Recitare per interposta persona: Ingrid Bergman e Roberto Rossellini

In 1949, when she arrived in Italy for the first time, Ingrid Bergman personified a double cultural model which in each case was antithetical to the dominant one in Italian neorealist cinema. From a professional point of view, the actress represented a typical product of classic Hollywood. From an anthropological point of view, as a woman, she embodied the Great North, so far from the traits usually attributed to Latin populations. Roberto Rossellini, for his part, in 1949 experienced a difficult moment professionally speaking, particularly in Italy, where his last films – Germania anno zero (1948) and L’amore (1948) – did not meet the approval of the public or even that of critics. Together they become the protagonists of the most important cultural “crossing” of Italian cinema of the 1950s. Ingrid Bergman, crossing the ocean to leave Hollywood, catapults herself into a cinema that her audience does not understand and therefore abandons her. But Rossellini also partly changes direction and dissatisfies audiences and critics, taking an unexpected path also to bring to the screen such a different actress, irreducibly foreign in the landscape of Italian cinema. Separately, they had experienced international glories. Together they experience the fall, the abandonment of the public, the ostracism of the critics. Diversity and marginalization are what most unite them. The last, most suggestive “crossing” made by the director and the actress is precisely that of the director in the actress, who acts for him and becomes his extension on the screen. Exacerbating an autobiography that Rossellini attributes several times to his wife, the director uses the actress by acting through a third party.