Europa '51

Roberto Rossellini's Europa '51 opened at Venice 1952 and won the festival's International Award. It is the middle film of his loose trilogy with Ingrid Bergman, between Stromboli (1950) and Voyage to Italy (1954), and the three together are the most internationally important work of his middle career. Europa '51 entered the upper tier of the Sight & Sound poll in 2022.

Irene Girard (Ingrid Bergman), a wealthy English-American woman married to an industrialist (Alexander Knox) and moving in fashionable Roman society, suffers a personal tragedy in the early sequences and finds she cannot go back to the life she had. In the months that follow she drifts into the lives of the city's poor, visiting a factory in an industrial suburb and helping a single mother, while her family begins to suspect a kind of religious mania. Giulietta Masina, early in her career, has a small role as the woman who introduces Irene to working-class Rome.

Its argument, that bourgeois European society has no room for real moral commitment and treats the women who attempt it as a problem to be managed, is one of the most discussed religious and philosophical positions in Rossellini's work. Aldo Tonti's photography of post-war Rome, the slum sequences and Bergman's performance have kept the film climbing in critical estimation. The collaboration between Bergman and Rossellini, professional and personal, is one of the founding stories of post-war European cinema.