Journey to Italy

Roberto Rossellini's Journey to Italy (Viaggio in Italia) opened in 1954 to a largely hostile reception in both Italy and France. Its reputation began to climb only after the critics who would form the French New Wave (Jacques Rivette, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard) championed it in the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma in the late 1950s. It entered the upper tier of the Sight & Sound poll in 2022, and a good deal of what became European modernist cinema grows directly out of it.

Katherine and Alex Joyce (Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders), an upper-middle-class English couple, travel to Naples to sell a villa Alex has inherited from a recently deceased uncle. Over roughly a week around the Bay of Naples they visit the excavations at Pompeii, the Cuma sibyl's cave and the volcanic vents of the Solfatara, and in long static frames and unspoken passages apart they slowly recognise that an extended spell away from home together has exposed how unhappy their marriage has become.

Its register was new to European cinema: long-take observational realism applied to the inner emotional life of the bourgeoisie, with documentary-style location shooting woven into the dramatic structure. Rivette later wrote that the whole post-war French film tradition could be traced back through this single film. Few European films of the 1950s have been argued over as persistently, or have repaid the argument so well.