BUY TICKETS HERE
Join us at 1 p.m. Sunday, March 29, for a screening of director Roberto Rossellini’s influential “Journey to Italy” (1954), which is considered a predecessor to the existentialist works of Michelangelo Antonioni and hailed as a groundbreaking modernist work by the legendary film journal Cahiers du cinéma.
The movie, which charts the declining marriage of a couple from England (Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders) on a trip in the countryside near Naples, is more than just the anatomy of a relationship: Rossellini’s masterpiece is a heartrending work of emotion and spirituality.
“With a cycle of projects starring his wife Ingrid Bergman, Roberto Rossellini began to lose some of the critics whose attention he had grabbed with ‘Rome: Open City’ (1945). Moving away from the neo-realist movement’s unflinching depiction of post-war social realities, he was beginning to chart the emotional relationships between his characters.
Katherine and Alexander Joyce (Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders) are an English couple holidaying in Naples whose marriage starts to fracture under the strains of mutual boredom and resentment. The striking looseness of Rossellini’s storytelling suggests the subjective textures of life, encompassing periods of dead time that anticipate the modernist art films of Michelangelo Antonioni.
“‘With the appearance of ‘Journey to Italy,’ all films have suddenly aged ten years,’ Jacques Rivette wrote. Narratively open and fragmented, driven by melancholy, astonishment and the disruptive force of reality, it is the ideal junction in Rossellini’s filmography between the neorealist experience, his artistic collaboration with Ingrid Bergman, and the adventurous, avant-garde nature that would guide the great Roman director throughout his career.” — Giulio Casadei
Tickets are $6 and available at link above. Students with Cane card use code UMSTUDENT at checkout for free admission.
