Ingrid Bergman in Rossellini's Italy: Stardom and the Politics of Neorealism

FAIN: FT-56768-09

Ora Gelley
North Carolina State University (Raleigh, NC 27695-0001)

The project focuses on Roberto Rossellini's cinematic collaboration with the Hollywood star Ingrid Bergman in the context of a broader critical reappraisal of all of Rossellini's immediate postwar films (1945 -1955), a major point of reference for questions of cinema and Italian national identity in the postwar era. It also aims to reassess the relationship between European postwar and American cinema, in part by looking at the ways in which the image of the Hollywood star was translated and transformed when it was imported into Rossellini's Italy. An in-depth study of the trajectory of Bergman's star persona from 1930s Sweden to 1940s Hollywood to Rossellini's Italy is linked to broader questions concerning the nature of global stardom in the wartime and immediate postwar periods, as well as the encounter between local or national and international film cultures.