Year

Country

Home

People

Films

Articles

Store

L'amore (1948) Secret Life

‘Pushed to an extreme in A Human Voice this experiment has served me since in all my films, because at one moment or another during a shooting I feel the need to put the script aside and follow the character in her most secret thoughts, thoughts she may not even be conscious of.   This microscope side of cinema is part of what constitutes neo-realism: a moral approach that becomes an aesthetic fact.’

Director Roberto Rossellini on the use of the camera as microscope.

Rossellini described the film as the embodiment of a theme that had obsessed him during that period: ‘the absolute lack of faith… typical of the post-war period.’

Both stories in the film make use of extreme images of isolation.   In the first story, una voce umana, events take place in one room and actress Anna Magnani is the only character we see.   Her only contact with the outside world is the telephone with which she conducts a series of devastating conversations with her ex-lover.   In Il Miracolo, shot on the Amalfi coast, both the solitude of Nanni, the simple-minded peasant girl, and her relationship with nature, is emphasised by the landscape and the way in which it is filmed by Rossellini.   Nanni’s unity with nature is suggested when, after an arduous climb to a church atop a hill, she sucks rocks for their moisture.

 In his book, The Films of Roberto Rossellini, Peter E. Bondanella makes the point that the film’s intense focus on the psychology of the individual was Rossellini’s first exercise in the cinema of introspection that would become a major aspect of his films with Ingrid Bergman.

 [ADD]