May 8 is both director Rossellini and Bergman's character Karen's #birthday.

“What mystery, what beauty.”

– Karen

“The madwoman has received your grace.”

– Nannina

Posted while deciding on my film dinner. Eventually I went with Tourneur's La Main du Diable (1943).

“I don't care about your barley. Or, your vines! Or, your new terra!”

– Karen

Karen – “Karin” in the opening credits – is a displaced Lithuanian woman in an Italy-based refugee camp. She meets an Italian military man bivouacking on the other side of the barbed wire and decides to say yes when he proposes. When the newly-weds leave for home, she finds to her dismay that he's a poor Sicilian fisherman from #Stromboli; a magnificent active volcanic island home to a small Catholic parish. Again displaced, Karen is confronted with herself more than with the others that share her faith.

“Here we are, poor wretches, in this hell, Condemned to tyranny.”

– Antonio

Roberto #Rossellini's Stromboli (Terra di Dio) is a peculiar melodramatic Italian/American hybrid that seems to strongly dismiss the Italian aspect. The significance of Struògnuli – the Sicilian name for the volcano – and the people's faith connected to the volatile mountain and the surrounding sea is presented as primitive superstition. That the Sicilian dialogue – song, prayer, life – remains untranslated and the locals' broken English is used as comic relief adds insult to injury.

 

Otello Martelli's photography excels when he manages to tear himself away from Bergman's face. Only when we're confronted with the magnificence of Struògnuli, the gifts from the ocean, and the greatness of nature we'll be able to understand why the island is man's home.

Twelve-year-old Edmund – the oldest kid to survive – works to support his whole family including his sick bedridden father while the remains of what was a thousand-year empire lies in rubbles around them.

– I don't go to school anymore.

– Why not? You don't like the new teachers?

– I have to work now.

Following Roma città aperta (1945) and Paisà (1946) of #Rossellini's unofficial war trilogy.