Europe '51 (1952)

Excellent film dealing with the upper echelons of society that are unable to deal with a member of it who undergoes profound tragedy, leading her to live a life in total commitment to the impoverished.Ingrid Bergman gets this calling when her son dies, and it's first looked upon as having taken totally socialistic or Communistic beliefs.Alexander Knox plays her supposedly understanding husband, but soon relents when she is taken to an insane asylumGiulietta Masina is as always excellent as the woman taking care of 6 children, but still having her own immoral agenda.There are some scenes which remind me of Bergman's 1948 "Joan of Arc." I think the film was a great prelude to 1958's "The Inn of the 6th Happiness." Society was so fortunate to have Miss Bergman's appearance on screen.

I am surprised this film is so undervalued on IMDb, as it is the one that Gilles Deleuze talks about more than any other in Cinema 2 as one an example of what he calls the 'time-image', those postwar films in which rather than 'movement prevailing over time', 'time prevails over movement'. Basically what that means is that, because of the social and political transformations that emerged in the wake of WWII, people were essentially incapable of reacting to their new situations, yet for that reason also became that much *more* capable of attaining a shift in consciousness, and this was reflected in the cinema of the time. Rational, linear, sequential narratives, which tended to follow very cliché progressions are themselves overcome by this change, so that there often is no satisfying 'conclusion' to the story, the characters often being as much an 'audience' of unfolding events as we are. As he puts it, "if all the movement-images, perceptions, actions and affects underwent such an upheaval, was this not first of all because a new element burst on the scene which was to prevent perception being extended into action, in order to put it in contact with thought?" (1) So, this is what he says occurs in such Rosellini's 'Europa 51'; the character Irene, the bourgeois housewife , who in the course of the story, is lead by the suicide of her war-traumatized son to question the structure of her society as a whole. Thus, intrigued by the insight offered by her friend Andreas, she wanders aimlessly, but with the highest of awareness through the slums, the factories and other elements she had never taken into account previously: "her glances relinquish the practical function of a mistress who arranges things and beings, and pass through every state of an internal vision, affliction, compassion, love, happiness, acceptance, extending to the psychiatric hospital where she is locked up at the end of a new trial of Joan of Arc: she sees, she has learned to see" (2). It is not only the audience then, who become 'seers' (as opposed to 'agents' in the narrative structure that prevailed before the war), but the characters such as Irene are also a kind of 'audience', they perceive a world which they can barely conceive how to intervene in. When the character's motor capacities are short-circuited by overwhelming situations, says Deleuze, "he records rather than reacts. He is prey to a vision, pursued by it or pursuing it, rather than engaging in action" (3). Thus, just as each of us have sensory-motor patterns that make us turn away at the sight of something we would rather not see, so too does Irene, but because of her son's suicide she suffers a 'shock' and this habituated way of 'living' is interrupted so that just as she does not, *we* do not turn away either so that we become *seers*. 'Europa 51' I would say, breaks with what at the time was the prevailing emotional posture, particularly that of metaphor and cliché, which tend to direct our attention away from that which is difficult to comprehend. As Deleuze says, "we normally only perceive clichés. But if our sensory-motor schema jam or break, then a different type of image can appear: a pure optical-sound image, the whole image without metaphor, brings out the thing in itself, literally, in its excess of horror or beauty, in its radical or unjustifiable character, because it no longer has to be 'justified' for better or for worse…the factory creature gets up, and we can no longer say, 'Well, people have to work…' I thought I was seeing convicts: the factory is a prison, school is a prison, literally, not metaphorically. You do not have the image of a prison following one of a school: that would simply be pointing out a resemblance, a confused relation between two clear images. On the contrary, it is necessary to discover the separate elements and relations that elude us at the heart of an unclear image: to show how and in what sense school is a prison, housing estates are examples of prostitution, bankers killers, photographs tricks - literally, without metaphor" (21). What was especially interesting in regards to all of this was the reversal that occurs in the main character, (that is very similar to Joseph Losey's 'Mr. Klein') in which, once Irene comes to the factory and spends a day working there, says "I thought I was seeing convicts" to her friend Andreas, only for her to end up in a similar position, under the similarly knowing gaze of others. This matching is foreshadowed when the sound of the 'work whistle' that starts the workers' day sounds very much like the air raid siren she reminisces with her son about just before his death, and when her husband begins to worry that she is cheating on him with Andreas, her only response being that her love has expanded to encompass the entire world. By the end of the film, after being persecuted by this newly 'liberated' society for her beliefs, the situation has turned upside down, as we begin to see *her* as a kind of 'prisoner' also, though I will not say in what sense (so as to not cross the spoiler boundary). Her son's death mirrors that of her 'downfall', as well as how it is 'understood': as the doctor says of Michel early on, "unusually sensitive children are liable to go to extremes when they are upset". Despite the kind of 'do-gooder' mentality that prevails, which may be tiresome for some, I thought it was a quite powerful film and I can definitely see why it made its way into some of the most outstanding film theory texts out there.

Poor Ingrid suffered and suffered once she went off to Italy, tired of the Hollywood glamor treatment. First it was suffering the torments of a volcanic island in STROMBOLI, an arty failure that would have killed the career of a less resilient actress. And now it's EUROPA 51, another tedious exercise in soggy sentiment.Nor does the story do much for Alexander KNOX, in another thankless role as her long-suffering husband who tries to comfort her after the suicidal death of their young son. At least this one has better production values and a more coherent script than STROMBOLI.Bergman is still attractive here, but moving toward a more matronly appearance as a rich society woman. She's never able to cope over the sudden loss of her son, despite attempts by a kindly male friend. "Sometimes I think I'm going out of my mind," she tells her husband. A portentous statement in a film that is totally without humor or grace, but it does give us a sense of where the story is going.Bergman is soon motivated to help the poor in post-war Rome, but being a social worker with poor children doesn't improve her emotional health and from thereon the plot takes a turn for the worse.The film's overall effect is that it's not sufficiently interesting to make into a project for a major star like Bergman. The film loses pace midway through the story as Bergman becomes more and more distraught and her husband suspects that she's two-timing him. The story goes downhill from there after she nurses a street-walker through her terminal illness. The final thread of plot has her husband needing to place her for observation in a mental asylum.Ingrid suffers nobly through it all (over-compensating for the loss of her son) but it's no use. Not one of her best flicks, to put it mildly.Trivia note: If she wanted neo-realism with mental illness, she might have been better off accepting the lead in THE SNAKE PIT when it was offered to her by director Anatole Litvak!! It would have done more for her career than EUROPA 51.Summing up: Another bleak indiscretion of Rossellini and Bergman.

I saw the Americanized dubbed and drastically cut version of this movie that seemed like it was made for television, complete with abrupt stops where they wanted to insert commercials. The story seemed interesting, but could not develop any nuance in only 108 minutes. Ingrid Bergman seemed a bit too overtly overwhelmed in this story after she started to see poverty in visiting the slums. The one shining performance even in the truncated time came from Giulietta Masina. In this shortened version, I could not tell if the music was original or added for melodramatic effect by the television censors. All and all not a very satisfying film, though the original might have been quite moving.