40-Viaggio in Italia - Director:Roberto Rossellini. Cast: Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders.

"It's a film that moved me tremendously when I first saw it.But I often ask myself why I find it so moving.Because "Voyage to Italy" works very different from other movies.You don't really get the impression of "acting" when you're watching the film.Most of the time,it feels like you're watching a real-life married couple.

It's hard to convey the emotional pull at the end of this picture.Because in order to experience it, you really have to see the whole movie and absorb it."Voyage to Italy",unfortunately was a disaster when it first came out in Italy in 1953.For many people the end of Rossellini as a Director.But ultimately it had a profound effect in film History because the people who finally did appreciate were the critics from the French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma.Who would later become the directors of the French New Wave in the late 1950s and 60s.Jean-Luc Godard,François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer,Claude Chabrol,Jacques Rivette and their mentor Andre Bazin,one of the first critics anywhere to recognize Rossellini's greatness.For them,"Voyage to Italy"wasn't just great,it was revolutionary...the beggining of something new in movies.It helped to inspire a whole new kind of filmmaking.Improvisational,almost experimental.Unencumbered by trappings of studio filmmaking.As Godard once put it...-"Rossellini proved that all you really needed to make a movie was two people in a car, and a camera"

After "Voyage" there was no turning back for Rossellini.He made one or two more films with conventional stories but his heart didn't seem to be in it.For all intents and purposes he abandoned traditional narrative altogether.It's remarkable that this was a movie that wasn't just unpopular,it was actually reviled when it came out.But in the end "Voyage to italy" was so inspiring to the people who responded to it,that it wound up having just as powerful an effect on the History of Cinema as many better-know films.And ultimately it paved the way to the Cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni."

-Martin Scorsese- My Voyage to Italy ~


"(Viaggio in Italia) opens a breach(which) all Cinema,on pain of death,must pass through"
-Jacques Rivette-


"Death doesn't exist here.Because it's a living thing in Italy.It's a different kind of civilization.There's a different meaning to things here."
-Roberto Rossellini-