Stromboli / Stromboli (Terra di Dio) (1950) [The Criterion Collection]

Director: Roberto Rossellini
Writers: Roberto Rossellini (story), Sergio Amidei (collaboration), Gian Paolo Callegari (collaboration)
Stars: Ingrid Bergman, Mario Vitale, Renzo Cesana

The first collaboration between Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman is a devastating portrait of a woman’s existential crisis, set against the beautiful and forbidding backdrop of a volcanic island. After World War II, a Lithuanian refugee (Bergman) marries a simple Italian fisherman (Mario Vitale) she meets in a prisoner of war camp and accompanies him back to his isolated village on an island off the coast of Sicily. Cut off from the world, she finds herself crumbling emotionally, but she is destined for a dramatic epiphany. Balancing the director’s trademark neorealism—exemplified here in a remarkable depiction of the fishermen’s lives and work—with deeply felt melodrama, Stromboli is a revelation.

Extras:
- New high-definition digital restoration of the English-language version, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
- New 2K digital restoration of the Italian-language version, Stromboli terra di Dio, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
- Introduction by director Roberto Rossellini
- New interview with film critic Adriano Aprà
- Rossellini Under the Volcano, a 1998 documentary that returns to Stromboli fifty years after the making of the film



3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman:
In the late 1940s, the incandescent Hollywood star Ingrid Bergman found herself so stirred by the revolutionary neorealist films of Roberto Rossellini that she sent the director a letter, introducing herself and offering her talents. The resulting collaboration produced a series of films that are works of both sociopolitical concern and metaphysical melodrama, each starring Bergman as a woman experiencing physical dislocation and psychic torment in postwar Italy. It also famously led to a scandalous affair and eventual marriage between filmmaker and star, and the focus on their personal lives in the press unfortunately overshadowed the extraordinary films they made together. Stromboli, Europe ’51, and Journey to Italy are intensely moving portraits that reveal the director at his most emotional and the glamorous actress at her most anguished, and that capture them and the world around them in transition.