Authenticity of Journey to Italy

Journey to Italy is considered as one of the masterpieces of director Roberto Rossellini, being  a significant work of Italian Neorealism. Roberto Rossellini uses techniques such as slowly presenting the unnoticed details and the extra surrounding environment instead focusing on the main protagonist in order to express the importance of time and space, causing the plot  to blend into real life, resulting in letting the audience feel the reality and authenticity.

In Kogonada’s video, Kogonada compared two films one by De Sica and one by Selzinik in order to vividly explain Neorealism. The first comparison he makes reveals one technique of De Sica and Neorealism, “meanwhile De Sica’s opening takes twice as long but Reviews far less”. Apparently, Journey to Italy has the same kind of opening as De Sica’s film. In the opening of Journey to Italy it presents long highway driving of this film’s main character —— Alex and Katherine. They simply drive on the road while doing nothing specific but boring chat about daily random stuff. While they were driving the camera was not always locked on them, it focused on the outside view of the car, surrounding environments especially cattles as Kathrine staring outside the window during this trip. It is very unusual as in the opening of the film it revealed nothing about this film, it said nothing about this trip as where are they going to, why are they going to. Rossellini here endured the process as they drove into the city while spending a huge amount of time focusing on the surrounding on their drive on the highway. It is very obscured but as Kogonada said “these in between moments are what movies seem to cut out, and these are the in between moments that De Sica seems to be valued in”. Therefore Rossellini here makes the corresponding Neorealist technique as he endured the whole process of driving into the city at the opening. However, it creates a sense of authenticity of this film. As Alex and Katherine are not from Italy, by having the process of them on the way to Italy, presents a stronger representation of them from outside of the city. Also as this boring chat they had while driving and Kathrine staring outside the window to nothing but cattles whole time gave the audience evidence of Kathrine and Alex having marriage issues that later showed in the film. 

In addition, there is a scene where Alex went downstairs asking servants to fill the bottle for him. These two servants as two small and meaningless characters that have never shown up later in the movie and have basically no effect towards the plot and major characters. However, Rossellini still spends excessive time to show these two servants’ reactions and this long process of how Alex gets the wine from the servant. Meanwhile, these two servants speak way louder than Alex speaks, we basically could not hear Alex clearly which has made the audio be de-centered from Alex as a protagonist and focused on servants instead. It de-centers the main character and shifts attention to minor nobody which makes the movie’s setting become closer to the real world as everyone is a part of it.

Last but not least, at the end of this film, after Alex and Katherine hugged each other, the camera soon de-centered from them and started to film the crowd which is right next to them and continue filming slowly as Alex and Katherine are no longer shown in the film. It corresponds with Kogonada’s video essay, “his main character leaves the space but the camera doesn’t follow nor does he cut, he lingers on extras that we will never get to know ” as an approach to create a more authentic scene of real life instead of having the feeling of small world that only belongs to main characters alone.  In the last shot of the film, Rossellini presents many completely characters unrelated to this film, such as policemen, music performers, and random people. Unusually, the film already had an excellent scene to end the movie as two major characters hugged each other, but Rossellini decides to not only linger on the crowd of extra but he also decides to end the movie with a police captain watching people pass by in front of him. Which is totally unusual and very meaningless to end this movie with characters that have never shown up in this whole movie right after the final resolution of the central figures. More importantly, such a happy ending did not have a happy romantic background music, instead it used loud parade music along with the noise of the crowd. The purpose of all these weird moves are stated by Kogonada, when he says“to make time and place seem more critical than plot or story”. This film ends with many surrounding environments details, which can deliver the sense of reality from the film.

            Although, in many perspectives, Journey to Italy contains many non-neorealism elements such as being cast with famous actors like Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders, this movie is still considered a neorealist film. Roberto Rossellini slowly presents the unnoticed details and the extra surrounding environment instead of focusing on the main protagonist in order to express the importance of time and space, causing the plot to blend into the real life in result letting the audience feel the reality. More importantly, letting the audience be easier to connect film with their real life, as the film itself is a good representation of real life.

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Works Cited

Kogonada, director. What Is Neorealism? Sight & Sound/British Film Institute.