EN
I gave to those who were asking nothing of me. I let myself be found by those who were not looking for me.
Isaiah 65:1, opening epigraph of the film
“Dear Mr. Rossellini,
I saw your films Open City and Paisan, and enjoyed them very much. If you need a Swedish actress who speaks English very well, who has not forgotten her German, who is not very understandable in French, and who in Italian knows only ‘ti amo’, I am ready to come and make a film with you.”
Ingrid Bergman
“If cinema were merely the art of probing the soul’s interior, I would be ready to give all of Stromboli for the Hitchcock shot [in Under Capricorn] in which Ingrid Bergman’s face, sunk against the edge of her bed, heavy-lipped, eyelids half-closed, reflects, in the space of an instant, such a wealth of diverse sentiments (fear and self-mastery, candor and calculation, rage and resignation) that the most concise writer could not express it in several pages. But Rossellini’s design is different, and it would be unfair of us to condemn him for denying us what others put so much science into revealing. In his work, each thing is in the present, is an appearance, a palpable form, and admits nothing beyond the divine hand that presided over its creation.”
Éric Rohmer