silver nitrate notes

Rossellini's Stromboli and the Tuna Hunt That Stops the Film

12 jun 2026

Halfway through Stromboli (1950), Roberto Rossellini (1906-1977) stops telling his story and films a fish. Not a fish, exactly. A tuna hunt, the old Mediterranean tonnara, the nets drawn up and the great animals thrashing and the men hauling and clubbing them in a churn of blood and water, shot at length, as documentary, with the drama of the picture put on hold while it happens. The most expensive star in the world is standing in the boat, and Rossellini points the camera at the fish. That decision is the film, and it is the reason the film was misunderstood for years.

Ingrid Bergman (1915-1982) plays Karin, a displaced woman from the Baltic who marries an Italian fisherman, Antonio (Mario Vitale), to get herself out of an internment camp after the war. He takes her home to Stromboli, a volcanic island off Sicily, a place of black sand and white houses and almost nothing else, and she discovers she has swapped one prison for another. The story is a melodrama of entrapment. The treatment is anything but.

The collision at the centre of Stromboli is between a Hollywood star and a method that had no use for stars. Rossellini was coming off Rome, Open City (1945) and Paisan (1946), pictures shot in rubble with people who were often not actors at all. His cameraman here, Otello Martelli (1903-2000), photographs the island as itself: the glare, the pumice, the real faces of real islanders, the sea that does not care who is famous. Into this Rossellini drops Bergman, lit and framed like the icon she was, and lets the friction show. Karin is too composed for the island. Bergman is too composed for the film. The mismatch is not a flaw. It is the subject, a woman who cannot be absorbed by a place that absorbs everyone.

That runtime line tells its own story. RKO, which had financed the film through Howard Hughes, took Rossellini's version, cut it down to 81 minutes, attached a piously explanatory voiceover and a softer ending, and sold the result on a scandal. The scandal was real. Bergman had written Rossellini a now-famous letter after seeing his neorealist films, offering, in effect, to come and work with him; she did, they fell into an affair during production, and she left her marriage and Hollywood for him while pregnant with their son. America was scandalised to the point of denunciation on the floor of the Senate. RKO understood it had bought a tabloid story and recut the picture to match. The recut buries the very thing that makes the film matter.

Because what Rossellini was actually doing was refusing to let the melodrama, or the star, organise the world. The tuna hunt is the clearest case. A conventional director uses such a sequence as backdrop, a few cutaways behind the dialogue. Rossellini lets it run as the real and brutal event it is, and Karin watches it the way we do, appalled and outside it, and the scene becomes about her exclusion from a life of labour and death she will never be let into. The labour is not decoration for her drama. Her drama is an interruption of the labour.

The ending earns its reputation honestly. Karin tries to flee the island across the volcano itself, and the climb becomes a genuine ordeal, the fumes, the ash, the body failing on the slope, and Rossellini withholds the resolution a melodrama would owe us. Whether her cry near the summit is faith or surrender he will not say. He films the mountain, the actual smoking mountain, and lets it dwarf the question. It is the same gesture as the tuna hunt. The world is larger than the story we came to watch, and Rossellini keeps insisting on the world.

Watch the restored 107-minute version, not the old RKO cut, and a different film appears, harsher, stranger, less consoling, the first of the three pictures Rossellini and Bergman made together before they were done. The fish are still there, taking up the middle of the film, refusing to be background. I have come to think that is the most honest thing in it.

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sources
[1] Gallagher, Tag. The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini. New York: Da Capo Press, 1998.
[2] Bondanella, Peter. Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present. New York: Continuum, 2001.
[3] Bergman, Ingrid, and Alan Burgess. Ingrid Bergman: My Story. New York: Delacorte Press, 1980.
[4] The Criterion Collection. 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman (release essay), 2013.