If the history of film were based, like ancient mythology, on legends and fables, then no one could disregard the end of Stromboli, terra di Dio, the film that Rossellini premiered at Cannes in 1950. There was nothing particular about the plot, a mere anecdote, and the film could easily be confused with other neorealist works that had begun to sprout like mushrooms at festivals the world over: Awoman, fleeing from war, stuck in a refugee camp, agrees to marry a young Italian and move with him to his town in a miserable island south of the Tyrrhenian Sea. The woman is beautiful, educated, sensitive; the lad bends over backwards for her, but can do nothing to change his coarseness, his ignorance, his brutishness. The island is arid and inhospitable, and a permanently active volcano rules the lives of the inhabitants like an evil God. The woman quickly discovers that this island is to be her prison, and the film shows this gradual imprisonment in the open air. At the end, the woman decides to flee and, in a quasi-mystical act, ascends the erupting volcano. The final image is of the woman, almost now a saint, looking out on this boundless and terrible panorama. So why do we think this ending is essential? Well, because that woman, facing death, dazzled by the spine-chilling beauty of that devastated land, is Ingrid Bergman, the most important actress in the world, the same who years earlier had stunned Hitchcock and Bogart, and had swanned like a queen through the palaces of the world. The same woman who, just months before becoming that anonymous peasant, had been Joan of Arc. That was the person who climbed up the side of the erupting volcano, who gave herself to the erupting volcano like an offering, and waiting for her on the other side was neither Hitchcock nor Bogart, but Rossellini, the most modern of directors, breathing new life into cinema, the same who after years of mendacious interiors turned the cameras around and made them look out to the world. That was the ceremony that was being celebrated with this final scene. The princess abandoning everything, bidding adieu to the glitz and the glory, to run almost barefoot across the parched clay and immerse herself in the sulphurous fumes, into the arms of a moody and surly man, but a man who knew how to look at things and take from them the poetry and the truth. So would the ending have been any different if the actress had been another woman? If alongside her, Isla from Casablanca and Alicia from Notorious had not been climbing that same redemptive volcano? The filming of Stromboli was the first time that the earlier career of an actor turned a fictional scene into something else. For the first time, the woman who goes up the volcano is not playing a queen, but rather, she is a queen. She does not play Joan of Arc: she is Joan of Arc.
The aim of the project titled La Flor is similar to that of Stromboli, but with an added ingredient. The film does not set out to use an actress’s prior work to bring a particularemotion to a series of images. Instead, La Flor aspires to construct, to constitute this experience. The experience is the very film itself. Viewers see various actresses’ careersunfolding before their eyes, as part of the same film. The idea is that one film should be a series of films, an era in the life of four people, and that cinema should be able to show this passing of time, this learning, this process. That from the different inventions and fantasies that the avatars of the project gradually contribute, one can see eventually the true face of the four women, shining brightly through the fog of fiction.
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