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Gelley, Ora.
Ingrid Bergman's Star Persona and the Alien Space of Stromboli
Cinema Journal - 47, Number 2, Winter 2008, pp. 26-51

University of Texas Press

Ora Gelley - Ingrid Bergman's Star Persona and the Alien Space of Stromboli - Cinema Journal 47:2 Cinema Journal 47.2 (2008) 26-51 MUSE Search Journals This Journal Contents Ingrid Bergman's Star Persona and the Alien Space of Stromboli Ora Gelley Abstract This essay looks at the trajectory of Ingrid Bergman's star persona, from 1930s Sweden to 1940s Hollywood to Rossellini's Italy, with particular focus on the later part of the 1940s in Hollywood and on the transformation of her star persona in the first film she made with Roberto Rossellini, Stromboli, land of God, released in 1949. It has been said that 1939, the year of Ingrid Bergman's "discovery" by Hollywood, signaled the low point of the careers of her two major predecessors -- as European imports -- Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, both of whom had by this time deemed "box office poison" by the industry. Bergman was introduced, Robin Wood argues, "as a replacement: at once the 'new Garbo' and the anti-Garbo." Yet, despite her tremendous success in Hollywood throughout the 1940s, Bergman has in subsequent decades not inspired the kind of detailed, theoretically nuanced readings afforded to figures like Dietrich, Garbo, and another of Bergman's contemporaries, Rita Hayworth. Furthermore, in the discourse on the representation of women in the cinema, Bergman is seldom held up -- in the way that these other figures consistently are -- as paradigmatic of the phenomenon of Hollywood stardom in the...