Dear Reader:
Please sing along.
Ingrid Bergman, Ingrid Bergman,
Let's go make a picture
On the island of Stromboli,
Ingrid Bergman.
Ingrid Bergman, you're so perty,
You'd make any mountain quiver,
You'd make fire fly from the crater,
Ingrid Bergman.
This old mountain it's been waiting
All it's life for you to work it,
For your hand to touch it's hard rock,
Ingrid Bergman, Ingrid Bergman.
If you'll walk across my camera,
I will flash the world your story.
I will pay you more than money,
Ingrid Bergman.
Not by pennies dimes nor quarters,
But with happy sons and daughters,
And they'll sing around Stromboli,
Ingrid Bergman.
So Ingrid Bergman shows up on the island of Stromboli. This causes friction among the women and men there. So the volcano erupts.
Also, Billy Bragg writes a tune, for Woody Guthrie's lyrics, written from the point of view of Roberto Rossellini, about Ingrid Bergman.
Also, Roberto Rossellini makes a film in the Italian Neorealist style, which stresses documentary-style use of everyday working people, not professional actors. Among the everyday working people in the cast is Ingrid Bergman.
Also, Ingrid Bergman writes a letter,
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
Roberto Rossellini, who can damn well read the Italian, accepts her invitation. They go make a picture. Senator Edwin C. Johnson (D-CO) has a fit about it, on the floor of the Senate.
Also, Roberto Rossellini makes a film in which Ingrid Bergman is portrayed as pretty much entirely helpless. She can't even manage the fireplace. I don't think you can blame this entirely on Rossellini's quasi-Fascist politics, nor on his place and time. We do the same damn helpless-Woman shit, in films to this day.
I think that Woody Guthrie has got the masculine/feminine symbolism in Rossellini's film upside down. Men are associated with the sea, woman are associated with the volcano and the hard rock. You could argue that the symbolism is about who is working what, though.
And anyways, it's art. A film strongly characterized by masculine/feminine symbolism doesn't have to have that symbolism working as straightforward schematic.
And Woody Guthrie may make of the work what he wants.