The following notes on part one of Roberto Rossellini's L’Amore, La Voce Humana, were written by John Bennett, PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. A restored DCP of La Voce Humana from the Cineteca di Bologna will be shown on Saturday, September 28 at 2 p.m. in the Cinematheque's regular sceening space, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. The screening will be followed by a discussion with filmmaker Nancy Savoca. Admission is free!

By John Bennett

In the immediate postwar period of Italian cinema, Roberto Rossellini was undoubtedly the most renowned practitioner of what was known as “Italian neorealist” cinema. Neorealist films—such as Open City (1945), Rossellini’s enormously successful depiction of war-ravaged Rome—were notable for their stories and styles that captured the hardships of World War II and its aftermath in Italy with a documentary texture. With Open City, Paisan (1946) and Germany, Year Zero (1948), Rossellini established himself as a the most prominent member of a cohort of directors that included Vittorio de Sica, Luchino Visconti, Alberto Lattuada, and Giuseppe de Santis—all of whom made films with a certain realist grit that was, at the time, a rather novel development in world cinema. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, as the Italian economic boom began to cauterize the wounds of war, most of these directors began to drift toward a more psychological and heightened brand of filmmaking. No film is more representative of the earliest movement of this drift than The Human Voice, Rossellini’s 1948 short film.

The story of The Human Voice is simple: a woman (Anna Magnani, whom Rossellini had helped bring to international prominence with Open City) languishes in her dark and cluttered apartment as she has a final despairing telephone conversation with an invisible ex-lover. Rossellini’s choice in source material for The Human Voice is the surest sign of his break from neorealism; he drew from a theatrical piece by French writer, artist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau. If Rossellini was one of the great champions of cinematic realism, Cocteau was a master of poetic filmic fancy. His Beauty and the Beast (1946), with its enchanted castles, magic mirrors and hexed princes, seems the antithesis of the grim and gritty collection of stories in Rossellini’s Paisan, which was released the same year. Yet in treating this material, Rossellini anticipates the more psychological cinema that would interest him throughout the 1950s in the films he made with screen legend Ingrid Bergman. The Human Voice, a story of love on the rocks, directly anticipates a film like Journey to Italy, a Rossellini/Bergman collaboration about the deterioration of a bourgeois marriage.

For a portmanteau feature entitled L’Amore, The Human Voice was paired with a second short film, Il miracolo (The Miracle). Rossellini helms this film as well, with Anna Magnani playing Nannina, a religious peasant who encounters a rakish man whom she takes as an apparition of St. Joseph. The man (played by none other than Federico Fellini, on whose idea the film was based) plies Nannina with wine until she passes out. When she discovers, weeks later, that she is pregnant, she tragically attributes the pregnancy to divine intervention but faces social ostracization from her conservative community. The result of this diptych of films is a pure showcase for Magnani’s range. The Human Voice allows her to be sullen, plaintive and agonized, while she demonstrates her ability to play a naïve and odd outsider in Il miracolo.

Indeed, a title card to Il miracolo, signed by Rossellini, proudly proclaims that “this film is an homage to the art of Anna Magnani.” In The Human Voice, that art is on the fullest display. Present in nearly every shot of the film, Magnani manages to give her character an arc of increasing frenzy and despair as last grains of sand fall away in the hourglass of her love affair with the unseen man. Magnani was a performer who made excess a virtue. Frequent close-ups allow us to see the control with which Magnani manipulates her expressions: her eyes widen in despair at times and shiftily dart left and right with suspicion at others, and well-timed teardrops punctuate the sentences of her conversation. Veneers of barely maintained calm slip away each time she fears that the line has been disconnected, illustrating the swiftness with which she could shift the intensity and aspect of her demeanor as a performer. As she grows more distraught over the dwindling minutes of communication with the man she loves, Magnani clutches with operatic desperation at the apartment’s curtains, just as she writhes with increasing convulsion amid her unmade bedding. Towards the end of the film, she distractedly bunches the telephone cord around her face and mouth, threatening to literalize “chewing the scenery” as an idiom. Though it runs a mere 35 minutes, The Human Voice gives one as palpable a sense of the grandeur and physicality of Magnani’s performance style as any of her feature length films.

On another level, The Human Voice reflected and anticipated elements of the personal lives of Rossellini and Magnani. In Tag Gallagher’s lengthy biography, The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini, he traces the romance that began between the two titans of Italian cinema from the mid-40s through its conclusion around the time of the production of 1950’s Stromboli. Around this time, Magnani anticipated making an American film with Rossellini about Italian immigrants in New York. Rossellini instead turned his attention to Stromboli, which starred Ingrid Bergman—an actress who replaced Magnani in Rossellini’s projects as well as his affections (Bergman and Rossellini married shortly after Stromboli’s release). Though The Human Voice marked the end of her collaboration with Rossellini, Magnani’s career continued to flourish: she went on to find global success delivering the same kind of thunderous, earthy, swaggering expressivity in films like Jean Renoir’s The Golden Coach (1952), Sidney Lumet’s The Fugitive Kind (1960), Mario Monicelli’s The Passionate Thief (1960), and Daniel Mann’s The Rose Tattoo (1955), for which she won an Academy Award for Best Actress.

The Human Voice marked the first adaptation of Cocteau’s play. Yet since Rossellini’s inaugural adaptation, the piece has proven to be a perennial exercise for actresses. Ironically, Ingrid Bergman would go on to play the same role nine years after the dissolution of her marriage to Rossellini in a 1966 television adaptation (directed, somewhat incongruously, by Ted Kotcheff of First Blood fame). Sophia Loren played an older version of Magnani’s character in another Italian adaptation directed by Edoardo Ponti in 2014. The spareness of the material proved conducive to filming during the COVID-19 pandemic and Tilda Swinton became the Woman on the Phone for legendary Spanish director Pedro Almodovar in 2020. Scattered among these notable versions are innumerable iterations of the material, whether they be foreign television broadcasts, filmed theatrical productions, or independent calling cards. Nevertheless, one can assume that, with each new adaptation, directors and actresses refer back to the sense languor and lovesick agony that Rossellini and Magnani so skillfully conjured.