There are as many ways of casting nonprofessional actors as there are of casting professionals, and as many ways to direct films with the one as with the other. Nonprofessionals can be dramatically inspired newcomers (such as Lynn Carlin in “Faces” or Souleymane Demé in “Grigris”), exemplary documentary-style incarnations of themselves (such as the entire cast of “The Exiles” or “People on Sunday”), blank slates for radical de-theatricalization (as in nearly the entire œuvre of Robert Bresson). But there are particular creative tensions that arise out of casting nonpros alongside movie stars. What interests me most about the casting of nonprofessional actors in dramatic movies is their disruptive presence, the way that their relative lack of technique and inexperience taking direction and playing to the camera create textures of the sort that directors have sought to achieve since the early days of narrative movies. The acclaim of Chloé Zhao’s “Nomadland,” in which Frances McDormand performs with a remarkable group of nonprofessionals, whom the production encountered on location, spotlights both the power and the pitfalls of such pairings. A more successful precedent is Roberto Rossellini’s 1950 film “Stromboli,” starring Ingrid Bergman alongside residents of the titular island. Their onscreen relationships are the very mainspring of the drama.
In the movie that first showcased the concept and the practices of so-called Italian neorealism, “Open City,” from 1945, Rossellini told a story about the Italian resistance to Nazi occupation by casting one of the rising stars of the time, Anna Magnani, and the well-known comedic actor Aldo Fabrizi alongside many nonprofessionals. The tension of the shoot (which took place during wartime, at high risk) and the immediacy of the drama elevated the entire cast to a sharp dramatic focus. Rossellini continued to work with nonprofessionals in his next features, “Paisan” and “Germany Year Zero,” both about the war and its aftermath, and the dramatic effect of their presence was heightened by the historical thrust of the stories and the equally significant depiction of war-scarred Italy and Germany; the casting fit the stories and the environments. Then, when Bergman, one of the biggest stars of the time, wrote to him admiringly to offer to work with him, he followed the same methods—albeit more radically—in their first collaboration, “Stromboli,” another drama rooted in the Second World War. Here, the casting didn’t just serve or heighten the story—it became the story.
In “Stromboli” (which is streaming on the Criterion Channel and—in a slightly shorter cut—on IMDb TV and other services), Bergman plays Karin, a Lithuanian woman in her late twenties who, after the end of the war, is living in a refugee camp. She’s more glamorous, more energetic, more refined, and, especially, a lot more cynical than the other women in her barracks, and she’s desperate to get out. Karin is involved in a romance with an Italian fisherman named Antonio (Mario Vitale, a real-life fisherman, in the first of his few movie roles) from the other side of the barbed wire separating the women’s and men’s compounds. When she’s turned down for a visa for Argentina, she accepts his proposal of marriage and leaves with him for his home, the volcanic island of Stromboli. Arriving there with him, Karin is instantly and inconsolably miserable. The island is geographically forbidding; its houses are old and dilapidated, its residents poor and struggling. The young and energetic aspire to escape, while those who remain (and the many elderly people who return) are deeply religious and bound to tradition. In short, it offers none of the urbanity and sophistication that marked Karin’s earlier life in European capitals.
Yet the tradition-bound, poor, and isolated islanders—played by nonprofessionals, people encountered there—are clumsy and nervous. They look on camera as they appear to Karin, stiff and backward. They seem like the opposite of naturals, appearing uneasy before the camera and in the presence of Bergman’s gaze—and, above all, in Karin’s. Stromboli is their island but the intruding presence of the camera, the star, and the glossy newcomer detaches them from it, makes them seem like misfit strangers at home and awkward fits in the film that depicts their way of life. They tear through the surface of the drama, interrupting its texture and flow.
The urbane Karin comes to Stromboli, it seems, not only as a way of getting out of a refugee camp but as a way of avoiding deportation to her home country. (It eventually emerges that, during the war, she’d had an affair with a man whom she identifies as one of the occupiers—presumably, a German.) In her misery, she plots her escape, scheming to get the money with which she and Antonio can leave for Australia or the United States, while also trying to squeeze whatever bits of happiness she can find into what she treats as her new form of confinement. Karin is what one woman on Stromboli calls a “flirt”: she associates uninhibitedly with a woman considered “bad”; attempts to seduce the one worldly man on the island, the parish priest (who’s also played by an outsider, Renzo Cesana, a writer and producer who was also a minor Hollywood actor); and playfully embraces another fisherman. Antonio himself, though devoted to Karin, is harsh, demanding, imperious, and, when their marriage becomes the subject of gossip, even violent toward her.
As for the islanders, they’re gossipy, unsparing, and rigidly judgmental, paying hardly a glimmer of attention to opening the island to wider currents of change and progress. Yet Rossellini also restores them to themselves cinematically when his dramatic direction shifts toward documentary—notably, in a justly celebrated sequence showing fishermen rowing out patiently, steadfastly, and silently, while Karin visits Antonio and sees for herself the heroic, violent, dangerous struggle of their daily lives, and hears for herself the work songs that sustain them in their harsh labor. Then comes a volcanic eruption, which reveals—to viewers, as to Karin—the ambient terror of imminent catastrophe that silently but decisively haunts life on the island, the presence of death that’s both its residents’ horrific burden and sacred spiritual trial.
In the course of the film, the roles become reversed—life on Stromboli reveals Karin’s strangeness, her clumsiness, her misconceptions, and also the ill-fitting graft of Bergman herself among its people. Through the drama, the residents, in effect, again take possession of their home and of the cinematic space in which Rossellini presents them. Unlike in “Nomadland,” where McDormand’s character, Fern, is defined from the start by her empathetic connection to other nomads (however different their motives and circumstances), in “Stromboli” neither Karin’s nor Bergman’s (nor, for that matter, Rossellini’s) outsider gaze upon the troubles of locals has their perspectives built in. The calmly lucid and analytically precise images, weaving documentary observation into staged fiction and crystallizing the drama from unscripted events, make the mutual clash of lives and dreams, the conflicted graft of the star onto the island and the islanders into the dramatic cinema of a star, the hot and unstable core of the drama. Far from disguising or downplaying the production’s methods and realities, Rossellini puts them into the foreground and builds upon them the movie’s grand emotional world—and his grand social and spiritual vision.
