Viaggio in Italia

In Promised Lands: Cinema, Geography, Modernism, Sam Rohdie writes about his own film-induced tourism adventure:

"Do you remember, one summer, in Naples, we retraced the steps of Ingrid Bergman in Rossellini's Viaggio in Italia? We took photographs in Il Bersagliere, posed in front of the Excelsior, walked along the embankment opposite where George Sanders had picked up a whore who he took for a melancholy ride to nowhere. His reality and its sadness were exposed without a word, like ours. Do you remember? And the time in Pompeii, when they discovered the clay mould of a couple embracing at death, and their own desperation? And the ferry ride to anguish and silences and hurt in the Bay of Naples?

I wonder what we reproduced. Why did we choose to do so? It certified something disquieting. Then, I only wanted to translate what had happened in the film, just for fun, like a game, like children. But now, I know other reasons. If you know the result beforehand, Rossellini said, there is little point in filming it. To film, like 'to write', is to reveal something, not to record what has already been revealed and that you already know. When Sanders and Bergman find each other during the hysteria of the religious festival, after having been lost to each other, it is like a miracle. I am certain Rossellini came upon the ending as they came upon each other.

The experiment has to be done with care to avoid coming to a conclusion and thereby cheapening the journey. Viaggio in Italia is never cheap. Film narratives, most of them, impose sense. Rossellini had to decompose sense, to allow sense to flourish, giving birth to significance by making it uncertain.

If I had said anything like that to you, you might have looked bored.

The game I played and the one you played were different even if it seemed that we were playing together."

To me, this resonates with what Glen has been writing about lately, that not everyone follows the same rules within the confines of a singular event (and coincidentally, both Glen and Rohdie are referring to a game that is played out between people). So, how can one define the parameters of the film-induced tourism event? I guess that it begins when the film is first watched, when the viewer is seated at home watching it on the TV or at the cinema. For Rohdie, we see his journey begin as a retroactive homage to the film-event - a "reproduction" or an attempted simulation of the symbolic conditions of possibility of the film-event. Deleuze has written that it is impossible for becoming to occur simply by imitation - what needs to happen is for the film-event to also become the film-induced tourism event. So, as Rohdie's journey continues, it begins to blend with his own experience (the sadness and the anguish are jointly shared by film-characters and Rohdie/partner). And what Rohdie is suggesting in this passage is that only some films allow such becomings - the films that can "decompose sense" are the films that can enable film-becomings.