Notes on our Voyage in Italy (cont.)

As the Joyces take their first steps toward the car which will take them to Pompeii, they walk toward the camera, as if into the image itself, a plunge, a diving motion suggesting a defeated acceptance of destiny. At this Rossellini abruptly fades out and immediately back in. This fade-cut emphasizes the sweep of Tony Burton's gesture via which we are presented the space as the sweeping back of curtains presents a stage. Another long pan across a space. Earlier we traced inscrutable horizons, this time the maze-like ruins. But unlike the previous pans, this one finds a focal point, a climax, the discovery of the Pompeian man and wife. This couple seems at once to have sprung from the character's thoughts or their dreams. Hitherto, all the encounters in Naples have been ineffable, vague in significance, if nevertheless intensely clear as physical experience. All the things and people Katharine or Alex have confronted have seemed foreign, other. But this time the encounter is at once a discovery of the self. In these bodies, the Joyces recognize a foreign couple and themselves. It is the point of identification and spacial orientation they have so long sought after, but what kind of revelation does it bear? In seeking renewed life, they find instead death, or rather the point of death. These Pompeian figures are petrified at the very moment of its onset, frozen as the revelation strikes. Overwhelmed Katharine/Bergman exits the frame. Alex/Sanders follows after her. Here they share a moment of decency and respect, a tacit acknowledgment of a shared trauma. He makes excuses to Burton. And they depart on their road to each other...

Now a succession of lateral tracks and pans, tracing a continuous movement from left to right. We pinpoint the characters, moving with them, but obliquely so. We move around them and they around us, pivoting as if every space were a turning point, folding up like a screen, only to fold out again just after the moment of their passing. Thus the space seems alive, inhaling and exhaling with the characters, and yet at the same time with a life of its own, containing them as if caught in the "fishbowl of their own emotions" (Gallagher's words). So does it all seem ineluctable, preordained, and yet new, an adventure always into the undiscovered country. For a moment she pauses, and then continues on, he following. As they enter a new section of the ruins, they stop together. He is on the attack, but she parries, and they move on. At the threshold between one section and another, she stops again, this time to apologize. He replies coldly, and, in turn, aggressively she pivots towards the opening. They continue. They pass a beautifully preserved mosaic, but do not see it. They enter a wider section at which they part from each other, only to drift back together as they turn the corner. At last they come to the widest section of the excavated city. Its expanse consumes their feeble words. "Life is so short," she bemoans. ""That's why one should make the most of it," he replies cruelly. They arrive at their car, get in, and drive back to Naples.

All this walking, this negotiating of space and time, all their competition and their mind games, goading each other, relentlessly prodding and poking each other, only through such a process can they be prepared for grace. As pack animals, they experience this ancient and eternal world. It will make them like the donkey Katharine sees while driving to the catacombs. It will teach them to bear each other's burdens as man and woman. Naples will beat the both of them. Thus, in the final scene, they are stripped of their last shreds of self-defense, the remains of their armor against nakedness. Their Bentley, which has, for both of them, offered such a paralyzing sense of security, allowing them to remain always viewer and not doer, is itself rendered immobile. Now the world forces them into motion, forces them out of the vehicle that has transported them like a hearse transports its dead. Yet even now, wounded, ashamed, resentful, they continue to bite and snap at each other until the last, until the miracle of movement itself defangs them. Katharine is swept away first. Alex follows after. Stirred from their own lifelessness into romance, and so into life. As a cripple comes to walk, so they come to love.