Irene Wagner, the wife of prominent scientist Albert Wagner, finds herself blackmailed about her affair by her lover's jealous ex-girlfriend. The plot, an experiment in causing fear, drives her into a rage.
EN
“The film is a post-World War II update of Austro-Jewish writer Stefan Zweig’s 1920 novella Angst about adultery and blackmail, which on the surface seems more ideally suited to a psychological thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Instead of reading the film as a conventional project from an artistic filmmaker selling out to commercial interests, La Paura should be viewed as an experimental companion piece to his socio-political masterpiece Germania anno zero (1948). The film ironically employs a melodramatic narrative (a genre associated with the bourgeoisie) to comment on the moral desolation of this class in postwar West Germany and – more provocatively in terms of Bergman – critique both her unraveling marriage with Rossellini and her prior career in 1940s Hollywood melodrama that the director disdained for its bourgeois artificiality.”
Christopher Weedman1
- 1Christopher Weedman, "Melodramatic Postwar Confessions: Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini's La Paura (1954)", Senses of Cinema, 2015.
NL
“La paura van Roberto Rossellini en met Ingrid Bergman, uit 1954. Het schouwtoneel is München. Stefan Zweigs novelle aangepast aan de tijd, net als de angst. De oorlog heeft ervoor gezorgd dat de verhouding tussen man en vrouw nooit meer hetzelfde zal zijn en heeft het neorealisme voortgebracht. Ontmanteling van fictie. De werkelijkheid wordt waargenomen onder quasi-experimentele omstandigheden, bij het levende object.”
Frieda Grafe1