Rosselini shot two versions of La paura, one in German (Angst) and an inter national version (Fear). The two differ in shots and editing. The first Italian version (La paura) corresponds to the international one. Later on another shorter version was distributed by the title Non credo più all’amore. This restoration is the reconstruction of the international version, Fear, and it started from the negative of Non credo più all’amore and by two vintage duplicates, a positive and a negative. The latter, with a number of vintage prints, were used as reference to reconstruct the editing. The English soundtrack was restored from the digitization of a vintage positive soundtrack. Rossellini’s last film with Ingrid Bergman was an Italo-German coproduction. Based on Stefan Zweig’s short story Angst (Fear), it is about a woman who cheats on her husband who in turn hires an actress to blackmail her and get a confession from her. However, being blackmailed fills her with so much anxiety that her husband has to step in and stop her from killing herself. In this story, set at the beginning of the last century, Rossellini preserves the essential while modifying the characters and their deep er motivations. In particular, he moved it from the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the start of the 20^th century to contemporary Germany. It was shot in Munich, between the end of summer and October 1954. Rossellini printed two negatives at the same time: one intended for the German market and acted in German (also by Ingrid Bergman who was multilingual), and the second, intended for the international market, mainly in English before post-synchronisation in English and then dubbing into Italian. It was from this second negative, in fact, that Rossellini obtained the Italian version, the same as the recently restored international ver sion, complete with the parts that had been eliminated from the English version released by Atlantic Television Corp., where it is even possible to hear Ingrid Bergman’s voice. For Rossellini it was a return to Germany almost ten years after Germania anno zero, a Germany which was no longer the same as post-war Berlin, which had been destroyed by bombs. As well, this industrious nation was already split in half: the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic. History changes and Rossellini changes history: he changes the location to the efficient Bavaria of West Germany, which was already experiencing an economic miracle, but had yet to come to terms with the ghost of guilt. Rossellini highlights many times the importance of distinguishing the material aspects from the moral aspects of German rebuilding after the war. The fear in the title is also that of a nation incapable of dealing with its moral reconstruction, the darker side of the official bright present that is full of wellbeing, but constructed on the negation and repression of guilt rather than its acceptance and confession. It is difficult to resist the temptation to see, in the scientist who subjects his wife to his experiments, the director’s double because he subjected his wife, the actress, to experiments at the same time. He had been doing this since Stromboli, experimenting with a new language, without shying away from the certainty of destroying the diva in her, and showing her as a woman.

Elena Dagrada