They travel to his home on Stromboli, a small volcanic island in the Tyrrhenian Sea. The melancholy tone established by the opening scenes renders The Edge of the World as a lament for the loss of the old world, and a recognition of the impossibility of sustaining it.įollowing on from his famed ‘war trilogy’, Stromboli continues Rossellini’s exploration of the aftershocks of the Second World War: in an internment camp for displaced people, Lithuanian refugee Karin (Ingrid Bergman) marries an Italian man she hardly knows in order to gain her freedom. The death in question is that of a way of life – specifically, the one lost with the evacuation of the Hebrides. To leave, then, is equated with death, as the film’s symbolic, tragic ending makes clear. Nearby, a gravestone epitaph reads “gone over” – and, when the film then flashes back to tell the story of how Hirta came to be deserted, Andrew uses these very same words to describe his friend Robbie’s (Eric Berry) desire to leave (“you’ve gone over to the other side”). Once ashore, Andrew watches as ghostly images of the former residents walk past in double exposure, like the souls of the dead. The skipper, Andrew (Niall MacGinnis), tells the bourgeois yachtsman (Michael Powell) that the island’s name, Hirta, means death. At the start of The Edge of the World, a sailboat circles an isolated, abandoned Scottish island.
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