Films of 1947

PAISA

Dir.: ROBERTO ROSSELLINI

Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà (Paisan) is a composite film each of whose six episodes reflects on the Battle of Italy (1943-45) in a different region of the country, among them, Sicily, Naples, Rome, Florence and the Po Valley. The result is an epic national portrait. Was Rossellini influenced by the preceding year’s Battle of the Rails, by René Clément, which consists of vignettes of the French Resistance—a rare French neorealist work? Regardless, Paisà’s final episode, which depicts a slaughter of partisans, achieves the sledgehammer force of Rome, Open City (1945), which very nearly ends with the execution of a priest sympathetic to the Resistance. Paisà shimmers with a tragic sense of the cost of Italy’s struggle against the Germans before, during and after liberation.

     The Naples episode involves an African-American soldier, a military police officer, whose boots are stolen by a shoeshine boy. When he goes to the boy’s “home” to retrieve his property, the young soldier discovers the impoverished world the war-orphaned child inhabits. The soldier has told the boy that his American home is a shack to which he doesn’t want to return; he, too, is familiar with desperate poverty. He leaves the boots.
     Another episode also involves an American soldier. During the liberation of Rome, he meets an innocent girl, Francesca. Later, without recognizing her, he becomes her john. But the film reverses chronology, presenting the earlier time as a flashback, the soldier’s reminiscence, when he is with the prostitute. He tells her how much he wants to meet Francesca again. She tells him she can arrange it—although, in a sense, she cannot. In any case, he doesn’t show up for the arranged reunion.
     Paisà is radical in its formal aim. Rossellini contests traditional “plottedness”; the film’s episodic nature reduces “story” by multiplying it.

-Dennis Grunes

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FILM STARTS AT 8.30 PM

126 mins

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