silver nitrate notes

Paisan and Six Stories of Liberation

10 dec 2015

Rossellini followed Rome, Open City with Paisan (1946), a six-episode film that tracks the Allied advance up the Italian peninsula from Sicily in 1943 to the Po Valley in 1944. The cinematographer was Otello Martelli (whom we have met later on La Strada). What Rossellini and Martelli set out to do was make six short films, each about one of the encounters between the Allied forces and the Italian civilians they met along the way, and let the cumulative effect produce a kind of moral geography of the country in war.

Each episode was shot on location in the area it depicts. The Sicilian episode was filmed in Sicily. The Florence episode was filmed in and around Florence. The Po Valley episode was filmed in the marshes where it takes place. Martelli shot most of the exterior material with available light. Interior setups used minimum illumination. The result is a film whose six parts do not visually match each other; each episode has the light of its own location.

What Rossellini does with his non-professional actors (most of the cast in each episode are local residents playing versions of themselves) is give them scenes to do rather than lines to read. The Sicilian episode has an American soldier and an Italian girl trying to communicate without a shared language; the scene's dialogue is almost entirely mis-translation, interrupted sentences, and gestures. The Florence episode follows a British nurse and an Italian partisan walking through the city under German fire; most of the episode is walking. The Po Valley episode ends with partisans being executed by the Germans; Rossellini stages the execution across a minute of flat daylight without music.

The moral of the film, if it has one, is that the war was experienced by ordinary people in specific, local terms. The Allied advance was not, for most Italians, a liberation in the grand sense. It was a series of encounters with specific individuals from elsewhere, in specific places, for specific reasons, most of which were better than what had come before and some of which were not. Rossellini does not argue this. He films it.

Martelli would go on to many of the great films of the next fifteen years of Italian cinema. His technique in Paisan is not stylised. It is attentive, which is a harder thing.

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sources
[1] Gallagher, Tag. The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini. Da Capo, 1998.
[2] Brunette, Peter. Roberto Rossellini. Oxford UP, 1987.
[3] Bondanella, Peter. The Films of Roberto Rossellini. Cambridge UP, 1993.
[4] Bazin, André. What Is Cinema?, vol. 2. University of California Press, 1971.