Six episodes on the allies advance through Italy. In the first one (with Carmela Sazio, Robert Van Loon, Carlo Pisacane) a Sicilian girl fraternizes with an American soldier: both are killed by the Germans, but the Americans will believe the girl a traitress.
In the second (with Dots M. Johnson, Alfonsino Pasca) a Neapolitan guttersnipe steals the shoes to a black soldier that finally is moved to pity with him
In the third (with Maria Michi, Gar Moore) a Roman girl is forced to prostitute, finds again the American soldier that had put her pregnant: but he won’t see her amymore.
In the fourth (with Harriet Whit, Renzo Avanzo, Giulietta Masina) an English nurse crosses Florence to the vain search of the partisan loved.
In the fifth (with bill Tubbs and the Francescans fo Maiori’s convent) three chaplains of different confessions are guests of a convent of good monks, that fast for the conversion of two “heretics”.
In the sixth (with Dale Edmonds, Cigolani) in the Delta of the Po, partisan and allied parstroppers are victims of the Nazi ferocity.

PRIZES

Silver ribbon for the best music and direction

CRITIQUE

Rossellini’s ideology is inspired to a humanitarianism and an animism a little bit generic (see the fifth episode), but his vision of life is tragic and dry, and the ability to gather and to synthesize the reality is unique. The bare emotion, the rare moments of smile, the not conciliatiory strongness at the end, do of it an unforgettable and essential film in our cultural history (P. Mereghetti “Dizionario dei film 1998”, translated by Alice Castoldi)
After Open city (1945), introduced at the first Festival of Cannes in 1946, Roberto Rossellini realizes Paisà, introduced in 1947 at the first Mostra di Venezia of the postwar period. Many people (Victor Haines, Marcello Pgliero, Sergio Amidei, Federico Fellini, Vasco Pratolini, the same Rossellini), had worked to the subject, only Rossellini and Fellini write the screen-play. Open city had been in a certain sense a work more felt that thought, with Paisà Rossellini shows to have taken a conscience, aesthetic too, of the new formula of which he had been the great initiator. The matter, if possible, was even more painful that the first one: after the tragedy in Rome, Italy’s tragedy, the death’s passage from Sicily to Comacchio. This time, however, Rossellini, differently than what he has done in Open city, doesn’t grant anything to the past of cinema, narrative and stylistic, and he doesn’t accept even the tears. He tells everything with documentary dryness and he entrusts only the inside emotion of the facts he enunciates: with simple, bare and impersonal words that have always had the taste and the times of the chronicle and that rather replace that chronicle which nobody in that days dared to draw near in cinema yet. Almost all the episodes on which the film is built in exact and harmonic way, with dry passages from the one to the other, they are dismal, without light, concluded most of the times with the death of an Italian, the Sicilian Carmela, the Roman Francesca, the partisan fo Florence, the bloody group of the partisan on the Po. Rossellini looked with dry eyelash and shut lips, with and apparently impassive attitude, he never eneterfers among the represented things and the cine camera, he exposes, he enunciated, he documents, avoiding any personal intervention, any suspect of involvement. Even if keeping distant from it, almost extraneous, he always shinily arrives to involve: for a sense of fatality which always entrusts the characters, for a secret echo - painful, dramatic that lets wave in the heart of everyone, for a curious, mysterious sense of wait that lets also narratively leaven on every episode. With the possibility, for who looks, to go on, to read something more. As Paul Eluard had to notice later, when introducing Paisà in Paris affirmed: “A film in whose inside we rove almost with passion, with the avid look, but in which, like good curious, we are also actors and spectators. We see and we are seen, and what happens there disorientates and surprises us. Life drags us, it submerges us, dominates us, because it is always life the first comer, found in the street, man, woman, child, civil, soldier, with everybody’s gestures and as a sudden flame of gestures of anybody, in a snared country. A people that struggles, as often other people do, against the power of the masters, and against their own weakness, against the injustice and the poverty; a film in which they confess not only their faults byt their innocence, their value and theirs good actions, not only theirs misfortunes by theirs desires and their own joy, for love of the truth; a truth each time or miserable or glorious”. Concluding in this way: “Without wanting to show the ment of its country better than what they are, Rossellini, with upsetting and calm audacity, compensates and corrects the past of the victims with the hope of the heroes”.

NOTES

Scanty in that period, the success of public. The narrating voice is of Giulio Panicali. Filmed with makeshift means under the lee of the facts and produced with the collaboration of the Foreign Film Production Inc.