The Italy of World War II encompassed a highly fragmented population. Some Italians were Fascists or actively supported them, some passively went along with Fascism, and some organized resistance actions and counted the days until liberation by the Allies. Others simply picked the path of least resistance, trying to anticipate how supporting one group or another would impact their likelihood of survival and when to switch sides. It’s always best, in such circumstances, to back the winning hand. Many Italians welcomed Allied forces and some activity cooperated with them. Others backed them once it became apparent that the war was going their way bit by bit. Regardless of that support, however, the presence of so many inherently aggressive young men in a society dominated by archaic concepts of virtue and purity was bound to pose problems. Add to that the inevitability that most of these serviceman couldn’t speak Italian and you had the fixings for deep resentments. Paisan, filmed at the time and in pseudo-documentary style, captures the period of liberation from the vantage point of the indigenous population.

Historical Background: Although Luchino Visconti may have produced the first film fitting the notion of “Neo-realism” with Ossessione in 1942, it was Roberto Rossellini (1906-1977) who brought the concept to international attention with his trilogy of films relating to the liberation of Italy in World War II. The first of the three movies, Open City, pertaining to the liberation of Rome, took the world by storm when it was released in 1945. Filmed in real apartments and houses and on the streets of Rome, Open City follows the rise of the resistance movement through a series of interconnected vignettes. With it, Rossellini reinforced the hallmarks of Neo-realism: hand held cameras, semi-documentary or pseudo-documentary style, and use of non-professional actors almost exclusively. Neo-realism was less an artistic ideal, however, than a practical necessity. As Fellini later pointed out, “Neo-realism was the natural way in Italy in 1945. There was no possibility of anything else. . . A neo-realist was in reality any practical person who wanted to work.

Rossellini followed Open City with Paisan in 1946 and Germany, Year Zero in 1947. Like Open City, Paisan was segmented, but in the latter film, there was no attempt to interconnect the narratives of the six segments. Paisan is arguably Rossellini’s greatest film contribution.

The Story: Paisan is comprised of six vignettes extracted from various stages of the Allies’ Italian campaign, in 1943-4. Each vignette is introduced by a map of Italy showing the extent of the Allied advance up the boot. Each segment occurs somewhat north of the preceding episode, giving viewers a pretty good cross-section of Italian cities and/or countryside. The film does not much concern itself with the primary war effort – the battles raging between the Allied forces and the Germans and their Fascist supporters. Instead, it focuses on the relationship between the Italian people and the Allied forces and the Italians who fought as partisans in conjunction with the Allies.

The first episode takes place in Sicily shortly after the Allied invasion. When peasants of the Sicilian populace first encounter American soldiers, they cannot believe that the Allies have landed despite the evidence before their eyes. Even when the new reality sinks in, the Sicilians are uncertain what the change in occupiers means for their lives. They are as cautious of the Americans as they were of the Germans. They are all just more men with guns. Their suspicions are eased a bit when an American soldier and translator speaks Italian to them and explains the situation. The American troops need advice about how they can advance while avoiding the mine fields set by the Germans. One Sicilian girl, Carmela (Carmela Sazio), knows a way through the mine fields. Since she needs to look for her father in that direction anyway, she offers to show them the way. They reach a cave overlooking the river bed and decide to leave the girl at that point with one soldier to guard her. They cannot afford to leave the only one who speaks Italian, so a homesick young soldier from New Jersey, Joe (Robert Van Loon), is the one selected. The crux of the vignette is the entertaining effort of Joe to establish communication and trust with Carmela despite neither speaking the other’s language. The failure of communication ultimately proves their undoing. Joe cannot understand why Carmela strenuously objects to his lighting his cigarette lighter and repeats the action. They are thereby spotted by German snipers who shoot the American. Carmela kills one of the Germans but is herself killed as well. When the American patrol returns, they misinterpret events and assume that Carmela betrayed Joe.

The second segment takes place in Naples, which is in a state of desperation and poverty at the time of liberation. The story centers on an African-American Military Policeman (M.P.), also named Joe (Dots Johnson). He is on liberty and gets thoroughly drunk. He acquires a sidekick – a small Italian boy whom he calls “Paisan” (Alfonsino Pasca). Once again, neither speaks the other’s language and mostly talk at cross purposes. The two attend a puppet show but the black soldier turns surly when it becomes apparent that the dark Moorish character is just so much fodder for the white knight. Offended by the racist overtones of the show, the drunken soldier climbs up on the stage and assumes the role of the Moor in battling the white knight. A riot very nearly breaks out, but the soldier and his small Italian escort make their exit. Sitting in an old dump, the soldier rambles on, for a while, about racism in the American south and belts out a rendition of “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen.” The Italian boy warns Joe that if he passes out his boots will be stolen, though the warning is in Italian and of no use to the intoxicated soldier anyway. Later, a now sober Joe complains vociferously to Paisan about the abominable thieves in Naples, little realizing that he is talking to the thief. When Joe discovers Paisan’s pockets lined with stolen American goods, he demands that Paisan take him home to where he lives. Joe gets more (or less) that what he bargained for, however, since Paisan has been orphaned by the war and now lives in a cave with dozens of other destitute, homeless Italians. Joe decides to leave things be, recognizing that these folks need his boots a good deal more than he does.

The third vignette occurs in Rome. Francesca (Maria Michi) is a young Roman woman scrapping by as a hooker, catering to the American soldiers. She brings a drunken soldier, Fred (Gar Moore), to her room. He is too intoxicated for sex but rambles on about a beautiful Italian girl he met when he first came to Rome and bemoans the impossibility of finding her again – little realizing that he is talking to her. In her street walker outfit and reduced to prostitution to survive, apparently Francesca bears so little resemblance to the innocent young woman that Fred earlier encountered that he cannot recognize her as the same. Francesca leaves her address with the hotel concierge and asks her to give it to the soldier when he awakens in the morning. The vignette ends with Francesca standing in the rain dressed once again as the sweet, innocent Italian girl that she was when the troops first arrived, waiting for her soldier.

The fourth segment takes place in Florence, further north. A young English woman, Harriet (Harriet Medin), working as a nurse, has come to Italy to find a man with whom she had fallen in love before the war. That man has since become a well-known leader of the partisan resistance. The first newspaper published in the partly liberated Florence reports that this man has been wounded. Harriet is due for liberty and determines that she will search for her lover, come what may. The partisans are presently engaged in street fighting on the other side of the Arno. She encounters an acquaintaince, Renzo (Renzo Avanzo), who is similarly desperate to get into the battle zone because his family is there. Together, they set out, passing through the abandoned galleries of Uffizi, over rooftops, and across streets amidst sniper fire.

The fifth vignette takes place in a rural Franciscan monastery. Three military chaplains (one Catholic, one Protestant, and one Jewish) arrive at the ancient monastery to pay homage to the 500 year-old building and to get a sense of the monastic life. Only the Catholic chaplain (William Tubbs) speaks Italian. The three are welcomed and their request for a place to stay the night is warmly granted. Though the monks have little in the way of food stocks, they will share what little they have. For their part, the three chaplains share candy bars and canned goods that they have brought along. The interactions are the epitome of selfless sharing until the Franciscans learn that two of the chaplains are not Catholic. They are baffled as to why the Catholic chaplain has not exhausted himself trying to save the souls of his colleagues by converting them to Catholicism. They remind him that it is his sacred duty. He tries to explain the more ecumenical and tolerant approach of the American military, reminding the Franciscans that his friends are equally convinced that their own faith is the true faith. Unconvinced, the Franciscans decide they will fast rather than eat with the infidels in the hopes that God will send a miracle to save their souls.

The last segment is, perhaps, the most conventionally dramatic. It takes place in the marshes of the Po River Valley in the extreme northern part of Italy. The Italian partisans fight there with very limited help from British and American soldiers and supplies. Not being an official force of an established government, the partisans are not protected by the Geneva Convention and are certain to be killed if captured. The vignette opens with a dead partisan floating down the river attached to a life protector ring and a sign reading “Partisan.” Despite the risk, the partisans are determined to pull the corpse from the river and provide proper burial. With painfully slow skiffs operated by oars and with the aid of a decoy action, the partisans successfully retrieve the body. Next, they must radio for a drop of desperately needed supplies. As the time for the drop approaches, they must briefly light a signal fire. Even that small signal proves extremely costly, allowing the Nazi troops to locate the insurgents. With superior firepower, the Nazis kill or capture this group of partisans. We also observe the slaughter of a house full of civilians who briefly aided the partisans. The captured partisans are later put to death by being bound and dropped into the river.

Themes: The obvious theme is one that qualifies to an extent as propaganda: the nobility of the Italian people and their trials and tribulations first under Nazi occupation and later during Allied occupation. Paisan is not one of those films like De Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis that is interested in exploring the guilt of ordinary Italians in Fascist sponsored repression and murder. Even thievery from the Allied forces is justified, in Paisan, by the impoverishment of the Italian people during liberation. On the surface, the case made by Rossellini that thievery was an understandable necessity for a people desperately struggling to survive is a strong one, until one recalls that such thievery soon escalated into the notorious Italian black marketeering in stolen American goods that proliferated in the early post-War years.

One important variant on the first theme is the role of communication difficulties in the problems that developed between the Italian populace and the Allies during occupation. Distrust is aggravated by inability to effectively communicate. Communication problems associated with not knowing each other’s languages are a significant part of vignettes one, two, three, and five. It is reminiscent of European complaints about ugly-Americans who tour their countries but refuse to learn even the basics of their languages. Considering the size of the liberating force that was required, it is unrealistic to expect that any but a small fraction of the military personnel landed by the Allies would speak Italian.

There are a couple of themes that are distinctive to particular segments. In the second vignette involving the black M.P., we see the conflict between the Italian hatred of the Moors and the necessity in America to suppress racism to the extent possible because we are such a broad mix of races and ethnicities. We also see in that segment the issue of resentment that occurs in civilian populations toward rowdy servicemen, whenever and wherever they are found in large numbers. The issue even pertains to towns and cities in America that happen to be located near large military bases. Rowdy servicemen often diminish the quality of life for the civilians but the civilians also make money catering to those same servicemen, so it’s something of a love-hate relationship. In the third vignette, we have the further elaboration of that issue in the form of prostitution. Wherever there are large numbers of servicemen on liberty, there will be easy money to be made by young women in prostitution. The Italians quite naturally resented the influence that the presence of lots of American soldiers and their dollars had on the moral climate of Italian society. In the fifth segment, Rossellini reveals one cultural difference where he prefers the American standard to that of his own country. Italy, being completely dominated by Catholicism in its most rigorous manifestation has very low tolerance for other religious persuasions while America, by necessity, has developed greater tolerance for diversity of viewpoints. Proselytizing in America is not given much respect while the Franciscans in the fifth vignette view it as a moral obligation of every Catholic. Still, that one instance of admiration for America values I would call throwing the American audience a bone. The sixth segment introduces concerns about the sometimes inadequacy of Allied support for partisan Italian forces fighting under desperate conditions.

Production Values: In keeping with both the precepts of Neo-realism and the necessities of the time, Paisan was shot in documentary style, with ambient light, and genuine settings. Some of the shots are rather seriously under-lit, though one can argue that this adds to the realism.

One of its great strengths is that the film has been drained of most of the melodrama that was evident in Open City. In Paisan, Rossellini is content to let the inherent poignancy of the narratives speak for itself. The pathos, tension, romance, and humor derive from the circumstances of each episode rather than being artificially enhanced by clever dialog or dramatic license.

Unfortunately, Rossellini did not possess the ability of Vittorio De Sica to extract brilliant or, even, believable performances from his amateurs on a consistent basis. Some of the performances in Paisan are painfully amateurish. I was especially sickened by the performances of the secondary characters in the fourth segment that takes place in Florence. The two leads weren’t so bad.

The musical score, provided by Rossellini’s brother Renzo Rossellini is sometimes ridiculously inappropriate and actually works against the nature of the film. While the filming style attempts to create an aura of authenticity by imitating an invisible documentary approach, the music frequently draws attention to itself, reminding viewers that the material has been dramatically enhanced.

Before the landing of the Allies in Sicily, Rossellini had been making propaganda films for the Fascist government. One could argue that Rossellini’s great war-related trilogy of Neo-realistic films are still propaganda, albeit no longer government directed. Paisan is at least less obviously propagandistic than Open City. The Italian people are consistently portrayed as courageous, heroic, victimized and misunderstood. The Italians who supported the Fascist government are no where to be seen in Paisan. The film sometimes comes across as Rossellini’s attempt to create an image of Italy that would comport with the new reality after the arrival of the Allies. While the Germans were in control, every Italian was a Fascist. With the ascendancy of the Allies, every Italian is a partisan. It is a highly convenient transformation. The Italians come off in Rossellini's rendition as looking better than any of the other parties. The Nazis, as might be expected, are simply evil. The Allies are presented as well-intentioned, but naïve, insensitive, and, sometimes, incompetent.

Bottom-Line: Not only is Paisan an important example of Neo-realism and a worthy artistic achievement in its own right, but it also marked the arrival of Federico Fellini in cinema (as a writer for the film) and the first role (albeit a minor one) for Giulietta Masina. The version I purchased of Paisan was a DVD release in combination with the De Sica film Two Women. There are a lot of flaws and debris and some awkward jumps in this print. One might hope that Criterion will get around to restoring these Rossellini masterpieces. This version was dubbed into English while I personally greatly prefer subtitles. I recommend Paisan as one of the classics of Neo-realism. It has a running time of 117 minutes.

Recommended:
Yes

Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older