PAISAN (1946)
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Randwick Ritz, Sydney:
2:00 PM
Sunday May 04
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
08:15 PM
Monday May 12
Rating: M
Duration: 126 minutes
Country: Italy
Language: English, German, Italian with English subtitles
Cast: Carmela Sazio, Maria Michi, Gar Moore, Dots Johnson
Director: Roberto Rossellini
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
2:00 PM
Sunday May 04
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
08:15 PM
Monday May 12
Rating: M
Duration: 126 minutes
Country: Italy
Language: English, German, Italian with English subtitles
Cast: Carmela Sazio, Maria Michi, Gar Moore, Dots Johnson
Director: Roberto Rossellini
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
4K RESTORATION – AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE
“…a milestone in the expressiveness of the screen. … it is not an ordinary film—neither in form nor dramatic construction nor in the things it has to say. In some ways, it is the antithesis of the classic "story film," and certainly it throws off glints of meaning which are strangely unfamiliar on the screen.” – Bosley Crowther, New York Times
Roberto Rossellini’s follow-up to his breakout Rome Open City was the ambitious, enormously moving Paisan (Paisà), which consists of six episodes set during the liberation of Italy at the end of World War II, and taking place across the country, from Sicily to the northern Po Valley. The incidents which supposedly occurred during the Allied war campaign in Italy—random incidents, with no connection, except by war— allows Rossellini “to construct a terrifying picture of the disillusion, the irony, the horribleness of strife.” With its documentary-like visuals and its intermingled cast of actors and non-professionals, Italians and their American liberators, this look at the struggles of different cultures to communicate and of people to live their everyday lives in extreme circumstances is equal parts charming sentiment and vivid reality.
Introduced by Gino Moliterno at Ritz Cinemas and Cristóbal Escobar at Lido Cinemas
Presented with the generous support of IIC Sydney and IIC Melbourne.
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“…a milestone in the expressiveness of the screen. … it is not an ordinary film—neither in form nor dramatic construction nor in the things it has to say. In some ways, it is the antithesis of the classic "story film," and certainly it throws off glints of meaning which are strangely unfamiliar on the screen.” – Bosley Crowther, New York Times
Roberto Rossellini’s follow-up to his breakout Rome Open City was the ambitious, enormously moving Paisan (Paisà), which consists of six episodes set during the liberation of Italy at the end of World War II, and taking place across the country, from Sicily to the northern Po Valley. The incidents which supposedly occurred during the Allied war campaign in Italy—random incidents, with no connection, except by war— allows Rossellini “to construct a terrifying picture of the disillusion, the irony, the horribleness of strife.” With its documentary-like visuals and its intermingled cast of actors and non-professionals, Italians and their American liberators, this look at the struggles of different cultures to communicate and of people to live their everyday lives in extreme circumstances is equal parts charming sentiment and vivid reality.
Introduced by Gino Moliterno at Ritz Cinemas and Cristóbal Escobar at Lido Cinemas
Presented with the generous support of IIC Sydney and IIC Melbourne.
FILM NOTES
By Bruce Hodsdon
Bruce Hodsdon is a retired film study collection curator and film programmer.
ROBERTO ROSSELLINI
Roberto
Rossellini (1906-77) began his work in the film industry, supported by the
Fascist government, on three features (1941-3), but his regard for the real and
the coralità (chorality) of the servicemen’s collective
activity, already potentially present in the films he was directing, injected a
humanist edge into nationalistic military drama. Rossellini broke through with Rome
Open City (Roma città aperta, 1945), filmed against the odds in
improvised interiors and on the streets of Rome during the period of
liberation, mid-1944. A powerful melodrama, integrated with elements of
documentary realism, the film successfully broke new ground, and was a hit with
audiences in Italy and internationally.
Italian audiences were not as responsive as emergent American “art house” audiences to the innovations of the second film of Rossellini’s war trilogy, Paisà (Paisan, 1946), with its synthesis of art and information. Without becoming a modernist director, Rossellini experimented in Paisà with non-classical elements (long takes, location filming, elliptical editing etc.), in what was a restless search for a different kind of cinematic language, a personal breakthrough that would depart from “programmatic neo-realism.”
For his cinema features, Rossellini rarely, if ever, worked with a pre-set screenplay: developed his films at during the filming (an exception was General Della Rovere (Il generale Della Rovere, 1959). When filming, he did not rely on multiple takes in search of the right one, preferring the immediacy that would preserve the moment and did not result in the usual “finish”. ‘It was what he “found” while filming […] rather than what he wished to demonstrate, that mattered: inspiration not planning, what arrived by chance rather than what was predetermined,’ according to film scholar Sam Rohdie. (1)
Rohdie claims that ‘What Rossellini recognised, and what neo-realism evaded, was the problematic relation between reality and the presentation of it. It is when reality seems strange that it is most true and that you can begin to see it.’ (2)
Filmmakers who have acknowledged Rossellini's influence include François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, the Taviani brothers, Gillo Pontecorvo, Ermanno Olmi, Federico Fellini, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.
Feature films in which Rossellini felt he had a free hand as an ‘auteur’: Paisà, Germany Year Zero (1948), Francesco Giullare do Dio (The Flowers of Saint Francis,1950), Stromboli (1950), Europe 51 (Europa 51, 1952), Viaggio in Italia (Journey to Italy, 1954), India Matri Bhumi (India Mother Earth,1959), The Rise to Power of Louis XIV (1966).
Italian audiences were not as responsive as emergent American “art house” audiences to the innovations of the second film of Rossellini’s war trilogy, Paisà (Paisan, 1946), with its synthesis of art and information. Without becoming a modernist director, Rossellini experimented in Paisà with non-classical elements (long takes, location filming, elliptical editing etc.), in what was a restless search for a different kind of cinematic language, a personal breakthrough that would depart from “programmatic neo-realism.”
For his cinema features, Rossellini rarely, if ever, worked with a pre-set screenplay: developed his films at during the filming (an exception was General Della Rovere (Il generale Della Rovere, 1959). When filming, he did not rely on multiple takes in search of the right one, preferring the immediacy that would preserve the moment and did not result in the usual “finish”. ‘It was what he “found” while filming […] rather than what he wished to demonstrate, that mattered: inspiration not planning, what arrived by chance rather than what was predetermined,’ according to film scholar Sam Rohdie. (1)
Rohdie claims that ‘What Rossellini recognised, and what neo-realism evaded, was the problematic relation between reality and the presentation of it. It is when reality seems strange that it is most true and that you can begin to see it.’ (2)
Filmmakers who have acknowledged Rossellini's influence include François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, the Taviani brothers, Gillo Pontecorvo, Ermanno Olmi, Federico Fellini, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.
Feature films in which Rossellini felt he had a free hand as an ‘auteur’: Paisà, Germany Year Zero (1948), Francesco Giullare do Dio (The Flowers of Saint Francis,1950), Stromboli (1950), Europe 51 (Europa 51, 1952), Viaggio in Italia (Journey to Italy, 1954), India Matri Bhumi (India Mother Earth,1959), The Rise to Power of Louis XIV (1966).
THE FILM
Paisà's origins were as a film intended to enhance the low level of
respect extended to Italians at the time by Americans and Britons. It was to be
addressed to Americans and about Americans discovering Italy. To be titled Seven
from the U.S, the film was initially envisaged as a sort of diary of
the war, introducing seven Americans participating in the first Allied landing
in Sicily on July 2 1943. Rossellini was still involved with Roma città
aperta. so he empathetically accepted the American slant on the film in the
initial script conferences with four Americans (June to September 1945).
However, in the first treatment of the Rome episode, the perspective, including
a flashback, was shifted from that of the American soldier to the perspective
of the Italian prostitute, Carmela, who “befriends” him. Similar shifts of
perspective occurred in each of Paisà's episodes. Biographer
Tag Gallagher identifies this shift as key to Rossellini's developing concept
of a film with ‘the aura of a national epic’, to be developed by Rossellini and
Fellini over six months travelling the length and breadth of Italy; Italian
viewers would identify with Italian characters while American viewers would
identify with Americans. (3) Rossellini's title, Paisà, adopted two
months into the shooting, evokes fraternity: it is not an Italian word but a
corruption of the Italian-American “paesan” (“countryman” or “buddy”) that
Allied soldiers used when greeting Italians.
Tag Gallagher writes that ‘Rome Open City had been a triumph for Rossellini as producer. Paisá would be his triumph as director’ (p. 182). Gallagher, in his biography, gives the fullest account (in English) of the origin and early development of Paisà (pp.180-4). That he initially planned to hand over actual direction of Paisà to a number of other directors indicates that Rossellini still thought of himself as primarily an organiser rather than a creative artist. However, by degrees he took over development of the project from the two principal scriptwriters, Klaus Mann and then Sergio Amidei, who had fought with each other over the script more than with Rossellini; Amidei wanted a traditional, well-prepared, well-crafted production. Rossellini in contrast was reluctant to engage in the populist flag-waving that he felt he had done during Rome Open City. Gallagher suggests that Rossellini determined to go as far as possible away from traditional studio filmmaking. He wanted to shoot spontaneously on the streets, to get out and explore, to show Italians of different regions to each other. ‘Principally he wanted to be free’ (p.184).
The first half of Paisà (the Sicilian, Neapolitan, and Roman episodes) show the impact of the American invasion on the Italians: in the first and second episodes, the American soldiers continually fail to understand or misinterpret the locals they encounter. The young woman, Carmela, in the first episode, seems to stand for Italy, the victim of both the Americans and the Germans. The Naples episode was conceived on location when Rossellini and Fellini sighted the cave of Mergellina, a hell hole for refugees from war. In this episode, a black military policeman is “bought” by a street urchin who steals his boots when he falls asleep after drunkenly talking about living in a slum back home. Later re-encountering the boy by chance and demanding his boots back, the black soldier is subjected to a bitter irony.
The time lapse between the first episode following the Allied landing in Sicily in July 1943 and the third episode in Rome is approximately 18 months and there is a flashback in the story to six months earlier, the liberation of Rome in June 1944. The flashback becomes the instrument of a comparatively novelettish irony representative of scriptwriter Sergio Amidei's preferred approach, in what amounts to a retreat from the real by Rossellini – in all probability the only time he ever deployed a flashback. Such a fictive device seems emotionally appropriate in its evocative dissolving of liberation optimism into the daily sordidness of occupation.
Rossellini compensates for this “compromising” of the real by showing stunning scenes of violence imbued by the terror of open spaces, in the re-creation of the battle in Florence on August 8 1944. In the fourth episode, the Germans and Fascists attack the partisans isolated by German bridge demolitions. The episode follows an American nurse Harriet and a friend Massimo on a desperate journey through the deserted streets in the search for Harriet’s lover, a partisan leader, and Massimo's wife and child. The improvised dialogues were apparently completed by Fellini on location, supplemented by input from former partisans.
The fifth episode is entirely filmed in the otherworldly peace of a monastery, ostensibly in the Romagna district (actually filmed in the south). The concept of the episode underwent basic changes several times. The final script had major input from Fellini, who drew on childhood experience. An episode set in a monastery seems to have been envisaged in order to diffuse the painful history of the partisan movement, while foreshadowing the religious theme in Rossellini's ‘50s films. After the fervour of the monks' fast and prayer for the conversion of two of three visiting army chaplains – a Jew and a Protestant – the tension at the meal for the visitors is “made strange” by the American Catholic chaplain's comprehension. There is an abrupt ellipsis that similarly ends each of the other episodes of Paisà, all of which are not “finished” in the normal sense (except for episode 3 in Rome). The Maiori monks were valued by Rossellini ‘for the “fantasy” in which they “really” lived; their “simplicity” was to him unfathomably “complex”’ (Gallagher, p.192).
In the sixth episode in the final months of conflict in the German-occupied Po delta during the winter of 1944, the tone changes once more, as the war between the occupiers and partisans, aided by the Allies, assumes another kind of bitterness. The cruel futility is intensified in images often filmed by a camera distanced from the action in long takes that are inserted abruptly, and scenes powerfully devoid of conventional suspense in the narrative. Standing alone as “The great Italian national-populist masterpiece,” 'The Po Delta', is generally acknowledged as Rossellini's most extreme experiment in “off-the-cuff’ filmmaking, conceived and executed so that the autonomy of “the facts” is maintained, requiring the viewer to make an active effort to find the story by filling in a series of gaps (Gallagher, p. 204).
Notes
1. Sam Rohdie, Film Modernism, Manchester University Press, Manchester 2015, p.184).
2. Rohdie, Roberto Rossellini: Magician of the Real, David Forgacs et al editors, BFI Publishing, London 2000, p 120.
3. Tag Gallagher, The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini, Da Capo Press, New York 1998.
Tag Gallagher writes that ‘Rome Open City had been a triumph for Rossellini as producer. Paisá would be his triumph as director’ (p. 182). Gallagher, in his biography, gives the fullest account (in English) of the origin and early development of Paisà (pp.180-4). That he initially planned to hand over actual direction of Paisà to a number of other directors indicates that Rossellini still thought of himself as primarily an organiser rather than a creative artist. However, by degrees he took over development of the project from the two principal scriptwriters, Klaus Mann and then Sergio Amidei, who had fought with each other over the script more than with Rossellini; Amidei wanted a traditional, well-prepared, well-crafted production. Rossellini in contrast was reluctant to engage in the populist flag-waving that he felt he had done during Rome Open City. Gallagher suggests that Rossellini determined to go as far as possible away from traditional studio filmmaking. He wanted to shoot spontaneously on the streets, to get out and explore, to show Italians of different regions to each other. ‘Principally he wanted to be free’ (p.184).
The first half of Paisà (the Sicilian, Neapolitan, and Roman episodes) show the impact of the American invasion on the Italians: in the first and second episodes, the American soldiers continually fail to understand or misinterpret the locals they encounter. The young woman, Carmela, in the first episode, seems to stand for Italy, the victim of both the Americans and the Germans. The Naples episode was conceived on location when Rossellini and Fellini sighted the cave of Mergellina, a hell hole for refugees from war. In this episode, a black military policeman is “bought” by a street urchin who steals his boots when he falls asleep after drunkenly talking about living in a slum back home. Later re-encountering the boy by chance and demanding his boots back, the black soldier is subjected to a bitter irony.
The time lapse between the first episode following the Allied landing in Sicily in July 1943 and the third episode in Rome is approximately 18 months and there is a flashback in the story to six months earlier, the liberation of Rome in June 1944. The flashback becomes the instrument of a comparatively novelettish irony representative of scriptwriter Sergio Amidei's preferred approach, in what amounts to a retreat from the real by Rossellini – in all probability the only time he ever deployed a flashback. Such a fictive device seems emotionally appropriate in its evocative dissolving of liberation optimism into the daily sordidness of occupation.
Rossellini compensates for this “compromising” of the real by showing stunning scenes of violence imbued by the terror of open spaces, in the re-creation of the battle in Florence on August 8 1944. In the fourth episode, the Germans and Fascists attack the partisans isolated by German bridge demolitions. The episode follows an American nurse Harriet and a friend Massimo on a desperate journey through the deserted streets in the search for Harriet’s lover, a partisan leader, and Massimo's wife and child. The improvised dialogues were apparently completed by Fellini on location, supplemented by input from former partisans.
The fifth episode is entirely filmed in the otherworldly peace of a monastery, ostensibly in the Romagna district (actually filmed in the south). The concept of the episode underwent basic changes several times. The final script had major input from Fellini, who drew on childhood experience. An episode set in a monastery seems to have been envisaged in order to diffuse the painful history of the partisan movement, while foreshadowing the religious theme in Rossellini's ‘50s films. After the fervour of the monks' fast and prayer for the conversion of two of three visiting army chaplains – a Jew and a Protestant – the tension at the meal for the visitors is “made strange” by the American Catholic chaplain's comprehension. There is an abrupt ellipsis that similarly ends each of the other episodes of Paisà, all of which are not “finished” in the normal sense (except for episode 3 in Rome). The Maiori monks were valued by Rossellini ‘for the “fantasy” in which they “really” lived; their “simplicity” was to him unfathomably “complex”’ (Gallagher, p.192).
In the sixth episode in the final months of conflict in the German-occupied Po delta during the winter of 1944, the tone changes once more, as the war between the occupiers and partisans, aided by the Allies, assumes another kind of bitterness. The cruel futility is intensified in images often filmed by a camera distanced from the action in long takes that are inserted abruptly, and scenes powerfully devoid of conventional suspense in the narrative. Standing alone as “The great Italian national-populist masterpiece,” 'The Po Delta', is generally acknowledged as Rossellini's most extreme experiment in “off-the-cuff’ filmmaking, conceived and executed so that the autonomy of “the facts” is maintained, requiring the viewer to make an active effort to find the story by filling in a series of gaps (Gallagher, p. 204).
Notes
1. Sam Rohdie, Film Modernism, Manchester University Press, Manchester 2015, p.184).
2. Rohdie, Roberto Rossellini: Magician of the Real, David Forgacs et al editors, BFI Publishing, London 2000, p 120.
3. Tag Gallagher, The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini, Da Capo Press, New York 1998.
THE RESTORATION
Source: DCP Coproduction Office, Germany, DCP Cineteca di Bologna
Restored in 2013 by Cineteca di Bologna, CSC – Cineteca Nazionale, Coproduction Office at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, with the support of Cinecittà.
Director: Roberto Rossellini; Production Company: O.F.I with the collaboration of F.F.P.; Producer: Roberto Rossellini with the participation of Rod Geiger; Script: Sergio Amidei, Federico Fellini, Marcello Pagliero, Alfred Hayes, Roberto Rossellini, Rod Geiger, Klaus Mann; Photography: Otello Martelli; Editor: Eraldo Da Roma; Music: Renzo Rossellini.
Cast: Carmela Sazio (Carmela), Robert Van Loon (Joe), Benjamin Emanuel (Sarge), Dots Johnson (Joe), Alfonsino (Pasquale), Maria Michi (Francesca), Gar Moore (Fred), Harriet White (Harriet), Renzo Avanzo (Massimo), Giulietta Masina (Major’s Daughter)
Italy | 1946 | 126 Mins | 4K DCP | B&W | Italian, English, German with English subtitles | UC15+
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Restored in 2013 by Cineteca di Bologna, CSC – Cineteca Nazionale, Coproduction Office at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, with the support of Cinecittà.
Director: Roberto Rossellini; Production Company: O.F.I with the collaboration of F.F.P.; Producer: Roberto Rossellini with the participation of Rod Geiger; Script: Sergio Amidei, Federico Fellini, Marcello Pagliero, Alfred Hayes, Roberto Rossellini, Rod Geiger, Klaus Mann; Photography: Otello Martelli; Editor: Eraldo Da Roma; Music: Renzo Rossellini.
Cast: Carmela Sazio (Carmela), Robert Van Loon (Joe), Benjamin Emanuel (Sarge), Dots Johnson (Joe), Alfonsino (Pasquale), Maria Michi (Francesca), Gar Moore (Fred), Harriet White (Harriet), Renzo Avanzo (Massimo), Giulietta Masina (Major’s Daughter)
Italy | 1946 | 126 Mins | 4K DCP | B&W | Italian, English, German with English subtitles | UC15+
