PAISAN (PAISA) (1946) B/W 116m dir: Roberto Rossellini

w/Carmela Sazio, Gar Moore, Robert van Loon, Maria Michi, Bill Tubbs, Dots Johnson, Harriet Medin, Dale Edmunds, Harriet White

Director Roberto Rossellini's account of the Allied invasion of Italy covers six episodes during the time frame from 1943 through 1945. The film is a classic of neorealist cinema: precise, zealous in pursuit of truth, and doggedly historical in its point of view.

From Georges Sadoul's Dictionary of Films: "When Paisà was first shown in Paris, Paul Eluard described it as, 'A film in which we are impassioned rubber-neckers and greedy voyeurs but one in which, like all good rubber-neckers, we are both actors and spectators. We see and we are seen, and this upsets us. Life surrounds us, involves us, overwhelms us. For this is continuously the story of the first coming, taken in the streets with men, women, children, civilians, and soldiers revealing their typical behavior. It is a people fighting, as others have done so often, against tyranny and their own weakness, against injustice and poverty; a film in which people bare not only their feelings but also their innocence, merits and goodness; not only their miseries but also their joys and hopes for love and truth --- a truth in turns miserable and glorious. Not wishing to show the people of his country better than they are, the auteur of this film, with a calm audacity, compensates and redresses his victims' past with his heroes' hopes.'

"Having discovered, almost by chance, this film with my friend Paul Eluard, I wrote: 'A revelation such as I have rarely seen since I was first excited by my first viewings of Caligari ... , Potemkin ... , or Peter Ibbetson .... I have no doubt that, if it fulfills the promise of this film, the postwar Italian cinema will match the importance of those of Sweden and Germany during the Twenties.' (Ecran Francais, November 12, 1946). Rossellini had earlier told me: 'In order to choose my actors for Paisà, I began by establishing myself with my cameraman in the middle of the district where such-and-such an episode of my film was to be shot. The rubber-neckers then gathered around us and I chose my actors from among the crowd ... [Sergio] Amidei and I never finished our script before we arrived on location. We adapted ourselves to the existing circumstances and to the actors we selected. The dialogue and intonation were determined by our nonprofessional actors ... Paisà is a film without actors in the accepted sense of the term.'

"The best episodes are those in the Po Valley and Florence; the portrayal of the massacre of the partisans and Allied parachutists having become a classic in itself. The episode in Florence [This episode aroused a storm of protest in Britain. Ed.] is extraordinary but has been misunderstood by those who have forgotten that the town became a battlefield because the British refused to cross the Arno for three months and left the partisans alone to fight the Germans. In these episodes, as in the others, Rossellini damned the horrors that war had brought to his country and his heart cry was emotionally and enthusiastically understood around the entire world.

"Paisà was not a low-budget film despite what is often claimed. Rossellini's technique of improvisation was expensive and the film was in fact the most costly Italian film in 1946. The cameraman, Otello Martelli, was then the most famous in Italy.

"Most of the ideas seem to have stemmed from Amidei though [Federico] Fellini, then a journalist, assisted in both script and direction; and certainly worked on research and liaison with the local population. Rossellini received backing for the production from Rod Geiger, an American GI who had taken Rome, Open City ... to the States in 1945 and formed a company (Foreign Films Productions) to release it. In 1946, Geiger returned to Italy with film stock and a few unknown actors and actresses and successfully persuaded Rossellini to make a successor to Open City. As with the earlier film, Paisà received critical adulation in the USA and Britain."