Paisan (1946)

Paisa’, Italy, 126 minutes

Director: Roberto Rossellini

Writers: Sergio Amidei, Federico Fellini, Klaus Mann, Marcello Pagliero, Alfred Hayes, Roberto Rossellini, Rod E. Geiger, Vasco Pratolini

Photography: Otello Martelli

Music: Renzo Rossellini

Editor: Eraldo Da Roma

Cast: Carmela Sazio, Robert Van Loon, Dots Johnson, Alfonsino Pasca, Gar Moore, Maria Michi, Harriet White, Renzo Avanzo, William Tubbs, Dale Edmonds, John Whaling Allen, Dan, Roberto Van Loel, Cigolani

Film critics and historians appear prone to grouping director and cowriter Roberto Rossellini’s pictures into trilogies, even if they were not exactly intended that way. Paisan is thus the second in his so-called Neorealist trilogy, with Rome, Open City (1945) and Germany, Year Zero (1948). But not only is Paisan a genuinely standalone picture on its own, it is also composed of six separate episodes with six separate stories and casts. As the trilogy’s name suggests, the pictures are united mainly by the formal aesthetic, which in turn was imposed in the first place by conditions of low-budget financing and a country literally in ruins from war. From Rossellini to Bicycle Thieves to Jack Webb and beyond I come to the aesthetics of neorealism already in favor: shooting on the fly, casting amateurs, studying the underclasses—better without agenda, as Rossellini generally did it (though also implicitly pointing ways toward social reform).

I like the structure of Paisan almost as much as the little separate stories. The larger arc is the liberation of Italy by Allied forces, which started in 1943 and continued until it helped bring the end of the war in 1945. Just so, Paisan starts with the invasion of Sicily and advances north. The stories are not specifically about the progress of the war but rather just wartime stories involving ordinary soldiers and civilians caught in extraordinary situations. In the first a young woman whose father and brother have been missing for days, Carmela (Carmela Sazio), is drafted by invading US forces who are trying to root out dangerous nests of Nazis in a contest of urban warfare conducted at night. The movements of the US soldiers and the Nazis are complicated, information is lacking, mistakes are made, there’s no time to think, and the entire episode is all done in maybe 25 minutes. All the tales here are approximately the size of a Twilight Zone episode. The rhythms are formative but familiar.

Rome, Open City (1945)

Roma città aperta, Italy, 103 minutes

Director: Roberto Rossellini

Writers: Sergio Amidei, Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini, Alberto Consiglio

Photography: Ubaldo Arata

Music: Renzo Rossellini

Editors: Eraldo Da Roma, Jolanda Benvenuti

Cast: Aldo Fabrizi, Anna Magnani, Marcello Pagliero, Maria Michi, Giovanna Galletti, Carla Rovere, Francesco Grandjacquet, Harry Feist, Joop van Hulzen

There's a reasonable argument for a chain of cause and effect that starts with director and cowriter Roberto Rossellini making propaganda films for Italy's Fascist regime in the early '40s. One thing leads to another, giving us Naked City and eventually Jack Webb's hectoring pro-police agitprop media empire in the '60s and '70s and onward to documentaries as we know them today. No one can match the Lumiere brothers for impact on documentary moviemaking, they literally invented it, but Rossellini might be the No. 2 suspect here with his brand of neorealism, an aesthetic that relies on the structurally primitive for credibility and has informed a thousand million pieces of gritty realism as we understand it today: camera in motion, shooting on location rather than soundstage, favoring nonprofessional players over entertainers, and thematically placing the focus on scenes of poverty and social privation. The house is burning down, neorealism says implicitly. Who cares if the film stock matches?

That's pushing it a little, of course. Neorealism didn't just come out of nowhere. It emerged from Italy in the '40s under the care and guidance of Antifa critics and filmmakers such as Luchino Visconti, whose Ossessione—his take on James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice—is considered the first neorealist film. All Rossellini did was manage to put himself in the right place at the right time, wining a big prize at Cannes in a postwar bust-out that launched neorealism, or something like it (looking at you, Dragnet), permanently into popular consciousness. But Rossellini was more than a reformed propagandist who got lucky. He was a sensitive filmmaker and a complex figure relying on instinct, at bottom something of a romantic. He was aware of history but his impulse, for better and worse, was to make sweeping emotional statements out of it. 

Journey to Italy (1954)

Viaggio in Italia, Italy / France, 80 minutes
Director: Roberto Rossellini
Writers: Vitaliano Brancati, Roberto Rossellini, Colette, Antonio Pietrangeli
Photography: Enzo Serafin
Music: Renzo Rossellini, Giacomo Rondinella
Editor: Jolanda Benvenuti
Cast: Ingrid Bergman, George Sanders, Maria Mauban, Anna Proclemer, Paul Muller, Anthony La Penna, Natalia Ray, Jackie Frost

Director and cowriter Roberto Rossellini's third and last picture with his wife, Ingrid Bergman, shortly before their marriage ended, almost seems like an imaginary movie now, something that someone wrote about in a novel. That's probably more because of its relative obscurity. A beast with no natural home, a neorealist piece with Hollywood stars, an art film and a woman's picture all at once, it was released to terrible reviews and short runs, variously butchered in attempts to make it more commercial, and quickly sank like a stone. Besides all the confusing markers—an Italian movie shot in English, with stars but whose careers were on the slide—it's also about the end of a marriage, which makes it a complete and total bummer. Audiences at the time were baffled, which tells you something about different times.

For all that, the influence of Journey to Italy has grown over the years. Now safely installed in the top 100 of the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, it could almost be reverse-engineered from close viewings of Abbas Kiarostami's amazing Certified Copy, from 2010, or Richard Linklater's series of "Before" movies with Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke. It's about a relationship going bad, and incidentally about how travel can complicate that. One reason it flopped, and still languishes in all but critical obscurity, is likely exactly this downbeat trajectory. If it still seems a little alien now on that score, that's more for its general air of reticence. Among other things, Journey to Italy is also a story of the clash between repressed Northern Europeans and lusty life-affirming Southern Europeans. In the scope of film history, it can also serve as a milestone finish to Italian neorealism, Rossellini's career bread and butter, which was arguably no longer operative by 1954. It's also a swooning look at the layers of history with which we live. There is some sense here that the events could have happened hundreds and thousands of years ago, or that they could still happen now and in the future, and very little about the story would have to be changed. The threat of Mount Vesuvius is the only constant.