-Devdutt Trivedi
Tag Gallagher pronounces the second part of Roberto Rossellini’s war trilogy, Paisà (1946), as ‘the true debut of Rossellini, moviemaker.’ The name of the film comes from the Italian word paesano that loosely translated to ‘buddy’, a term used by Allied soldiers while greeting Italian countrymen.
The first part of this important trilogy, Rome Open City (1945), was as important, according to the great French critic Andre Bazin, for European cinema as Citizen Kane was for Hollywood. The film’s ability to capture a sense of reality instead of merely representing it, and allowing the viewer to choose, like in Welles’ masterpiece, those portions of the frame that interested the viewer by distancing the camera from the action occurring before it; and thereby creating more planes of depth within the image. In Bazin’s view this made Rossellini’s films heir to the achievements of Renoir (in its film form reminiscent of Brownian particulate motion caused by motion along different planes) and Flaherty (in its documentary-like detachment), at the same time. In this position, Rossellini could imagine a much larger project with money coming in from America.
In his essay on the film, Colin McCabe captures Rossellini’s transposition of modernist techniques, particularly cubist paintings and the novels of Kafka, with their ability to capture different sides to the same visage formation, with the transparent aesthetic of the American documentary, through its focus on the long take. McCabe states:
Rossellini’s realism, that is, should not be understood as some simple transcription of reality but as a juxtaposition of elements that become real as the camera captures them. This is very obvious in the way he sets his fictional material in real locations.
The film was a response to Seven Men From U.S., which was being planned by a group of Americans- including Rod Geiger, Klaus Mann, Alfred Hayes and
Bob Lawrence- about the everyday in Italy told through the eyes of American soldiers. The film designed to be one ‘for Americans, addressed to Americans, and about Americans, Americans discovering Italy’ was modified later when Geiger realized that “(m)ovies that make Italians known can’t be made except by Italians and in Italy, not in Hollywood.” The name of the film also reflects the name of Geiger’s dog at the time. What emerged was a film that combined a set of selected situations through the documentary milieu of filming instead of constructing characters first and then constructing landscape in the background. This inverted perceptions of American characters as being ‘conquerors’ instead of ‘liberators’ by ‘selecting’ situations that first unmasked American ‘naiveté’, cleverly through the English language, that linguistic colonizer that is the whole and soul of Hollywood’s worldwide linguistic conquests, in order to portray them as “indifferent, obtuse, kindly savages” that ‘are taught pointed lessons in humility—usually at the cost of Italian lives.’
Gilles Deleuze correctly points out the importance of situation in the cinema of Rossellini, where action mediates the situation. According to Deleuze the situation makes the character “arise from the surface” of space to engage with “an encounter” that takes place with another character in the historical public domain. The situation does not transform as it would in Hollywood or in ‘transformation of object’ exercises in modern and contemporary art, but instead creates a static space that raises the encounter to its phenomenological abstraction. The non-transformed object is even more off-the-cuff with its emphasis on improvisation through rewriting the script and choosing actors on location. Rossellini commented on his process of choosing actors:
To choose my players in Paisà, I would start by setting myself up with my cameraman in the middle of the locality where I planned to realize this or that episode of my story. People idling nearby would group around and I would choose my actors from the crowd. You see, if you’re dealing with good professional artists, they never correspond exactly to the idea you yourself have made of the character that you want to create. To succeed in really creating the character you’ve dreamed of, the director has to undertake a struggle with his player and end up bending him to his will. It’s because I have no desire to waste my strength in such battles that I only use actors-by occasion. And then it’s difficult to harmonize the good professional with the ‘amateurs’. So I’ve preferred to renounce using the good actors.
He continues:
Paisà is thus a film without actors in the proper sense of the term. The American Negro whom you found remarkable in the Neapolitan sequence, claimed to have played some small roles, but I perceived that in reality he had lied to me in order to get work. All the monks from the convent scene are real monks. The minister and the rabbi from the American army who dialogue with them are also a real American minister and a real American rabbi. It’s the same for the peasants and the swamp folk who live around Ravenna [in “The Po Delta”] and speak the dialect of the region, just as the Sicilians in the first sequence speak Sicilian. The English officers [in “Florence”] are as authentic as the German soldiers whom I took from among the prisoners. And if you found talent in the young American who plays in the Roman episode, you should know that he never posed before except in front of the camera of a photographer who used his picture for razor-blade advertisements.
Rossellini’s techniques of working with actors were opposite to those of Bresson, who chose non-actors like Rossellini, but destroyed expressionism and realism through the use of retake to ‘exhaust’ his ‘models.’ Rossellini’s method of working with actors and shooting on location influenced a range of film-makers ranging from Jean-Luc Godard, who considered Rossellini to be the great among film-makers and Abbas Kiarostami who combines Rossellini’s penchant for realism with Bresson’s discourse around controlled accidents through the use of the retake.
Gallagher points out that viewing Rossellini’s 1946 masterpiece is an “emphatic” experience for Italian viewers and only a ‘diluted’ one for Americans. Gallagher contrasts Rossellini’s role as an organizer-producer as opposed to a director-artist, in his initial decision to let a number of directors execute different portions of the film which he would supervise. The film was initially to be scripted by Klauss Mann, who had published twenty books and served in the American army’s Psychological Warfare Branch in North Africa, Italy and Germany. However he was pro-American and Rossellini modified his role claiming that all Italians were ‘Katzelmacher’ or ‘bastard-makers.’ Instead of capturing the spirit of the Italian liberation at the hands of the Allies Rossellini chose to make a film about ‘the realities of Italian life in the period of 1943–44.’
Mann was replaced by Rossellini’s regular scriptwriter who would go on to become amongst the most important Italian film makers in his own right, Federico Fellini, who collaborated with the Communist scriptwriter Massimo Mida, who had earlier worked with Lucino Visconti. This further complicated the response to the film when it was shown in Italy as neither the Catholics nor the Communists accepted the ideology that the film offered.
The structure of the film is divided into five episodes which further break up the viscosity of the film, making it multi-layered and more importantly multi-paced. The first episode ‘Sicily’ centers on the young girl Carmela, followed by second episode ‘Naples’, in which a drunk military policeman has his shoes stolen by a street urchin. The third episode in Rome, which is a sympathetic character sketch set around a prostitute with flashbacks, is followed by the fourth episode, which consists of the most striking photography, in which an English nurse and an Italian man traverse the well-known streets of the center of Florence, she seeking her lover, he, his wife and child. The fifth episode centers on a Franciscan monastery in the north of Italy which is shaken to its foundations when it finds itself entertaining a Protestant and a Jew; and is followed by the final episode around the massacre of partisans in the Po Valley.
Rossellini wanted to emerge from the dichotomy of conforming to either the Church or the (Communist) Party as he had to in his universally acknowledged masterpiece Rome,Open City. He wanted to spontaneously improvise sequences and shoot on the street in order to successfully ‘go as far as possible away from traditional studio filmmaking.’ In 1972, he commented on his take on the film:
“You have no idea—this is really a confession—how much I hate Open City and how much I love Paisan more. Open City is full of old ingredients…Paisan [is] purer…less seductive.…[Just] the facts are all there. My starting point was a moral position [to show facts honestly in order to understand fully], so I had a feeling that I was cheating a little bit [in Open City—for example, by having the boys whistle outside Don Pietro’s prison cell], so I tried to purify the thing.”
Mida, in an interview from Il neorealismo nel fascismo, felt that following his collaboration with Rossellini he ‘had left the (Visconti) ‘clan’, I would no longer have the privilege of his high protection.’ Conversely Mida states that Rossellini would ‘sulk’ if he got to know of Mida’s interaction with Visconti.
On the other Fellini who had begun to interact with Rossellini as scriptwriter for Rome, Open City, described his own role in the films as ‘secondary’. He stated about his collaborations with Rossellini:
“Rossellini had very precise ideas, he knew exactly what he wanted, and we were like two friends joking and exchanging opinions. Perhaps I often drew his attention to certain situations, or oriented him in some direction, but no more than that.”
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Fellini also described Paisan as a turning point in his life, as he felt at ease while making a film for the first time in his life:
“…seeing Rossellini at work, I discovered for the first time that it was possible to make films with the same intimate, direct, immediate rapport as a writer writes or a painter paints. I understood…there wasn’t anything particularly difficult about filming, or so mysterious or technical about all that equipment as to
require special initiation—except knowing how to say with simplicity what one had seen.…I suddenly glimpsed a whole new world: that look full of love with which he enveloped things and which inspired each one of his shots.…The principal lesson I got from Rossellini was a lesson in humility. His humility in front of life…, his extraordinary trust in things, in people, in people’s faces, in reality. Looking at a thing with love, and with that communion that is established from one moment to another between a face and me, an object and me, I understood that the profession of director could fill my life, could be rich enough, passionate enough, exalting enough, to help me to find a sense in existence.”
Fellini also emphasized how the film was an emergence from the clutches of the Fascist regime and a rediscovery for him of the Italian landscape:
“For me, the Paisà trip constituted a discovery of Italy. We were surrounded by a whole new race of people, who seemed to be drawing hope from the very hopelessness of their situation. There were ruins, trees, scenes of disaster and loss, and everywhere a wild spirit of reconstruction. In the midst of which, we did our tour. The troupe of people working on Paisà travelled through an Italy they scarcely knew, because for twenty years, we’d been in the grip of a political regime which had literally blindfolded us. But at the same time as this moving discovery of my own country, I realised that the cinema miraculously made a big, double game possible: to recount a story and, while telling it, personally to live another, an adventure, in the company of characters as extraordinary as those of the film being made—often even more fascinating— and which would be evoked in another film, in a spiral of invention and life, observation and creativity, simultaneously spectator and actor, puppeteer and puppet.”
Rossellini completed the film without shooting a sixth episode in Piedmont centering on an Italian-American parachutist and the leader of an intellectual band of partisans. According to Tag Gallagher, the sequence could not be shot as Rossellini had lingered on for too long in Florence and there was no longer enough snow in Piedmont to complete shooting. Rossellini did not want the episode as it made the partisan heroes seem ‘indomitable’ and linked to the class struggle that the Communists thought would be automated following the war.
Gallagher correctly ascribes Rossellini’s cinema as being about ‘a premonition of freedom in presence of death.’ Perhaps this is what Robin Wood refers to as ‘total instability’, that according to Wood, opposes Rossellini’s realism with Eisenstein’s ‘architecturally’ composed ‘glory’ that was based on the classical formation of the hero, Rossellini opposed the hero’s ability to act (as in Hollywood’s action-image) with ‘his ability to suffer.’
The film was shown at the first post-war Venice Film Festival. The initial cut was almost an hour too long and disappointed viewers at a trial screening in Rome and then at Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Eventually Renoir’s The Southerner won best film, with Rossellini’s film getting special mention after an entire range of films including contemporary work ranging across a palette of directors including Fritz Lang, Julien Duviver and Marcel Carne.
Rossellini would later emphasize his disappointment:
“I deeply believed in the film, it’s one of the three I prefer [with Francesco giullare di Dio and Europe ‘51]. The first Italian review I saw talked about the ‘gangrenous brain of the director’.”
Ironically, the film was released in Italy through the support of the Communist Party of Italy. Trombodori tried to ‘protect’ Rossellini’s film, and the film’s commercial screening in Rome was often introduced by Alberto Moravia. The film went onto win the Nastro
d’Argento (Italy’s equivalent of the Oscar) for Best Subject, Best Direction, and Best Music.
References
The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini, Tag Gallagher, 2006
Colin MacCabe
Robin Wood