A Film Canon

This extraordinary short undermines its propaganda imperative at every point, largely by refusing to fully contextualise the eponymous battle - whether strategically, as a significant moment in the liberation of Italy, morally, as an example of Allied determination and morale, or dramatically, as anything other than an agonising, often boring, attrition. Combined with such propagandistic residues as illustrative maps, the reversal of footage to ensure that the Allies and Germans always remain on the same sides of the screen, and the relative facelessness of the enemy, this produces the ambiguity, or even mild irony, encapsulated in Huston's superb narration, which fuses the immediacy of the participant with the detachment of the analyst. In the process, the landscape around San Pietro, and the bodies of its various victims, are thrown into traumatic topological relief, as evinced in the unusually extended imagery of graves and grave-digging, which becomes almost synonymous with the slow movement of the Allied front, as well as the magnificent conclusion, in which - for the only time in the film - Huston's narration ceases, forcing the viewer to identify with the local Italian population's return to their decimated town, as well as their plea for agricultural recovery to the local patron saint. The result could be an episode of Paisan, approaching neorealism from the direction of documentary, rather then narrative, film practice, and finding its logical conclusion at those moments at which Huston allows the camera to simply pan over dead bodies, condensing the entire weight of the war into so many irreducibly individual experiences: "The lives lost were precious lives - to their country, to their loved ones, and to the men themselves...many among these that you see alive here have since joined the ranks of their brothers in arms who fell at San Pietro."