A Film Canon

The centrepiece of Rossellini's neorealist trilogy, Paisan presents the war in microcosm, consisting of six vignettes of the Italian Liberation, which extend from Sicily to the Po Delta, and from the Allied landing to the final, desperate stages of the German defence. In turn, the centrepiece of the film is the fourth vignette, which describes a treacherous passage from one side of Florence to the other, subsuming all its cultural and historical icons - most memorably the Uffizi corridor, but also the Ponte Vecchio, Duomo, and Boboli Gardens - into a series of military co-ordinates, and capturing the city at its most desecrated, disorienting and uncanny. In this way, the film clarifies Rossellini's neorealist ambitions as springing from a cityscape so surreal as to constitute a self-contained aesthetic experience, and so require a fairly transparent mode of documentation. From this perspective, the second episode, which deals with the relation between an American G.I. and a young orphan, feels like a mere preparation for the extraordinary 'Cave of Orphans', upon which it closes. Even the first and final vignettes, which occur against natural backdrops, partake of this uncanniness, as evinced in the strangeness of the lava-locked, castle-studded Sicilian coast, and the indeterminacy that the Po Delta so poetically reifies, upon which note the film closes. That said, there are overtly political - or at least historicised - moments in the commentary between vignettes, as well as a strong narrative dimension to the second and fifth. Nevertheless, Rossellini manages to construe narrative as a mere extrapolation, or extension, of the fleeting, coincidental encounters that characterise the entire Liberation, such that the miracle registered in the fifth vignette - which depicts the arrival of an American Catholic, Protestant and Jewish priest at a northern Catholic monastery, whose inmates pray for their conversion - is merely that of communication itself, whose lack pervades the rest of the film, both in the form of the continual alternation between Italian and English and, more specifically, in the form of the second vignette, which depicts a young G.I's haunting failure to recognise the prostitute that his old sweetheart has become.