Original Title: Paisà
Year: 1946
Country: Italy
Language: Italian, English, German, Sicilian, Latin
Genre: Drama, War
Director: Roberto Rossellini
Screenwriters: Sergio Amidei, Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini, Rod E. Geiger
Music: Renzo Rossellini
Cinematography: Otello Martelli
Editor: Eraldo Da Roma
Cast:
Carmela Sazio
Robert Van Loon
Dots Johnson
Alfronsino Pasca
Maria Michi
Gar Moore
Harriet Medin
Renzo Avanzo
William Tubbs
Dale Edmonds
Rating: 7.6/10
Original Title: Germania anno zero
Year: 1948
Country: Italy, Germany, France
Language: German, English, French
Genre: Drama
Director: Roberto Rossellini
Screenwriters: Roberto Rossellini, Carlo Lizzani, Max Kolpé
Music: Renzo Rossellini
Cinematography: Robert Juillard
Editor: Eraldo Da Roma
Cast:
Edmund Moeschke
Ernst Pittschau
Ingetraud Hinze
Franz-Otto Krüger
Erich Gühne
Hans Sangen
Jo Herbst
Christl Merker
Rating: 8.0/10
The second and third part of Rossellini’s groundbreaking War Trilogy, following ROME, OPEN CITY (1945), which ushers in Italian neorealism to revolutionize the studio-bound, backlot-confined stock in trade since the genesis of motion picture. Hiring non-professional actors and minimizing sensationalization (scores are discretely applied), securing real-life locations to shoot often in a guerrilla style, Rossellini is the standard bearer and has the perfect timing and resources to capture the post-war actualities and cook up something raw, intense and thought-provoking to an audience ripe for something more authentic and relatable.
PAISAN (there are some glitches in sound mixing in the Criterion version) is an anthology film, containing six unrelated stories as regards the Liberation of Italy by the Allied forces in the later stage of WWII. Starting from Sicily, the film’s each episode sequentially heads north through Naples, Rome, Florence, Appenine Mountains, to the Po delta. Altogether they constitute a collection of exempla about interpersonal connections between the Italian resistance movement and the Allied forces.
It is the basic sense of justice that compels a young Sicilian girl to heedlessly avenge an American soldier whom she barely knows and who is picked off by a German sniper. A universal compassion is elicited from an African-American military officer to a pilfering street urchin when the former is led to observe the enormity of demolition the city of Naples has suffered. A budding romance between an Italian girl and an American soldier takes a poignant turn after six month in the liberated Rome, they fail to recognize each other after being corrupted by debauchery and intemperance. Maria Michi is wondrous in evoking a sense of unforthcoming fulfillment and tremendous loss.
In Florence, a volunteer nurse risks her life crossing the enemy line to look for an Italian partisan fighter she once knows, only her dismay seems to be foreshadowed. Agape can be found in a remote Roman Catholic monastery in the Appenine Mountains when 3 American military chaplains are generously treated by the monks in spite of their denominational differences (among the chaplains, one is protestant and another is Jew). On the Po river, OSS members and local partisans fight cheek by jowl against Germans, heroically laying down their lives merely months before the victory.
GERMANY YEAR ZERO (its monochromatic textures also vary in the Criterion version) departs from the war-ridden Italy and spirits audience away to the Allied-occupied, bombed out Berlin right after WWII. It focus on the subsistence of the Köhler family. A bed-ridden father (Pittschau, an erstwhile silent film star in his last screen role, making a good fist of a self-pitying patriarch stripped off all his prowess, all he is left to do is nagging himself to death, no pun intended) and his three children: Karl-Heinz (Krüger), the adult son, refuses to register because of his die-hard Nazi background and hides in their pokey apartment with no ration card; Eva (a stouthearted Hinze), the adult daughter and the main provider of the family, who goes out with soldiers every night to bogart cigarettes to sell; and the 12-year-old Edmund (Moeschke), who is too young to secure a decent job and wanders on the streets to collect whatever he can find, often being hornswoggled by adults and browbeaten by the querulous owner of the apartment building.
A chance encounter with a former teacher Mr. Henning (Gühne) implicates Edmund with more petty crimes and alerts audience that Nazism is far from being obliterated. Mr. Henning’s handsy fondling of Edmund is a disconcerting red flag that the tenacious canker of Weltanschauung is still insistent on corrupting malleable, suggestible individuals after the fall of Nazi Germany. Edmund becomes a latest victim, taking ideas on Mr. Henning’s say-so, he naively believes that he should fulfill his bemoaning father’s constant but (to an adult’s ear) boastful death wish, and eventually acts on it. After being grossly rejected by a hypocritical Mr. Henning for his parricide, Edmund buckles down under the immaterial force of dejection and forlornness. The film ends with a harrowing upshot that is rarely seen on the celluloid at that time. While it can be quibbled as over dramatic, but Rossellini’s prescient discernment overrides such criticism. After all, the tactful unison of ungarnished reality and emotional potency is the holy grail for any filmmaker to pursue, and in GERMANY YEAR ZERO Rossellini has notched up his.
Both films incorporates authentic war footage and astounding ravaged cityscapes into their stories to illustrate the enormity of damage and adversity occasioned by warfares. But, Rossellini isn’t interested in making a hardship porn. In PAISAN, against the format’s scanty length (each episode is roughly about 20 minute), which confers every story a run-and-gun mobility, the overall impression is a mutual understanding and camaraderie that weaves through each episode, compelling audience to spectate the selfless acts that shine ablaze and transcend untold adversity. GERMANY YEAR ZERO is a heart-rending cautionary tale, and a precocious Moeschke, in his sole sortie into acting, has Edmund’s transition from attentive innocence to be subjugated by the pall of taedium vitae indwelled on the screen for keeps.
referential entries: Rossellini’s ROME, OPEN CITY (1945, 8.6/10); Gillo Pontecorvo’s THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (1966, 8.5/10); Andrei Tarkovsky’s IVAN’S CHILDHOOD (1962, 8.2/10); Andrzej Wajda’s KANAL (1957, 8.1/10).
Cinema Omnivore 