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THE FILM SINCE THEN
the relation between people and soldiers seems to have crystallised around that misunderstanding. The G.I/s expect to be exploited for their money and their good nature — and they are. The drunken Negro is sold for his boots, the besotted Lothario is picked up by the girl. The harbingers of democracy look wonderingly at these byproducts of fascism. But when, in the person of the Negro, they get a glimpse of the hell of misery from whence rises all this ignorance and crime, the sight is too much for them, they turn and run. And they have learned nothing. Their hearts have been touched but not their minds. Civilised emotionally, they are nearly as intellectually at sea as the lowly peasants they despise.
Further up the peninsula, the pattern changes. In Florence and beyond it in the Po marshes, the liberators encounter Italians more politically advanced than they are themselves. The partisans know what they are fighting for, the nature of the enemy, and what was probably most surprising to the Americans, how to fight The collision of the two cultures takes on more historic meaning in the isolated sequence in which the worldly American chaplains stand helpless before the humility — and the arrogance — of the monks who give up their food to bring about the salvation of a Jew and a Protestant. Altogether the position of the citizen-soldiers of the conquering army grows more equivocal as the film advances. In terms of their own experience of democracy, their contempt for the * paisan ' has basis. But Rossellini is not really defending him. The image put forward to replace both paisan and democrat is that of a third kind of man, the partisan.
Thus to set down the far reaches of thought which Paisan provokes is not to take the real measure of the film. Primarily it is a film about war and the effect of war; the overtones are there for the seeking. But more than any film we know, it is first and foremost drawn from the life. Ideas arise from the material, they do not control it, they hardly shape it. The line between documentary and fiction disappears as we watch ordinary men and women
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