Fifty years of Italian cinema (1955)

54 over the world. It was put together in almost haphazard fashion, but the result was a robust, acute and highly moving work. Its roots were spread in life as it was lived, evoking memories of the winter that Rome passed under the German occupation. Its figures stand out — ■ a priest , a partisan, a woman destined for tragedy and death, and consecrated by her supreme resistance. Here and there the mood becomes one of a daily chronicle, and the film gains potency from this. Over the ferocity and ugliness, set down in firm, incisive touches, hovers a restrained emotionalism that only rarely lets itself go, along with questionable effects such as the torture sequence. The emotion condemns but understands — it becomes heartbreaking in the face of evil. It is most deeply affecting where the boys return to the city, after the shooting of the priest, for these boys are the life of tomorrow. All this is expressed in a series of shots that seem haphazard, but their sum total reminds us that here was no ordinary director. Rossellini proved himself to be an artist with Open City, and after the first surprise had passed, the confirmation of that fact came immediately. Paisa (Paisan), in 1946, made use of a rather difficult formula — that of telling a story in episodes (1). The film deals with six different moments of the war fought over the Italian peninsula, following the Allies' advance northward. It is an album of short dramatic vignettes, in which almost everything is essential. The emotionalism of Open City is more hidden and muffled in Paisan. Rossellini, the mature artist, makes his incisive personality felt in those moments describing the deserted streets of Florence in the last hours of the German occupation ; and the partisan combat in the marshes and canals of the Po valley. These moments made the viewer impatient for the future work of this artist. The triumphant reception that greeted Rossellini 's work made the director overcertain of his strength. Now began the legend of Rossellini 's disdain for a finished scenario. The first signs of this were visible in Germania anno zero (Germany : Year Zero), in 1947, a thin chronicle of Berlin in 1946 — ■ an ant-heap in which three millions swarmed painfully, trying to keep alive in the midst of chaos. The protagonist of this tale of slow ruin is a young boy of eleven named Edmund. The film details his efforts to find work, his relationship with his unfortunate family, and his meeting with his former schoolmaster. He becomes what amounts to a petty thief. Influenced by outside sources, he believes he can alleviate his father's suffering by killing him. Obsessed with the horror of his act, he throws himself off a roof. All this transpires against the most sordid of backgrounds, with the usual complement of girls who live by using cigarettes for money. Rossellini did not feel this life, nor could he perhaps have felt it as the life he showed in Open City and Paisan. Perhaps he was not aware that he was telling too many things at once in Germany : Year Zero, noting them between short breaths. So the film becomes a book of jottings, of studies for a film that is yet to be done — • even though the final scene has a broad though somewhat affected and calculated didacticism. (1) Difficult only because the episodic film was then still relatively new. Since then, as we know, a veritable « rash » of episodic films from all countries has now made this formula more than familiar to us.