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THE EUROPEAN CINEMA
least, but a description of their own shame and agony at their national disgrace.
Expressed in terms which everyone could understand, Open City created a sensation wherever it was shown.1 It had been a long time since a film of such stark honesty had reached the screens of the world. Rossellini's second production achieved greatness. Paisan (1946) ranks with Potemkin in marking an epoch in the advance of the screen. It consists of six episodes, united in sequence by the progress of the American and British Armies up the Italian peninsula, from the first landings in Sicily until the day before victory. Filled with tumultuous life, they separately and together tell the story of two peoples, two cultures, formally united in aim and locked in a struggle with a common enemy, but too separate culturally and historically, too beleaguered by circumstance, to discover together their common humanity. The film's theses are as significant of contemporary dilemmas as was Pudovkin's Deserter, but unlike that film, Paisan is not cabinned and confined by a pre-ordained dialectic. It takes facts as they are. As fresh and unprecedented as are the methods of Paisan, it does not give the feeling of an * experimental ' film. It seems the mature expression of minds deeply at grips with the problems of modern existence.
* Paisan ' was the American G.I.'s term of good-natured contempt for the ordinary Italian. The contempt is that of the world's best educated (but still hardly educated at all) and highest-paid proletariat for one of the most ignorant and miserable. The film is a weighing of that contempt for its origins and for its portent in a world now theoretically one. The soldiers landing in Italy find a village populace so fantastically ignorant that they cannot distinguish between their liberators and their oppressors. The soldiers puzzle over that fantastic ignorance, try to figure for themselves what it can mean, but at the first unfavourable sign they take the easy conclusion — * Why, that dirty Eyetie \ By the time the campaign has reached Naples and Rome,
1 Cf. page 547. It created, however, little attention in Italy. — P.R.
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