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THE EUROPEAN CINEMA
enact experiences closer to them even than the revolution was to Eisenstein's workers and peasants. Sometimes this direct observation of life falters, or moves along a plotted line. The Roman episode, with its Maupassant irony, seems a rather too polished vignette — but its opening scene in the cafe is a slice of actual life. When the Negro says to the little paisano, ' I don' wanna go home ', we are perilously close to a planted moral — but all humanity is in the actual relationship of the two. In short the more Rossellini trusts his genius for evoking their own humanity from his ' actors \ the more this film moves forward, away from 1 art ' toward an emotional factuality that seems beyond question. The concluding episode is one of the greatest passages in cinema, triumphant vindication of the promise of the work of all first-rate directors, from Griffith till today. This is indeed ' the story of an action ', the very core of film itself. But one hardly knew before how great the medium could be, how deeply it could reveal the springs of action from action alone, and make a comment from the event itself.
It is hard to say how much of this comes from learned skill. Rossellini and his team were men mainly without film experience a few years ago, with the exception of the writer Sergio Amidei. The men and women who people their films are innocent for the most part of any facility beyond doing things they know from their own lives. It all comes out of experience, out of war and death and the release of passionate emotions. Such an art seems bound to follow the chain of events which brought it into being, just as has happened in Russia in the last thirty years. And there are signs to show that this is about to come to pass, if it has not already done so.1
Rossellini, in both his films, holds up the image of the partisan as the new man who can shape events toward some more human scale of things. Other films reflect other forces in the chaos of post-fascist Italy. Vittorio de Sica's Shoe-Shine was an eloquent account of the degradation of
1 Cf . p. 42.
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