PAISAN
not a symbol of value but simply a fact of nature. And the situation of
the men-removed from the elaborate political, moral, and military
framework that an American director would use to give it "meaning"–
becomes also a part of the screen image, a visible fact of experience:
these moments of tension are among the possibilities in a man's life.
This quality of "existential" truth
is
vitiated later in the episode,
when an attempt at communication between one of the soldiers and
an Italian girl is used (in a typically "American'' manner) to draw
vague populist sentiment out of a purely accidental limitation, as if there
were some great truth still to be discovered in the fact that one person
speaks English and another Italian, and yet both are human beings.
But the earlier quality is regained in the treatment of a group of German
soldiers and in the image of the Italian girl herself, whose large and some–
how undefined body-to an American eye, almost repellent in its lack of
physical charm, and at the same time disturbing in its persistent sug–
gestion that charm is irrelevant-becomes the leading visual element
of the episode. At the end, when this body is seen for a moment dead
and sprawling on the rocks, hardly more ungraceful than when it w.as
alive, it contains in its visible presence the dramatic meaning and con–
clusion of the episode (the product of war is always a corpse, but always
a
new
corpse) -though Rossellini's fundamental lack of taste permits
him to spoil this
~ffect
with·a final scene of cheap irony,
In the Florentine episode, there is a moment when a group of
partisans captures two Fascist snipers. A confused knot of men bursts
around a corner into the sunny street and moves rapidly toward the
camera, growing larger and clearer. One man is dragged along by the
shoulders, kicking and struggling; another, erect, is propelled by blows
that force him to move ahead as if he were part of the group, rather
than its object, and shared the general desire to bring matters to a
quick conclusion. Just in front of the camera, the men are thrown to the
ground and left for a moment inside a small circle, the camera pointing
downward at their backs. One of them cries, "I don't want to die!"
There is a burst of machine-gun fire, and the scene is over.
This scene moves so rapidly that the action is always one moment
ahead of the spectator's understanding. And the camera itself remains
neutral, waiting passively for the action to come toward it and simply
recording as much of the action as possible, with no opportunity for
the variation of tempo and the active selection of detail that might
be used to "interpret" the scene; visually, the scene remains on the
same level of intensity from beginning to, end, except for the increasing
size and clarity of the objects as they approach the camera-and this
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