PARTISAN REVIEW
important characters who appear only momentarily-for instance, the
German soldiers in Sicily or the partisan leader Cigolani in the Po River
episode. But the reality of these figures does not depend on "character–
ization"; they come to the screen full-grown, and are as real in ten
seconds as they could
be
made in half an hour-they are
visibly
real.
(The stranger one sees on the street is no less real and no less individual
because one does not know him.) In American films, on the contrary,
the characters are likely to
be
emphatically individualized, and precisely
because they are basically abstractions: without character traits and
personal histories, they would disappear.
But the rejection of ideas is also a rejection of principles. Rossellini
has no intellectual defenses, and when he attempts to go beyond the
passive representation of experience, he falls at once into the grossest
sentimentality and falsehood. The monastery episode, in which three
American chaplains (one
Protesta~t,
one Jew, one Catholic) are taught
some lesson-humility, perhaps; certainly not tolerance-by a group
of Italian monks, is so outrageously vulgar that it must surely
be
the
product of a calculated dishonesty, probably for political reasons. And
the dishonesty is made all the plainer by the fact that a view of the
Church such as no politically sophisticated Italian could seriously ad–
vance in his own name is here presented through the eyes of three
simple-minded Americans (what little intelligence they display among
them is all given to the Catholic) ; by this device, Rossellini tries to pre–
serve his "neutrality." (A similar tenderness for the clergy appears also
in all the other Italian films I have seen:
Open Cit')l, Shoeshine,
and
To Li,v·e in Peace.
Piovene suggests that the key factor in Italian "bad
faith" is a refusal to deal honestly with the issue of the Church.)
But the sentimentality goes beyond any single issue. The "message"
of
Paisan-after
all, it does have a "message"-is that the whole meaning
of war (indeed, the whole meaning of history) is suffering and death.
Moral and political differences are obscured: the death of a Fascist
equals the death of a partisan, and, as Siegfried Kracauer points out,
the American liberators look much like the German conquerors; even
the German officer of the Po River episode is presented sentimentally
(and therefore with relative success; Rossellini's complete failure with the
sadistic German officer of
Open City
is evidence of his inability to deal
with real moral distinctions). This view of war is always valid: Falstaff
is more nearly right than Prince Hal, and Thersites than Ulysses. But
it is also a view that has a special attraction for a defeated Fascist
nation, and Rossellini cannot restrain himself from taking a special
820
