Piasa (1946)
Piasa is film by Roberto Rossellini. This was the director’s second major neorealist film after Rome Open City and is apart of his war trilogy. In studying this movement I thought it fitting to begin with these Rossellini’s films and like this, most posts from here on out will concern themselves with important films of the movement. For an overview on Neorealism please click here :)
Staying true to his refusal of making conventional films with plotted stories, the director offers six episodes chronicling the allied advance through German occupied Italy from the south through to the north. Briefly, the first episode, Sicily, deals with the disillusionment of Italian villagers who first encounter the American soldiers. They are apprehensive and just see the Americans as another foreign country coming to occupy, yet when asking for assistance a young woman offers to help. The second episode, Naples, deals with an African American G.I. who befriends a young street thief and the two develop a bond through both of their social-economic standings. The soldier, a poor Negro, who counts for nothing in his own country finds he is no better than what the boy is to his own. The third episode, Florence, begins to show the partisans struggle against the Germans and the lack of support from the idle British allied forces. An American volunteer nurse and her friend try to go to the front lines in search of loved ones. The fourth episode, Rome, is a bit of a love story following a prostitute who sees herself as something better. She attracts a drunken disinterested G.I. who recounts tthe allied taking of Rome and him being greeted by a woman who he came to love, who actually is the prostitute. Because of her level of deprivation he doesn’t recognize her and she tries in vain to get him back. The fifth episode, Monastery, examines an old untouched cathedral and its priests. They are visited by three American chaplains, two of which to the horror of the priests are of a different religion, one is Jewish. They question the US chaplain on how he can be friends with nonbelievers before he explains the meaning of true brotherhood. The sixth episode, Po, is perhaps the most powerful, showing unsupported partisans fighting against the remaining Fascist and Nazi strongholds.
The genius of this film is in its raw simplicity. What Rossellini does is present to us simple characters who do not explain themselves or their choices and subsequent actions. They simply exist before the camera. They don’t ask us to think, they simply just ask us to watch. In the first episode the woman from the village doesn’t rationalize her actions in helping the American that leaves her with a bullet in the head, she just does. The boy after friending the drunken MP steals his shoes after he passes out, he even tells the solider if you sleep I will still your shoes. He doesn’t explain himself, he just says and does. The partisans throughout never explain their futile fight or why they risk death simply to retrieve the body of a dead comrade floating downstream, it is just understood that it is what is right and therefore they do. This is the heart of neorealism, because much of life can’t be cleanly wrapped with an overall clean moral for the fact that things just happen. Sometimes they do happen for reasons, but a lot these reasons may never become known to others, rendering them meaningless…
Aesthetically, I like how each episode has its own style relevant to the story’s content. Sicily: because of first contact between the Americans and Italians in the middle has a long dialogue sequence between the Italian woman and an American soldier as they struggle to understand each other. Shot in medium long never too close, we see as they come to understanding. Naples: the genius is in the camera cuts alternating in point of view. When the kid is shot, it is at the same distance just lower whereas the GI is shot from a higher POV. The contact is opposite yet similar. Florence: perhaps had the fastest cutting and shortest ASLs. Each shot feels fragmented much like the city as the two characters rush to the front line through all the chaos. Rome: because it features a flashback sequence, features great close ups and cuts of each characters feelings and thoughts from past to the present. Monastery is shot mostly in long shot. This encompasses much of the atmosphere and beauty of the untouched cathedral. Shots are composed with more than three people at all times giving the sense of brotherhood that is shared and reinforced by the American chaplain. Po, the most expansive episode of them all, features western-noir grand sweeping long shots where the environment dwarfs the characters. This also serves to show us the true isolation of the partisans in their fight, as they are utterly alone and appear smaller to us the audience do to distance and scale. Ethics and aesthetics are fused in way that only neorealsim could capture.
