Screening of Roberto Rossellini's masterpiece, with William Tubbs, Harriet White, Gar Moore, Carmela Sazio, Dots M. Johnson.
"Rediscovering Neorealism"
"Rediscovering Neorealism"PAISAN (PAISA' – 1946)Screening of Roberto Rossellini's masterpiece, with William Tubbs, Harriet White, Gar Moore, Carmela Sazio, Dots M. Johnson.Paisan (Paisà), Roberto Rossellini's follow-up to his groundbreaking and internationally acclaimed neorealist masterpiece Rome Open City (1945), works much of the same terrain while also extending and elaborating his aesthetic preoccupations on a much grander narrative scale. […]The film begins in Sicily and moves steadily northward with each succeeding story, thus reflecting the actual path of the Allied liberation of Italy starting in 1943. Each of the film's narratively unrelated vignettes begins with actual newsreel footage and narration that situates it within the larger context of World War II, and each takes place in an important locale: Sicily, Naples, Rome, Florence, the Appenine Range, and finally Porte Tolle in the Po delta. […]While Paisan is an episodic film, with each of the stories featuring completely different characters who are not connected to characters in any of the other stories, the film is tightly bound together by the theme of communication. Unlike Rome Open City, Paisan is not about the Italians' battle with the occupying Germans; instead it is about their tenuous relationship with the liberating American soldiers. Just as the film's stories gradually move northward up the peninsula, so too does each story increase the level of communication and understanding between the Italians and the Americans.This binding theme is reflected in the film's title, which is a term used to refer to someone from your own village. In essence, Rossellini is saying that the Americans, the foreign "others," became part of Italy during the liberation, which we see quite explicitly in the progress of the stories, as the film begins with cautious American soldiers and distrusting Sicilians unable to fully communicate and ends with American officers collaborating and dying side-by-side with Italian partisans, which is why the film's otherwise tragic ending is actually a paean to cooperation and respect. Rossellini makes the back-and-forth of cultural clash and eventual understanding into a profound statement about the nature of human interaction and solidarity, and even if the film is hampered at times by somewhat hammy acting (the American sometimes sound and act too much like a European's idea of what Americans sound and act like), it is rarely anything less than deeply moving. (Qnetwork)In Italian, with English subtitles.Monday, March 9th, 2015, at 18:30Italian Cultural Instituterehov Meir Rutberg 12 – HaifaFREE ADMISSION