Roberto Rossellini will forever be remembered as the Italian filmmaker who pioneered neorealism, initially making film shorts for the Fascist government during the war and then breaking through internationally in 1945 with the remarkable Open City, which was filmed on location in real houses and apartments. Rossellini is probably best known to American audiences for his scandalous affair with Ingrid Bergman and their subsequent marriage, but it should be noted that this groundbreaking director also introduced Federico Fellini to filmmaking and served as his early mentor.

Released in 1946, Paisan is Roberto Rossellini’s episodic tale of the American advance into Italy during WWII, chronologically divided into six vignettes that begin with the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943 and conclude with liberation in 1945. Although fictionalized, the six stories appear much like newsreels that give us pictures of the different regions of Italy as each episode moves northward up the western coast. Much of the reason Paisan retains a newsreel quality to is due to the neorealistic style of shooting with natural light and using local unprofessional actors. Working with Rossellini as one of the writers, Federico Fellini explains why this was the chosen film style:

”Neorealism was the natural way in Italy in 1945. There was no possibility of anything else. With Cinecittà in shambles, you had to shoot at the real location, with natural light, if you were lucky enough to have film. It was an art form invented by necessity. A neorealist was in reality any practical person who wanted to work.”

The first episode shows suspicious Sicilians encountering the American troops, only beginning to trust them when one Italian speaking American makes some small talk before asking about the Germans. The main focus of the story revolves around a New Jersey soldier (Robert Van Loon), who attempts to establish a relationship with Sicilian girl Carmela (Carmela Sazio) without being able to speak any Italian. Moving up the coast to Naples, the second story introduces a African American soldier (Dots Johnson) who gets drunk, has his shoes stolen by a street urchin, and tracks the boy down, only to discover that he is an orphan and probably needs the shoes worse than he does. Although individual stories are not credited to specific writers, this one bears elements that we will later see in Fellini's La Strada during a short street scene of performers busking for money.

Next in Rome we meet one of the city’s ever present streetwalkers, named Francesca (Maria Michi). American soldier (Gar Moore) tells her about a remarkable woman he once met but is too drunk to realize that the woman he is describing is Francesca. In one of the more intense dramas of the film, the fourth episode follows Italian partisan (Gigi Gori) and American nurse (Harriet White) as they attempt to get through the German lines on the streets of Florence.

Rossellini works in his views about respecting the sincerity of religious individuals while questioning the sincerity of the organized religion in the fifth episode, set in a rural Franciscan monastery. Three army chaplains seek to spend the night, and force an ecumenical encounter with the sequestered monks since the chaplains represent three main branches of Judeo-Christian faith--Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish. This episode offers a peaceful respite between the two most intense stories.

The final episode occurs near the end of the war and features a battle between Germans and Italian partisans in the Po valley. Partisans have absolutely no hope of surviving if captured--the opening scene features a dead Partisan floating down the river with a large sign to identify him as a "traitor." The Geneva treaty only applies to prisoners of war who are enemy soldiers, and the partisans are regarded as renegades from the regular Italian army. Thus, their actions become particularly independent and heroic in this climatic sequence.

Although Rossellini's film has the same appearance as a newsreel, it actually feels far more real than those "objective" films of the period--so slanted towards the country of origin. The stilted dialogue often sounds awkward, but this is to be expected since he is using rank amateurs. Still, this remarkable film communicates how the war in Italy actually took place on a very personal level--showing intimate vignettes of real people with all their heroism, fears, romance, humor, and humanity. Much credit must also go to Rossellini’s artistic sensibility with his camera, using the natural lighting to great effect and keeping our attention through his creative camera movement and innovative camera angles.

With the non-professional actors performing in actual locations on a shoestring budget, Paisan ranks as a supreme example of Italian neorealism. Rossellini's film also marks the point in time that Fellini decides that filmmaking is the career that he wants to pursue. Paisan is also the first film that Fellini's wife Giulietta Masina will act in--though her part is uncredited) Thus, it is a film worth checking out for both artistic and historic reasons.