Paisan (Rossellini, 1946): BFI Soutbank, Studio, 3.20pm
This film, part of the Italian Neorealism season at BFI Southbank, also screens on May 10th, 19th, 20th and 29th. You can find the details here.
Chicago Reader review:
Roberto Rossellini’s six-part film about the liberation of Italy was released in 1946; it confirmed the neorealist style of his Open City,
released a year earlier, but also extended that style into melodrama,
where many critics did not want to follow. The episodes all seem to have
an anecdotal triteness—black soldier befriends orphan boy, prostitute
finds redemption, etc—but each acquires a wholly unexpected naturalness
and depth of feeling from Rossellini’s refusal to hype the anecdotes
with conventional dramatic rhetoric. The concluding episodes—a final
skirmish between Germans and partisans in the Po valley—is one of
Rossellini’s most sublime accomplishments, a largely wordless sequence
that uses shifting focal lengths, drifting camera movements, and natural
sounds to create a suspense of almost unbearable intensity and
immediacy.
JR Jones
Here (and above) is Martin Scorsese's introduction to the film.
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