战火

评分：

6.0 还行

原名：Paisà又名：游击队 / 战火的彼岸 / 老乡 / Paisan

分类：剧情 / 战争 / 地区：意大利年份：1946

简介：本片以第二次世界大战末期，在意大利登陆的美军攻破德军防线为背景，导演以令人感动的

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更新时间:2024-06-12

战火影评：[Film Review] Paisan (1946) and Germany Year Zero (1948)

The second and third part of Rossellini's groundbreaking War Trilogy, following ROME, OPEN CITY (1945), which ushers in Italian neorealism to revolutionize the studio-bound, backlot-confined stock in trade since the genesis of motion picture. Hiring non-professional actors and minimizing sensationalization (scores are discretely applied), securing real-life locations to shoot often in a guerrilla style, Rossellini is the standard bearer and has the perfect timing and resources to capture the post-war actualities and cook up something raw, intense and thought-provoking to an audience ripe for something more authentic and relatable.

PAISAN (there are some glitches in sound mixing in the Criterion version) is an anthology film, containing six unrelated stories as regards the Liberation of Italy by the Allied forces in the later stage of WWII. Starting from Sicily, the film's each episode sequentially heads north through Naples, Rome, Florence, Appenine Mountains, to the Po delta. Altogether they constitute a collection of exempla about interpersonal connections between the Italian resistance movement and the Allied forces.

It is the basic sense of justice that compels a young Sicilian girl to heedlessly avenge an American soldier whom she barely knows and who is picked off by a German sniper. A universal compassion is elicited from an African-American military officer to a pilfering street urchin when the former is led to observe the enormity of demolition the city of Naples has suffered. A budding romance between an Italian girl and an American soldier takes a poignant turn after six month in the liberated Rome, they fail to recognize each other after being corrupted by debauchery and intemperance. Maria Michi is wondrous in evoking a sense of unforthcoming fulfillment and tremendous loss.

In Florence, a volunteer nurse risks her life crossing the enemy line to look for an Italian partisan fighter she once knows, only her dismay seems to be foreshadowed. Agape can be found in a remote Roman Catholic monastery in the Appenine Mountains when 3 American military chaplains are generously treated by the monks in spite of their denominational differences (among the chaplains, one is protestant and another is Jew). On the Po river, OSS members and local partisans fight cheek by jowl against Germans, heroically laying down their lives merely months before the victory.

GERMANY YEAR ZERO (its monochromatic textures also vary in the Criterion version) departs from the war-ridden Italy and spirits audience away to the Allied-occupied, bombed out Berlin right after WWII. It focus on the subsistence of the Köhler family. A bed-ridden father (Pittschau, an erstwhile silent film star in his last screen role, making a good fist of a self-pitying patriarch stripped off all his prowess, all he is left to do is nagging himself to death, no pun intended) and his three children: Karl-Heinz (Krüger), the adult son, refuses to register because of his die-hard Nazi background and hides in their pokey apartment with no ration card; Eva (a stouthearted Hinze), the adult daughter and the main provider of the family, who goes out with soldiers every night to bogart cigarettes to sell; and the 12-year-old Edmund (Moeschke), who is too young to secure a decent job and wanders on the streets to collect whatever he can find, often being hornswoggled by adults and browbeaten by the querulous owner of the apartment building.

A chance encounter with a former teacher Mr. Henning (Gühne) implicates Edmund with more petty crimes and alerts audience that Nazism is far from being obliterated. Mr. Henning's handsy fondling of Edmund is a disconcerting red flag that the tenacious canker of Weltanschauung is still insistent on corrupting malleable, suggestible individuals after the fall of Nazi Germany. Edmund becomes a latest victim, taking ideas on Mr. Henning’s say-so, he naively believes that he should fulfill his bemoaning father’s constant but (to an adult’s ear) boastful death wish, and eventually acts on it. After being grossly rejected by a hypocritical Mr. Henning for his parricide, Edmund buckles down under the immaterial force of dejection and forlornness. The film ends with a harrowing upshot that is rarely seen on the celluloid at that time. While it can be quibbled as over dramatic, but Rossellini’s prescient discernment overrides such criticism.

Both films incorporates authentic war footage and real-location shooting into their stories to illustrate the scale of damage and adversity occasioned by warfares. But, Rossellini isn’t interested in making a hardship porn. In PAISAN, against the format’s scanty length (each episode is roughly about 20 minute), which confers every story a run-and-gun mobility, the overall impression is a mutual understanding and camaraderie that weaves through each episode, compelling audience to spectate the selfless acts that shine ablaze and transcend untold adversity. GERMANY YEAR ZERO is a heart-rending cautionary tale, and a precocious Moeschke, in his sole sortie into acting, has Edmund’s transition from attentive innocence to be subjugated by the pall of taedium vitae indwelled on the screen for keeps.

referential entries: Rossellini's ROME, OPEN CITY (1945, 8.6/10); Gillo Pontecorvo's THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (1966, 8.5/10); Andrei Tarkovsky's IVAN'S CHILDHOOD (1962, 8.2/10); Andrzej Wajda's KANAL (1957, 8.1/10).