Roberto Rossellini / 罗伯托·罗西里尼 · 1946
Paisà
Paisà
Six episodes join encounters, mistranslations, and abrupt deaths while withholding transitions that would explain them. Characters enter after a fact has begun and leave before its consequences can be mastered; the inexhaustible before and after of the event presses directly on perception.
Film details
- Original title
- Paisà
- Director
- Roberto Rossellini / 罗伯托·罗西里尼
- Year
- 1946
- Region
- Italy
Film analysis: how shots organize concepts
Six encounters refuse to complete the event’s causal chain, leaving characters after the fact and before explanation.
- 01Encounter already underway
Each episode enters an already formed wartime situation: landing, occupation, flight, ruins, or resistance.
Characters never master the situation from its beginning; they respond from limited linguistic and bodily positions. - 02Communication leaves a gap
Mistranslation, darkness, noise, and unequal identities prevent good intentions from reliably reaching the other.
Wartime reality repeatedly severs the line between perception and action. - 03Ending resists closure
Death or dispersal abruptly ends an episode, and the next does not explain its consequences.
The event retains an inexhaustible before and after, making spectators bear an unfinished relation.
Close-reading questions
- 01In the Sicilian episode, as Joe and Carmela use gestures, matches, and terrain to build a fragile contact, how does the language barrier govern their relation before any shared military aim?
- 02The film cuts from one region directly to the next and omits the characters' later fates; how do the gaps between episodes make war appear as encounters that cannot close upon one another?
- 03At the end of the Po episode, as partisan bodies are thrown into the water one by one, how do river, long shot, and off-screen commands terminate rescue action while letting death continue to occupy the image?
Analysis and scene sources
Shots and scenes
Primary texts, scholarship, and locators
Theory coordinate: Cinema 2, Minnesota 1989, ch. 1, p. 2
- 01Cinema 2: The Time-Image
Authoritative source for the standard translation, translators, ISBN, and publication date.
Open the atlas source record →
Viewing gateways and editions
- Criterion Collectioncriterion.comOpen film page ↗
- Source type
- Distributor or streaming platform