Beauty v Truth: Rossellini's Paisan

Roberto Rossellini's 1946 "Paisan" is a curiosity today but highly influential on world cinema and still worth seeing and enjoying, at least once: made up of 6 episodes, each of about 20 minutes, it follows the invasion of American forces as they move north through Italy, from Sicily to the Po Valley, encountering some German resistance and linking occasionally with the Italian partisans. Some of the episodes are kind of melodramatic, but each presents a little story and each is a remarkably different setting: soldier picks of prostitute (and doesn't recognize her as someone he knew in the past), three chaplains stay in a monastery and are overwhelmed by the devotion, a partisan soldier and an American woman try to cross the Arno into partisan territory, a black soldier befriends a street urchin, and so on. Some of the scenes are strikingly beautiful, especially those shot along the Po river and the deserted streets of Florence, which looks like a DeChirico painting. Some are beautifully composed: the dinner in the monastery, with the monks fasting, which looks like a Renaissance tableau. Some of the production is ludicrously amateur by today's standards - Rossellini must have been working on a shoe string - with terrible shot-to-shot continuity. The terrible acting, especially among the American soldiers - who were these guys? GI's who stayed on in Italy after the war? - is a huge detraction. All of us should admire the resistance fighters, and who know whether any of us would have had the courage to take on the fascists or the occupiers, but this and other postwar films make it seem as if virtually the entire nation was partisan - someone must have supported Mussolini (and Hitler) or at least remained silent and unaware - the glorification of the Partisans may have done much to boost postwar morale but I suspect it's a bit of a fiction.