Italian Cinema Javier Suarez Found in translation: on Rossellinis Pais Pais is a choral film.

The voices of diversity appear; they are visibilized. Pais is the story (and history) of Italy during the last phase of the Second World War, when the British and the American armies arrived to Sicily and advanced towards the north until the end of the war. It is a film about fraternity between partisans and American soldiers. It is a film that can be seen as a historical document and testimony. It is a film about encounters. All of this has been said. However, what I want to show in these brief lines is that Pais is above all a film about translation1. The film seems to try to answer the question: how can I translate to the world an experience that has just passed/that is now passing? How can I make myself understood in a world that is decomposing as well as recomposing? How can diametrically opposed experiences encounter themselves in a common horizon2?

First translation: the intimate and spontaneous chat of two strangers The first section of the film shows the Americans arriving to Italy and trying to find the enemy: the Fascists or the Germans. We see an American soldier with Italian roots that can translate the voices of the Italian people in the Church. The American-Italian guy is the guide of the American soldiers. And thanks to this interaction, they can find the second guide, Carmela, who will guide (translate) them to a fortress where the American can be safe. She offers herself to be the guide because she wants to find her father and her brother and thinks that the Americans could help her. When Joe from Jersey and Carmela are let alone they start to chat just not to get bored. Carmela and Joes try to understand each other from anno zero. He tells her the Italians words that he knows and uses his body to depict the milk; she understands and says latte. Moreover, the importance of this scene lies in the fact that in this casual talk the landscape has a relevant role. In contrast with the Fascist Cinema and the pre-Neorealist films, the space in this film is one of the main characters. We hear the landscape. They start to talk about the sea and the sky, and, for the first time, a soldier wonders about his life and
1

Translation is always an encounter with something that is not familiar to us (and, even if it is familiar to us, is an encounter with difference, with something different from/for us). See John Sallis On translation. 2 This has always been the goal of all translation: the threshold where we can hear the difference.

remembers his history, his place of origin and talk about his dreams. This scene is really important because of its lack of importance, of its triviality within the context of the war. In fact, his soldiers-friends have gone away to do the important things; he is only there, quite reluctantly, to avoid the runaway of Carmela. In this scene, one space (Certeau) of translation is opened. In the Fascist cinema and its fixed cinematographic genre, there were no space to hear the interiority, the subjectivity, of the characters because they had to fit within the system of Fascist values and aesthetics. However, in this scene, we only hear the deep and spontaneous thoughts of a soldier. He tries, once again, too make himself understood. He has a moment of freedom, apart from the other soldiers. It is interesting to notice the erotic atmosphere of these two strangers; they are alone, during the night and they start to understand each other in an eccentric way when a German shoots Joe. From the beginning of the film, the necessity of understanding is present. Both Joe and Carmela show the intention of the film: depicting to the world an Italian people striving to fight against a painful past that is still present and still fighting in their soil: the Fascist forces. However, the end of this translation is not successful. Although Carmela remains loyal to Joes cause and dies as consequence of her defense of him, when the American soldiers come back, they believe that she has betrayed him. So any attempt to find an ideal translation between both of them is dead and is confined to the intimate and spontaneous chat of two strangers.

Second translation: publicity and love story In the third episode, we are not in a far and small town as in the first. We are in a public and well-known city, the center of Fascist Italy which has been penetrated by American and British soldiers. They are heroes. And we see and hear the voices of the people and, among them, women who are really impressed with all what an American soldier might represent historically, politically, economically and aesthetically. (It is a historical fact that the American influence after the liberation was really intense in the postwar Italy. It reminds me of Tu vuo fa lamericano, 1956 song of Renato Carosone.) In the first scene, we see the victorious American army entering into Rome.

However, here the film does a temporal leap to six months after the first encounter of Francesco and Fred. We can see the first signs of the Americanization of Rome: we are in the Moka Abdul, a place where American soldiers and Italian girls meet for something more than just talk, and we hear the rhythm of In the mood, famous American jazz song, Glen Millers 1940 hit. When Francesca runs into Fred, after leaving Moka Abdul, she takes him to her place and tries to kiss him; there we discover that she is a prostitute. (The unemployment and poverty have force many girls to find any kind of job to survive.) Then, Fred, drunk, tells her that Rome is full of girl like you. Fred, felling tired of his 6 months life in Rome, remembers when he knew Francesca. In the flashback, we see the encounter of Fred, and American soldier, and Francesca, probably a petit bourgeois Roman girl. What I want to emphasize here is the publicity of the translation. They are in Rome. It has been said that this scene is the most weak of all the film because it reminds a melodramatic love story of the previous cinema. However, if we follow the idea of translation as metaphor of the film, we see in this episode a second attempt to understand each other, not as casual and spontaneous as the first one, but one encounter long-waited- for as Francesca said to Fred. Fred needs water to wash his hands and face. However, Francesca misunderstands the message and thinks he wants to drink water (she apologizes because the water is not so fresh). When he enters to the bathroom to wash himself, she starts to read out loud English expressions from a grammar book (it can be also a dictionary). So she tries to make herself understood. Surprised, Fred also knows some Italian and they read together happily in both languages in front of the grammar book. They seem happy. It seems a traditional love story. However, when we are in the climax of romanticism, his friend soldiers call him and tell him they must leave immediately. They say good bye to each other showing us an uncertain feature. I want to emphasize the distance of this episode with the first one. In the latter, they do not know the language of each other but they try to translate themselves as much as they can, death is their end; in the third episode, the translators count with more tools to understand each other and their future is uncertain. Then, we discover that she is Francesca. She has not recognized her, so she lets her address to the house housekeeper and tells her to give the note-address to Fred. In the next

scene we see, Fred leaving with the soldiers (following his duty) and Francesca waiting for him under the rain. He will not come back. He has to be a soldier. Once again, we have here an unsuccessful translation. They want to be together, but something prevents this to happen. The story of Fred and Francesca is depicted as the longago-waited-for understanding of Italy with America (with the Allied cause); however, love and birth (and happinees) cannot be obtained unless the war is finished. The successful translation has, in Pais, a specific space, that is, war of liberation. Personal love cannot be securely obtained if the war is not completely won by the Allied. In the fifth episode, we see also the Christian chaplain and the friars understanding each other, but disagreeing because of religious matters. Once again, here we have the sharing of a same language; however, comprehension and union is not possible because the monastery is outside history. The film claims for a radical inside history. At the end of the fifth scene, the Christian chaplain invokes peace as the ultimate refuge for humanity. In fact, peace is the goal of the war; however, it has to be obtained within history, in the world and not in isolation. Consequently, the space of successful translation towards peace, despite the unfavorable circumstances, is the last episode.

Third translation: partisans and soldiers speak a same language in different languages In the last episode, Dale and Cigolani communicate very well, they worked together and they act in a common landscape (boats scenes). Moreover, they understand each others English and accented Italian perfectly and they are bound by a fraternity of common action (Haaland 114) with soldiers, partisans and common people. This episode shows that translation is successful when it has to do with winning the war and gaining peace; in this sense, Pais depicts a space where personal love and happiness has to be put in a second place after the war necessities. Casual encounters (first episode) and love stories (third episodes) have to wait. However, these unsuccessful translations are indeed as important as the successful translation of the final scene; because they depict the contradictions of the 1944-1945 Italy and they show also the voices of these characters in spontaneous and painful ways. Historical circumstances are so intense that they flood every personal situation. The film depicts the unavoidable of historicity; within this circumstances, it is not possible a

cinema of evasion. Fascist melodrama, through the attempts of realism in films like Quattri passi, has disappeared from the scene: what we have now is cinema as a historical document but also as an artistic and choral testimony of Italy who, like Paiss characters, is trying to understand, translate itself within the background of the end of the war. Despite the fact that the partisans and American soldiers are captured by the Germans, the successful translation that Dale and Cigolani have reached is a prefiguration of the fraternity that will finally win the war. The future horizon of the last scene and the voices gives the fiducia that the war will be finished in few months. In Rossellinis Pais, we see and hear Italys own path of re-finding (re-founding) itself through a self-collective and complex process of translation.