"An Aesthetic of Reality: Neorealism": Paisa - Shows the Reality of Italian Cinema

This image gives me a real feeling of the time and location of the movie, Paisa, discussed in the reading, "An Aesthitic of reality: Neorealism."

Rossellini tells us, in succession, six stories of the Italian Liberation. One part of the six stories includes the realism of the second world war in Europe.

Rossellini is not over-dramatizing. 35% of the housing in Western Europe was destroyed in the Second World War. While this may seem unimaginable to us, it is the reality that the Italians and other Europeans lived. And again, we have a chance for a surprisingly intimate encounter between an American GI, a black American GI - played by a non-actor , by the way, an American that Rossellini found in Italy at the time of the filming - and a young boy.

The black American GI is an MP, and the kid's a young hustler. The American GI is, in some ways, a shabby stereotype. In our more politically sensitive age, and from our side of the Atlantic, we don't like image of a drunken American soldier, particularly a drunken black American soldier. Here Rossellini is accurately reflecting the stereotypes many held, but he's also trying to counteract them.