Rossellini’s follow-up to his neorealist masterpiece Rome Open City works much of the same terrain while also extending and elaborating his aesthetic preoccupations on a much grander narrative scale. While the previous film was firmly rooted in a specific location, Paisan is a moving geographic fresco, taking us slowly northward through the Italian peninsula as six different wartime vignettes unfold—some comical, some tragic, but all deeply humane. Despite a higher budget and U.S. funding, Rossellini effectively maintains the rough-hewn, in-the-streets feel of neorealism, and in its best moments Paisan feels like something captured, rather than something produced. (DVD)