An Obligation to Look: Cinema in the Aftermath of War

Writing for MUBI's Notebook, Zoe Mohaupt sets Roberto Rossellini's Paisan (1946) beside Kenji Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff (1954) to show how postwar cinema turned national ruin into a moral experience for the viewer. Both films use long takes and refuse to over-explain, obliging the audience to stay with suffering longer than is comfortable. Mohaupt ties this to Andre Bazin's aesthetic of reality: it is no longer the editing that selects what we see, Bazin wrote, but the mind of the spectator. Paisan was shot in the actual ruins of Italy after the fall of Fascism, in the mood the filmmaker Alberto Lattuada described in 1945: we are in rags, so let us show everyone our rags; we are defeated, so let us look at our disasters. Rossellini used real locations, nonprofessional actors and an episodic structure, moving from Sicily to Naples, Rome, Florence and the Po delta, recording ruin, misunderstanding, poverty and death through the eyes of soldiers, children, monks and partisans. Mohaupt dwells on the film's ellipses. In the final episode, the execution of a peasant family who had fed partisans is never shown; we get three disconnected shards, a shared meal at dusk, distant gunfire, and at twilight the tableau of bodies beside a crying infant. Bazin praised Rossellini's audacity in leaving great holes for the audience to leap across, as one crosses a river from stone to stone. At the end of the film the camera stays on the surface of the water where the partisans' bodies disappear, and the river closes over the evidence almost at once. Sansho the Bailiff was made under different pressure. After the surrender, Japanese cinema worked under Occupation censorship, and, as the scholar Kyoko Hirano documents, no visual or verbal description of the devastation caused by Allied attacks was permitted. To work around this, Mizoguchi chose an eleventh-century folktale and told a story of violence, slavery, separation and historical guilt at a safe distance in time. The film follows a family broken apart after the father's exile. That father, a governor banished for shielding his peasants, leaves his son Zushio with a creed: a man without mercy is like a beast, and even if you are hard on yourself, be merciful to others. It is the moral spine of the whole film. The mother, Tamaki, is shipped to the island of Sado, and the two children, Zushio and Anju, are sold into bondage on Sansho's estate. Mizoguchi renders the separation in nervous, quickening cuts, saving the long unbroken gaze for the suffering still to come. When a slave is branded, the lens tilts just high enough to hide the burn, leaving only screams and a plume of smoke; it is by imagining it, Mohaupt writes, that we stop watching and start participating. Anju's death is staged with no struggle and no drama, the camera finally settling into stillness on the slowly diminishing ripples. To see, here, is to be answerable. The two methods differ. Rossellini's is subtraction: he removes the narrative links so the viewer must complete the atrocity. Mizoguchi's is accumulation: he stretches time until the viewer inhabits the experience bodily. One asks for imaginative labour, the other for empathetic endurance. Sound matters equally. Paisan was shot almost silent and post-synced, and its scuffed, multilingual track, Italian, English, Sicilian, German and Latin, usually unsubtitled, hands the characters' failure to understand each other straight to the audience. Mizoguchi answers with silence, and with Tamaki's distant lullaby measuring the cost of separation. That realism was partly forced. Germany's Babelsberg studio survived intact, while Cinecitta had become a refugee camp and Japan's Daiei studio faced shortages; Rossellini and Mizoguchi had no choice but to shoot in open rubble and marsh. In both films, women carry the moral weight. Carmela and Francesca in Paisan, Tamaki and Anju in Sansho, neither command armies nor make policy, yet their bodies and voices become testimony to national violence. Tamaki's lullaby drifts across Japan like a long-range distress call, a voice powerless to act that refuses to die. Mohaupt closes by connecting the two films to the images of today's wars. Eighty years on, she writes, rubble fills the screen again, and images reach us through livestreams, drones and phones at unprecedented speed, with no insulating scrim of legend or montage. But visibility alone never guarantees witnessing; what matters is how we look and how long we are willing to stay with suffering. Whether it arrives as a long take, a narrative ellipsis or a seven-second clip, the viewer faces the same choice the first audiences faced: turn away, or look long enough to reckon. Having seen, we are answerable.

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