☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Germany Year Zero (1948) – R. Rossellini
Roberto Rossellini
shot this film in 1947 in the ruins of Berlin (but with interior shots in an
Italian studio) which gives it a lot of its power. We follow a 13-year-old boy,
Edmund, who has to cope with the aftermath of war – conditions that are
detailed rather didactically through the dialogue spoken by the boy and his
father and siblings and members of other families (all living in the same apartment
due to housing shortages). So, despite adhering to the genre known as Italian Neo-Realism,
it is very apparent how scripted the film is. Rossellini shows the despair of
the German people – whether they followed Hitler or not – and, if not exactly excusing
anyone’s actions, he still documents the tragedy of the situation in a way that
evokes pathos. This is especially the case for Edmund, young enough not to
deserve any blame and scrappy enough to adapt to his conditions: learning about
the Black Market and ways to get food, illegally or not (and there is a strong
implication that women, girls, and even boys are/were exploited sexually as a
result of their plight). Unfortunately, Edmund may not be mature enough to
fully grasp the way adults respond to such terrible events, taking his father’s
cry that he wishes he were dead all too literally. As a result, the film turns
to horror, as it should, and I suspect the audience of the time felt helpless
to undo the trauma of the war even as the current audience must surely leave
feeling more strongly anti-war.
