#499: ROSSELLINI, Roberto: Germany Year Zero (1948)
ROBERTO ROSSELLINI'S WAR TRILOGY {Spine #500} OOP
Rosenbaum:
Roberto Rossellini
Letters from the Front: Carlo Lizzani on Germany Year Zero
Italian directors
ROSSELLINI, Roberto (Germany)
Germany Year Zero [1948]
Spine #499
DVD
DVD
The concluding chapter of Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy is the most devastating, a portrait of an obliterated Berlin, seen through the eyes of a twelve-year-old boy. Living in a bombed-out apartment building with his sick father and two older siblings, young Edmund is mostly left to wander unsupervised, getting ensnared in the black-market schemes of a group of teenagers and coming under the nefarious influence of a Nazi-sympathizing ex-teacher, Germany Year Zero is a daring, gut-wrenching look at the consequences of fascism, for society and the individual.
73 minutes
Black & White
Black & White
Monaural
in German
1:33:1 aspect ratio
Criterion Release 2009
Director/Writers
Story and screenplay by Roberto Rossellini (with the collaboration of Max Colpet and Carlo Lizzani).
Rossellini was 42 when he directed Germany Year Zero.
The Film
Other Rossellini films in the Collection:
#497: Rome Open City (1945)
#498: Paisan (1946)
#497: Rome Open City (1945)
#498: Paisan (1946)
#675: Journey To Italy (1954)
#463: Il Generale Della Rovere (1959)
#456: The Taking Of Power By Louis XIV (1966)
Eclipse Series 14: Blaise Pascal (1972)
#463: Il Generale Della Rovere (1959)
#456: The Taking Of Power By Louis XIV (1966)
Eclipse Series 14: Blaise Pascal (1972)
The Film
The third film in Rossellini’s War Trilogy, Germany Year Zero, is probably the most depressing, but is nevertheless a great piece of cinema verité …
Filmed in the immediate postwar rubble-strewn Berlin, the film has a power that transcends its time and place.
Edmund Meschke (Edmund) was a real non-professional find (plucked from a circus family) for Rossellini, whose own young son — Romano — had just passed away from a ruptured appendix (the film is dedicated to him). Edmund is just a kid, who has to grow up fast in the dog-eat-dog environment of the immediate postwar.
His father (Ernst Pittschau), sister Eva (Ingetraud Hinze) and brother Karl-Heinz (Franz-Otto Grüger [Franz-Martin in the booklet credits]) all live in a cramped room in a house owned by Herr Rademaker (Hans Sagen). Erich Gühne is Henning, the pederast teacher.
This is possibly the most “realistic” of the three films — all considered the progenitors of the “neorealism” movement … because of the naturalistic surroundings and the very natural acting.
Renzo Rossellini’s score is not nearly as melodramatic as Open City or Paisan. He employs a loud, thumping drum motif in three different sections as a prelude to dark and unhappy scenes …
Film Rating (0-60):
The Booklet
55
The ExtrasThe Booklet
#500: Forty-four page booklet featuring essays by James Quandt (on the trilogy), Irene Bignardi (Rome Open City: A Star is Born), Colin MacCabe (Paisan: More Real Than Real), and Jonathan Rosenbaum (Germany Year Zero: The Humanity of the Defeated).
Rosenbaum:
“An enormous amount of material was shot … enough to allow Rossellini plenty of choices in the editing … but selection clearly plays as important a role in defining an auteur as any sort of pure ‘creation,’ especially when some form of documentary truth is what’s ultimately at stake. A gesture of despair that emotionally fuses personal grief with an intense sympathy for the dispossessed, Germany Year Zero is finally something closer to a cry of pain than a carefully worked-out and conceptualized statement, and this is what grants it a lasting authenticity.”
Commentary
None.
Video introduction
Video introduction
By Rossellini from 1963.
Italian-release
Italian-release
Opening credits and voice-over prologue.
This Italian credit sequence is quite moving. First is an intertitle which translates to:
“When ideologies stray from morality and Christian piety, the very foundation of human life, they become criminal madness. Even a child’s good sense is tainted as he’s led from a horrendous crime to one no less grievous, innocently believing he will thereby be reduced from his guilt.”
Quite a spoiler, actually.
Rossellini continues in a narrator’s voice-over:
“This movie, filmed in Berlin in the summer of 1947, aspires only to be an objective and faithful portrait of this immense city laid to waste, in which 3.5 million people plod through a dreadful and desperate existence, almost without realizing it. They live as if tragedy were their natural state, not through faith or strength of spirit, but because they are tired. This is not an accusation or even a defense of the German people. It is a calm assessment of fact. Yet if anyone should feel, after watching Edmund Köhler’s story, that something must be done, that German children must be taught to love life once again, then the efforts of those who made this film will have been greatly rewarded.”
Roberto Rossellini
A 2001 documentary by Lizzani, assistant director on Germany Year Zero, tracing Rossellini’s career through archival footage and interviews with family members and collaborators, with tributes by filmmakers François Truffaut and Martin Scorsese.
An excellent hour-long doc, with clips of early Rossellini films you won’t find on Amazon!
- Fantasia Sotomarina (1940)
- La Nave Bianca (1941)
- Un pilota ritorna (1942)
- L’Uomo dalla croce (1943)
Letters from the Front: Carlo Lizzani on Germany Year Zero
A podium discussion with Lizzani from the 1987 Tutto Rossellini conference.
Hilarious. Lizzani reads from letters he wrote to a friend about what a complete asshole Rossellini was and how he treated people like dirt. The whole my-art-is-all-that-matters-and-fuck-everything-else mantra …
Video interview
Video interview
With Rossellini scholar Adriano Aprà.
As usual, he has lots to talk about:
“There are many moments in the film where you get the feeling that Edmund is like a ghost wandering through a land of ghosts. Rossellini’s realism is a strange one. It’s a metaphysical realism, you might say. And indeed the journey to the end of the world that is the story of Germany Year Zero is also a journey to a hypothetical paradise of dreams. The ruins that surround us are the evil we’ve brought upon ourselves. They’re the image of the evil within us. And only when we accept fully, all the way to the tragic ending of Germany Year Zero, this evil within us, can we hope to emerge on the other side and be reborn.”
Italian directors
Paolo and Vittorio Taviani (Padre padrone) discussing the profound influence Rossellini’s films have had on them.
The brothers ask Rossellini how he recovered from the “wound” of the critical failure of Germany Year Zero. Rossellini replies that he never recovered. Critical and commercial acclaim was never a factor in his ideals and hopes for his own cinema …
Extras Rating (0-40):
Roberto and Roswitha
An illustrated essay by film scholar Thomas Meder on Rossellini’s relationship with his mistress Roswitha Schmidt.
The letter to Roswitha telling her that he is now living with Magnani seems typically cruel. He must have been a son-of-a-bitch of a friend and/or lover …
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