The art of cinema reached emotional and technical maturity at the same time as the cataclysmic events of World War II were unfolding. War shaped the content of much of cinema's finest period whether as direct historical reconstruction, distortion for propaganda purposes or simply by feeding the necessity for romantic escapism. By the end of the war Italian neo-realism was entering its great period. A nation that had suffered much looked unflinchingly at its society. It is not therefore surprising that an Italian, Roberto Rossellini, was able to empathise so acutely with the plight of the German people in their zero year following the collapse of the Third Reich. Amid the rubble of Berlin, 12 year old Edmund does what little he can to earn trifling amounts to help feed his family including a chronically sick father. They are not popular with their neighbours, as an ill man is an encumbrance and there is still a residue of the Nazi dogma of the survival of the fittest abroad. Something of this eventually gets twisted in Edmund's immature mind causing him to embark on the terrible path of patricide. Innocence is thus destroyed in a particularly horrifying way. "Germany Year Zero" is as bleakly pessimistic and despairing as any film to come out in the immediate aftermath of the war. Other films, equally grim, such as Wadja's "Kanal", Sanders-Brahms's "Germany, Pale Mother" and Klimov's "Come and See" are recollections after gaps in time. The strength of Rossellini's work is its documentary immediacy. The bombs have all but fallen and trams have started to run again. The graves being dug at the beginning look as if they are for real and the horse that has collapsed in the street that has excited a group of gathering carnivores could have died moments before the camera arrives. "Germany Year Zero" is neither comforting nor uplifting, but it looks so real, it had to be.
Review of Germany Year Zero
