(Roberto Rossellini, Italy, France, Federal Republic of Germany 1948, 91 min., 35mm nitrate
print)
Director: Roberto Rossellini
Writers: Roberto Rossellini, Carlo Lizzani, Max Colpet
Producers: Roberto Rossellini, Alfredo Guarini
Cinematographer: Robert Juillard
Sets: Piero Filippone
Composer: Renzo Rossellini
Cast: Edmund Meschke, Ernst Pittschau, Ingetraud Hinze, Franz Krüger, Erich Gühne
Production company: Union Générale Cinématographique, Tever Film
Sound, b/w, 78 min.
German language, Finnish and Swedish subtitles, electronic
English subtitles
Print source: Kansallinen audiovisuaalinen instituutti (KAVI), Helsinki, Finland
Few major filmmakers have endured reputational swings as wide as Roberto Rossellini. Admired
by his contemporaries for his early films and reproached for much of the rest, Rossellini declined
to meet expectations better fulfilled by the likes of Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica,
though he alone might have remained truest to the promise of the “new Italian realism.”
Rossellini’s rise seemed sudden. After three short but accomplished wartime features about the
Fascist armed forces, he achieved international renown with the stunning Rome Open City
(1945), the first in his War Trilogy, followed by the ambitious Neorealist landmark, Paisan
(1946). But Rossellini’s star would fall nearly as fast. Accused of betraying Neorealism—a
betrayal embodied in his personal and professional spurning of the very Italian Anna Magnani
for the glamorous Hollywood star Ingrid Bergman—Rossellini soon had few fans apart from a
small coterie of French film cultists: Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Jacques
Rivette, and André Bazin. This critical about-face appears to have begun with Germany Year
Zero, the grim finale to the War Trilogy and a bitter pill for either victor or vanquished to
swallow. “I don’t think it’s possible to say more bad things about a film than were said about
Germania anno zero,” Rossellini later remarked.
With exteriors shot mostly in Berlin, the film follows a family of “good Germans” as they
struggle to survive in a city reduced to rubble. The patriarch is a bedridden widower, too weak to
support his children. His daughter cadges tradable cigarettes from Allied officers at nightclubs,
while his eldest son, a former Nazi soldier, is too fearful of exposure and arrest to find a job. The
youngest, a resourceful twelve-year-old, isn’t old enough for a work permit and is left vulnerable
to crime and moral corruption.
At this point in the trilogy, these characters may feel familiar, but here they are the “enemy”
whose soldiers tortured Rome in Open City and slaughtered partisans in Paisan. To recognize our
common humanity, however, is the challenge posed by the War Trilogy, and Germany Year Zero
is a fitting conclusion to one of Italy’s greatest cinematic achievements.
This original Finnish release print features both Finnish and Swedish printed-in subtitles.
Shrinkage ranges from 0.65% to 1.2%.
Ken Fox