Germany Year Zero

Roberto Rossellini, Italy/West Germany, 1947, 74 minutes

With this film, the final part of his neo-realist war trilogy, director Rossellini shifted the focus of his attentions from Italy (subject of Rome, Open City (1945) and Paisa (1946) to Germany. In the ruins of Berlin a boy, Edmund, tnes to come to terms with the Nazi's defeat; a situation his Hitler youth upbringing did not prepare him for. Edmund's father is seriously ill, a drain on scarce resources; while his sister is prostituting herself to obtain food, and a deserting German soldier is hiding out in their house.

Edmund wanders through the ruins a lot (allowing for characteristically neo-realist location shot scenes), applies Nazi social Darwinist doctrine and kills his father, cannot cope with his individual crime or the general societal disintegration. and so kills himself.

A grim movie perhaps, with its abandonment of the usual neo-realist view of children (compare Edmund to Bruno in De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948); or to the children of Rossellini's own Rome, Open City, but a great one: Rossellini provides a fitting end to both the trilogy and his 'pure' neo-realist period.

Review by Keith Brown
Taken from EUFS Programme 1995-96