Art house: Germany Year Zero
Paul Fonoroff
The definition of “Italian Neo-Realism” is radically altered by Roberto Rossellini, one of the movement’s leading auteurs, in his cinematic exploration of the post-second world war moral vacuum engulfing the erstwhile Third Reich.
Germany Year Zero (1948) is devoid of Italian flavour, possessing a Teutonic cast, German dialogue, and exterior locations shot entirely among the ruins of Berlin just two years after the demise of the Nazi regime (although the interiors were filmed on studio sets in Rome).
At the same time, the film is unmistakably Rossellini in character. The themes are consistent with his progressive social outlook, and the shooting methods are in keeping with the director’s esteem for spontaneous dialogue and nonprofessional actors.
Although quite different from his Rome, Open City (1945) and Paisan (1946), the third in Rossellini’s so-called wartime trilogy is as antithetical to Hollywood gloss as its predecessors.
The Kohler family’s saga was too raw to have been confronted by a German filmmaker when Rossellini’s cameras took to the streets of the forlorn capital in 1947.
The native population was reaping what the Nazi regime had sowed, and the question of collective guilt versus individual responsibility could only be tackled by an outsider.
Not that Rossellini was an objective observer: he had lived through the enemy occupation of Italy, and grappled with Italy’s complicity in the war’s devastation.
The scenario takes on complex ethical and emotional issues in centring on one boy’s struggle to make sense of it all.
Edmund Kohler (Edmund Moeschke) is a 12-year-old naïf who does what he can to navigate the shoals of a turbulent and hungry existence.
The rubble-strewn thoroughfares , rife with black marketeers, shady personages and rowdy youths, are in some ways less stifling than “home” – a tiny room shared with his sick father (Ernst Pittschau), elder sister (Ingetraud Hinze) who works the dancehalls to supplement the Kohlers’ meagre food supply, and ex-soldier brother (Franz-Otto Krüger), whose dubious legal status precludes him from seeking employment or a ration card.
Rossellini is unrelenting in his hardedged vision of life among these survivors.
He includes elements that rarely made it to the mid-20th century mainstream screens such as sex as a bartered commodity, and the implied paedophiliac attentions of Edmund’s former teacher (Erich Gühne). It is a testament to the director’s skill, his underlying sympathy for the civilian populace’s plight, and the brief 74-minute running time, that the overall effect is compelling rather than depressing.
I cannot think of another feature in which filmmakers from an invaded land journeyed to the capital of their recent enemy to relate a tale from the perspective of the would-be conquerors.
For instance, Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair was shot in Berlin and came out in the same year as this film. But it was a thoroughly American affair, told from the vantage point of the victorious heroes. Germany Year Zero is thus a singular work – not only in terms of Rossellini’s oeuvre, but also within the context of world cinema.
September 28, 5.30pm, Hong Kong Film Archive, October 6, 8pm, Hong Kong Science Museum. Part of the Repertory Cinema 2013 – Italian Neorealism Cinema programme
