Arnheim also talked about how camera angle and placement can be used to elicit effect and said that filmmakers make decisions about which angles to show us and that we as viewers create meaning from the angles we’re shown: “If I wish to photograph a cube, it is not enough for me to bring the object within range of my camera. It’s fair to say modern cinema wouldn’t exist as we know it without him. How we interpret this tragedy is a direct consequence of how we watch it, and how we watch it depends largely on how much we regard it as the personal expression of a particular auteur—and how much, neorealistically, as a reflection of the time and place where much of it was shot: Berlin, August and September 1947. Through the 1950s, Rossellini experimented with different forms, offering an ascetic religious film (The Flowers of St. Francis), a documentary about India (India), and a wartime melodrama that was one of his biggest hits (Il Generale Della Rovere). . And arguably, the same ambiguous mixture can be intuited in François Truffaut’s 1963 statement that “aside from Vigo, Rossellini is the only filmmaker who has filmed adolescence without sentimentality, and The 400 Blows owes a great deal to his Germany Year Zero.” Moreover, this is the first Rossellini film that Truffaut ever saw, turning him immediately into a convert. Germany Year Zero (Deutschland im Jahre Null) is a daring, gut-wrenching look at the consequences of fascism, for society and the individual. …

Germany Year Zero is an interesting intersection of Arnheim and Soltysik Monnet’s theories. And this is one of several scenes throughout that “disenchant war, strip it of all magic and illusion, and deny combat death its ritual and cultural power.” Rossellini shows us war’s devastating effects -- not on the Reich, but on typical German families. As always, he yearned to show life’s minutiae unadorned, bare and pure. Directed by Roberto Rossellini • 1948 • France, Italy, West Germany Starring Edmund Meschke, Ernst Pittschau, Ingetraud Hinze 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. Even the doom-ridden modernist score by his brother Renzo participates in the sense of unfolding disbelief and horror by suggesting some of the mood of science fiction. Deliberately or not, Germany Year Zero concludes Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy by posing a kind of philosophical conundrum, a fact already signaled by its title, which he borrowed, with permission, from a book by French sociologist Edgar Morin. A founder of Italian neorealism, Roberto Rossellini brought to filmmaking a documentary-like authenticity and a philosophical stringency. Made at a time when the Mexican film industry was searching for its own identity, this boldly stylized melodrama anticipated an experimental cinema that was never given adequate room to develop. Rossellini’s film spends very little of its 73-minute runtime addressing historical fact and instead uses a focused perspective and symbolism to explore the dangers of fascist ideologies on one German family. 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. Mr. Henning, in listening to Edmund’s troubles, spreads Nazi tenets about the “survival of the fittest” and “letting the weak be destroyed.” He even sends Edmund off with vinyl recordings of Hitler’s speeches to sell on the black market to earn a bit for himself. Jonathan Rosenbaum, former film critic for the Chicago Reader (1987–2008), now maintains a website at jonathanrosenbaum.net archiving most of his work. It is rather a question of my position relative to the object, or of where I placed it.” Looking at this concept beyond a cinematographic perspective and considering the emotional and symbolic implications, I think Germany Year Zero uses its unique perspective to “discredit and demystify war,” qualifying itself as a strong antiwar film, by Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet’s standards. The Criterion Collection upgrades their DVD box set of Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy to Blu-ray. But paradoxically, Rossellini himself was not much of an auteurist. Rossellini’s film has none of the usual trappings of a film about war: no combat scenes, no valorizing of soldiers. The fact that a portion of Germany Year Zero was shot in Rome between November 1947 and January 1948—even though the story throughout has the same postwar Berlin setting—may complicate our grasp of what neorealism consisted of, but this is only part of the conundrum.

Playing a motherless boy named Edmund Koehler, who struggles to help support his desperate family (including an ailing father and older sister and brother), Meschke is the film’s affective center and focus, clearly making it the most personal film in Rossellini’s War Trilogy. Instead, through a focused perspective and acting that expresses the lasting complexities of war, we see a child and his father as victims, “a bleak or unexpectedly tragic ending, and the depiction of death as unredeemed and meaningless.” When the final scene comes, with Edmund walking through rubble -- a building levelled by war -- we know there will be no chance to rid ourselves of the sense of desperation the film leaves behind. He said that he made the film for its final stretch: “Everything that goes before held no interest for me.” The whole film “was conceived specifically for the scene with the child wandering on his own through the ruins .

During a pivotal time for Black cinema, John Berry’s beautifully lived-in drama offered a portrait of an African American family that stood in opposition to a long history of harmful stereotypes.

We watch the young boy’s desperation deepen until it reaches a climax that has a devastating ripple throughout the family unit. The fact that a portion of Germany Year Zero was shot in Rome between November 1947 and January 1948—even though the story throughout has the same postwar Berlin setting—may complicate our grasp of what neorealism consisted of, but this is only part of the conundrum. In her essay, “Is There Such a Thing as an Antiwar Film?” cultural critic Soltysik Monnet examines how filmmakers have attempted to make antiwar films and the strategies they’ve used to do so, and yet how very few succeed: “many films that present war as painful, horrific and costly also represent it as important and necessary.”. Standing in a crumbled city, Edmund himself has been reduced to rubble; his indoctrination has an indelible effect. It’s easy to see how a leveling title that references a leveled country would form a major template for Jean-Luc Godard—cropping up most clearly in his hour-long 1991 film commemorating the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Germany Year 90 Nine Zero, but already fully evident in his earlier, Maoist-inspired notion, expressed most famously in La Chinoise (1967), to rebuild society “from zero” (that is to say, from the ground up). But this was, of course, a conviction that carried plenty of aesthetic and intellectual, as well as spiritual, consequences, including some that we’re still mulling over today.

A gesture of despair that emotionally fuses personal grief with an intense empathy 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. This scene in particular registers a symbolic message: we hear Hitler’s speeches echoing throughout a Berlin that’s been destroyed by his ideologies, reduced to rubble and on the edge of starvation. Unlike the more aesthetically and intellectually conceived French New Wave, Italian neorealism was above all an ethical initiative—a way of saying that people were important, occasioned by a war that made many of them voiceless, faceless, and namel…, With his mix of documentary-like immediacy and profound moral inquiry, Roberto Rossellini became a pioneer of Italian neorealism, a movement that transformed the way filmmakers captured the fabric of everyday life and and grappled with the most urgen…, Italy, Germany, New high-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray, Introduction by director Roberto Rossellini from 1963, Italian-release opening credits and voice-over prologue, Interview from 2009 with Rossellini scholar Adriano Aprà, Interview from 2009 with Italian directors Paolo and Vittorio Taviani (. “This movie, filmed in Berlin in the summer of 1947,” he declared in that statement, is “an objective and faithful portrait,” not “an accusation or even a defense of the German people.” Yet objectivity was clearly (and thankfully) the last thing Rossellini had in mind. In making Germany Year Zero, Roberto Rossellini said he was offering his viewers “an objective and faithful portrait” of Germany in 1947, not an accusation or “even a defense of the German people.” And though the film was shot mostly on location in 1947 and tells the life story of everyday people (typical of neorealist films), what we see is actually much more than a mechanical reproduction of reality.

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