There's a shot in this film that I can't get out of my mind. It's when the little German boy hops onto a crowded midday trolley. Even after the boy has gone out-of-shot aboard the train, instead of cutting to the next scene, the camera lingers for an inordinate amount of time, allowing us to glean the faces of each commuter passing the camera by with stoic solitude. They look hot, sweaty, cramped, annoyed, wistful, blank. Then, the camera slightly pans right to view the empty street as people walk by the ruins of their former office-buildings, apartments, marketplaces. All destroyed by the war. Yet they keep marching on. Not out of some optimism, but out of blind necessity. They don't know what else to do. This, I imagine, is the essence of Rosellini's Neorealist Trilogy. What rawness in just ten fleeting seconds.
First off: Bazin's initial musings on Rossellini (and the basis of 'neo-realism) are inaccurate and invalid, because his conclusions betrayed knowledge of the actual modes of production. Yet it may be accurate here - Open City & Paisan did use studio sets (though the latter to a lesser extent), used professional actors (Aldo Fabrizi was a famous actor!) - is this the first time the analysis of a director has led to their re-organizing their production constructs around it? Anyways - very difficult to write about: landscapes both documentary and psychological, moreover documentary landscapes which determine the psychological landscape of a person. Gallagher said the camera doesn't just follow Edmund, it haunts him. Many Germans here are more than willing to acquiesce to the new democracy, but are still Nazi's in private - Edmund's plight in ideological terms is that he is being told that democracy is truth, even though this environment tells him that fascism is truth. He cannot reconcile them, so he commits suicide. Rossellini's genius is to explicate this in emotional terms. Political dynamics are not a construct in which we, oh so innocent, exist inside of, but rather politics are part of us and everything we do are influenced by them. Our most casual decisions can be political ones. We can become individuals, but it's a mistake to believe you already are one. All Edmond wants to do is just be a child. He plays hopscotch by himself in rubble, he tells a girl that he wants to buy a car when he grows up, right before selling a bootleg vinyl of a Hitler speech to English soldiers.I was very sad watching this, if history repeats itself, this will be America. “I should have rebelled against it, but I was so weak like many of my generation. We saw disaster coming and did nothing to prevent it. Only now do we see the consequences. Now we’re paying for our mistakes. We have to acknowledge our guilt.”The most powerful opening credits in all cinema.
There’s really no way to prepare yourself for the levels of bleakness reached by Rossellini’s “Germany, Year Zero.”Think basement-level bleak... and then the basement is bombed out. That’s where this movie lives. Here’s a mindset to get into before viewing: Rossellini cast the non-actor child lead of “Germany, Year Zero” specifically to resemble his own recently deceased 11-year-old son. This is a character who undergoes some of the most emotionally devastating events experienced by any film protagonist ever — let alone an actual child. Rossellini filmed “Germany, Year Zero” amidst the shambles of Berlin following the allied liberation. The runtime of the movie passes without seeing a single structure untouched by bombing. Wrecked too are the souls of the movie’s core family; living ration card to ration card. But what Rossellini aims to impart is not only the damage war has committed on daily existence, but how it devastated the entire German soul. It’s similar ground to what Fassbinder would spend his career exploring decades later; though Fassbinder’s medium lay in the generational reverberations of the conflict, and its national forgetting. Rossellini works in its immediate aftershock. There is no chance for denial, no opportunity for emotional repair. There are only ruins.
