Germany Year Zero

The final film of Roberto Rossellini's post-war trilogy continues his examination of World War II's effects on ordinary people living in the devastation of a bombed-out, battered Europe. While Rome Open City and Paisan focused on Rossellini's post-war Italy, with Germany Year Zero he heads to Berlin, divided by the victorious Allies and wracked by poverty. As with the previous two films, this one is an intense and raw drama that draws on the wreckage of the post-war streets and the rough conditions of life for those who survived the war. Rossellini shot on cheap film stock in the actual streets of Berlin, which gives his film a real documentary appeal. Everywhere, there are piles of rubble and damaged buildings, pavement cratered by bombs, and whole families living in cramped one-room quarters. They subsist on minimal rations, there's hardly any work to be found, and prices are high for even the most essential foodstuffs. A hearty black market thrives, but it's full of crooks eager to take advantage of people's desperation to sell off their most valued possessions in return for a few cans of food.

Rossellini uses these dismal, desperate conditions as a backdrop for the potent story of one boy and his family struggling to survive in the aftermath of the war. Edmund (Edmund Moeschke) is just 12 years old, but he bears a lot of the responsibility for his family. His father (Ernst Pittschau) is too sick to work or even to leave his bed most of the time, while his sister Eva (Ingetraud Hinze) does what she can by going out every night — much to Edmund's disgust and confusion — with Allied soldiers so she can acquire cigarettes and trinkets. Worst of all, Edmund's brother Karl-Heinz (Franz-Otto Krüger) does nothing, because he served in the army during the war and is in hiding, fearing that he will be identified as a war criminal. He hasn't registered for food coupons, can't work, and simply loafs around the house all day while Edmund and Eva scrape together what few supplies they can gather for the family.

There are ambiguous intimations that Karl-Heinz could have involved in some atrocities during the war — he says he's afraid he'll be arrested when the authorities find out what unit he was in, an ominous suggestion — but he's only one sign of the more sinister undercurrents still threading through post-war Germany. The de-Nazification efforts cleanse the most overt displays of Nazi sympathies, but more subtle remnants are as ubiquitous as the rubble. By chance, Edmund encounters his old teacher Mr. Henning (Erich Gühne), who had been an organizer for the Hitler Youth during the war, and who now seems to be involved in some very shady activities. While walking around town, Henning casually trades words with an old acquaintance, who seems wistful for the days when they were "men, National Socialists," instead of just disgraced former Nazis. Moreover, Henning, whose solicitous, seductive manner towards the oblivious Edmund is skin-crawlingly pedophilic, lives with a secretive group of people, watched over by a mysterious and domineering man who has the air of an officer. Henning has vinyl records of Hitler's speeches, which he has Edmund sell to American and British GIs eager for a souvenir, but the group he shares a big house with seem to be secretively plotting something much bigger than black market sales. The whole icky vibe is of a shadow society of former Nazis still hidden within the ruins of the city, some of them slipping seamlessly back into society and some of them carrying out their vile plots at the fringes.


Though Rossellini certainly acknowledges the legacy and horrors of Nazism in sequences like this, the film's focus is not on the war criminals and evil masterminds of the Reich, but on the ordinary German citizens who lived through the war, some of them serving in the army, some of them simply staying at home while the bombs dropped all around them. In one of the film's most pointed political moments, Edmund plays a record of one of Hitler's speeches, and the words reverberate through a bombed-out building, before Rossellini cuts away to show more wrecked buildings, rows of houses missing their roofs, rubble and destruction everywhere. Hitler's stirring words about victory and glory seem so empty, so foolish, when played back atop these images of what Hitler's plans did to his people and his cities.

That's what this film, like Rossellini's other post-war street-level dramas, is really about: the human toll of war, the cost paid by the ordinary people who are simply trying to live quietly and provide for their families. It's a heartbreaking film, as Edmund's increasing desperation drives him to the edges of crime and corruption, trying to do anything he can to help his struggling family. He's just a boy, he barely understands so much of what's going on, but he hears the snide remarks from neighbors about his lazy brother and his "whore" sister, and he hears his father moaning about wanting to die, to relieve the family of the burden of caring for a sickly old man. It's chilling to see what Edmund is driven to by these circumstances, to feel his confusion and horror at the pitiless situation he finds himself in. In a typically understated shot, Rossellini holds Edmund and his father in a composition as the boy stoically, expressionlessly watches his father drink a poisoned cup of tea.

Germany Year Zero is a harrowing and heartrending film that holds a deep, tender humanism within its depiction of harsh, cruel realities. The film is raw and roughshod, the acting often shrill or stiff, and the music's bombast and melodrama is ill-suited to the ragged images that Rossellini found on these real war-torn streets. But this roughness and jaggedness is just a part of the film's greatness, adding to the impression that the director has captured the essence of day-to-day life for so many poor people just barely holding on in the aftermath of Europe's defining war.

Paisan

Roberto Rosselini's Paisan was his second postwar film, made after his scrappy, low-budget Rome Open City, which was filmed in the immediate aftermath of World War II with any film stock he could scrape together. Paisan is similarly rough and minimalist, continuing the ragged neorealist style that Rosselini inaugurated with his postwar work. The film consists of six tales set during the Allied liberation of Italy from the German occupation, focusing largely on interactions between Italian citizens and American soldiers, with the German troops a constant peripheral presence and lingering threat. The film is an interesting fusion of neorealist naturalism, melodrama and sentimentality. The stories Rossellini is telling are melodramatic rather than naturalistic, built around ironic reversals and stock characters, and the emotions evoked are generally broad and universal rather than specific. The film is more about the general experience of the liberation than it is about any particular stories or characters from this period, so its characters are fairly generic and its dialogue is mostly functional and rote.

Rossellini was working with a mix of actors and non-professionals, drawing from the ranks of the American soldiers still stationed in Italy to portray the Americans in the film. But the effect isn't quite realistic so much as amateurish; almost all of the Americans turn in awkward, stiff performances and not all of the Italians are much better. The amateur performances add to the sense of a film captured on the fly, with whatever materials are at hand, whatever locations can be filmed and whatever people are around, most of them real people who'd really lived through some version of the events depicted here. The film follows the structure of the Americans' northward advance through Italy, with each episode set in one town along the route of the military campaign, from the very south in Sicily to the very north in the Po River region. As the film progresses, and as Rossellini depicts the military struggle proceeding north, the relations between the American military and the Italian people become closer, less prone to misunderstandings and miscommunication. In the first three episodes of the film, the language barrier and differences in attitudes prevent a true connection between the Italian people and the Americans liberating the country, but in the final three episodes those divisions are increasingly erased.

The climax of the first tale is a touching scene between the American soldier Joe (Robert Van Loon) and the Italian girl Carmela (Carmela Sazio), who had been guiding a group of American troops through a dangerous area where only she knew the way. At one point, the other soldiers go out scouting, leaving Joe behind with Carmela to hide in a hilltop fort until the rest of the troops return. Joe doesn't speak any Italian, and Carmela doesn't speak any English, and yet the two sit side by side, trying to communicate, speaking to one another without really understanding anything of what the other is saying. They occasionally get a word or two, or can communicate through gestures and pantomime. The scene is very moving in its quiet, simple way, as they attempt to overcome the language barrier between them and make a connection. Rossellini stages the scene in one long take, a steady shot of the two people sitting next to one another by a window, talking, struggling with their words, smiling and sharing stories about their lives that, for the most part, they know the other person doesn't understand. It's a wonderful scene, and the warm emotions of this moment set up the heartbreaking ironies that follow from it in subsequent scenes, when a group of German soldiers stumble across the fort. The episode ends, not with communication but with further misunderstandings; that brief moment of frustrated connection is extinguished by violence.

In the second story, a black American soldier (Dots Johnson), drunk and disoriented, is taken advantage of by kids and street thugs — disturbingly, a couple of hustling kids try to sell him to the highest bidder in a back alley — and eventually winds up being led around by the bratty Pasquale (Alfonsino Pasca). As in the first episode of the film, the focus of the story is the inability to communicate across the language barrier between Italian and English. Sitting atop a pile of rubble — Rossellini filmed in the real streets of wasted Italian cities — the soldier entertains the boy with a frenzied re-enactment of a naval battle, in which the boy understands no more than a few words but enjoys the spectacle anyway, laughing and smiling. What he misses, of course, are the notes of pathos in the man's story, his drunken musings on home and the poverty and squalor that await him back in America. But the soldier doesn't really get the kid either, not until the end of this story when he finally confronts the reality of how so many poor, displaced Italian people are living: gangs of kids without parents, families without homes, large makeshift communities assembled from whatever trash is at hand.


In the third story, the American soldier Fred (Gar Moore) is picked up by the Italian prostitute Francesca (Maria Michi), who takes him home and listens to his story about the early days of the war. He tells her about a girl he met back then who was beautiful and kind and embodied, for him, the happiness of the liberation. Now it's six months later and Fred has grown cynical and exhausted, and he looks at the Italian people, and especially all the girls who have become prostitutes catering to the American GIs, with contempt and disgust. Of course, Francesca is the girl from the story, and once again this episode turns on a very O. Henryesque irony, based on the soldier's failure to recognize the girl he so badly wanted to see again. He also fails to recognize, as the black soldier had, the difficulties of surviving in the postwar chaos, and he has no sympathy for girls like Francesca who do the best they can to get along in this difficult situation. This sequence, which takes place mostly inside and is noticeably glossier than some of the other sequences, demonstrates the limitations of Rossellini's approach here. Without the virtues of the rough, realistic street photography of postwar Italy, all that's left are the tired clichés of the writing and the amateurish performances.

In the fourth sequence, the American nurse Harriet (Harriet White Medin) and the Italian citizen Massimo (Renzo Avanzo) try to find a way into German-occupied Florence, where Italian partisans are heroically fighting against the Germans while British troops sit just outside the city, waiting for reinforcements to arrive. Obviously, the gap between Allied efforts and Italian efforts remains large, but Harriet and Massimo run hand-in-hand through the city, each desperate to get inside for a different reason, her to find an Italian partisan who she loves, him to find his family who he fears may be in danger in the German zones of the city. The episode is basically an extended action sequence, with an emphasis on the spatial geography of the city, as the pair run across rooftops, dodge through hidden tunnels and avoid snipers and German patrols. It's a thrilling, effective sequence that ends with a moving, expressive closeup, one of the film's most glorious shots. Rossellini excels at closeups, at faces, and his final image of Harriet here is a sudden classical composition that emerges with devastating power from the loose, ragged style of the surrounding scenes.

The film's fifth segment concerns a trio of American military chaplains — a Catholic, a Protestant and a Jew — who arrive at an Italian monastery and are welcomed by the monks. The monks, however, are discomfited by the realization that two of their guests are not Catholic, and they become concerned about the two "lost souls" who they fear have made the wrong choice in terms of religion. This story evokes the gentle humor that Rossellini directed at the brave priest in Rome Open City; it's obvious that Rossellini has great respect for religion without being entirely straight-faced about it. The sequence where the monks find out that the American chaplains are not all Catholic is clearly played for humor, as they go running around the monastery in a panic announcing to the others that there's a Jew amongst them. It seems like Rossellini is setting up the story to mock the provincialism and intolerance of the monks, but instead it turns out that the monks are genuinely worried for the men, that they believe so strongly that their Catholicism is the only correct path that they don't wish for any good men to risk their souls with another religion. The segment is tonally unbalanced with the rest of the film and ends with a saccharine speech from one of the American chaplains, driving home the moral of communion between Italians and Americans, praising the Italian monks for their "pure faith."


In the final segment, depicting the battles on the Po River, the boundaries between the Italians and the Allies have been virtually erased. The Italian partisans speak Italian, and the American and British soldiers speak English, but they all seem to understand one another, without the difficulties of language seen in the earlier segments. They are working together towards a common goal, and the segment opens with a taut suspense sequence in which an American soldier and an Italian partisan cooperate from different points along the river in order to fight some German sentries while retrieving the body of a dead soldier. In this episode, the various armies and nationalities intermingle, and in the nighttime scenes it's impossible to see who's who; one can only hear the voices drifting across the dark river speaking English or Italian. Even so, this episode also emphasizes the one crucial distinction between the Italians and the Allies, which is that the Italians are fighting here for their homeland, for their people, while the Allies are on foreign soil. There's a difference, too, in the treatment of the prisoners who are captured by the Germans, and the film ends with a moving and horrifying tribute to the sacrifices of the Italian partisans who fought and died in the battles to push the Germans out of Italy.

On the whole, Paisan is an interesting if deeply flawed movie. It is obviously a very emotional look at the postwar period and the events that affected the Italian people in the final stretch of the war. If the film's writing is occasionally sentimental and generic, Rossellini pours real feeling into his images and into his portrait of the rubble-strewn streets of his home country.

Rome Open City

Roberto Rossellini's Rome Open City, made in the immediate aftermath of World War II, is a stirring, deeply moving portrait of Rome during the final years of the war, with the Nazis occupying the city and Allied forces slowly closing in. It is a rough, ragged movie, made on whatever film stock Rossellini could scrounge up in the desolate post-war economy, shot in the bombed-out streets of Rome with a kind of documentary realism that imparts an even greater impact to this story of the enduring resistance against evil. The film is divided into two parts, with the first half focused on the daily lives of a loose group of Resistance fighters living in Rome. Francesco (Francesco Grandjacquet) works for a Communist newspaper, and helps coordinate the activities of a group of militant anti-Nazi fighters, led by his friend Giorgio (Marcello Pagliero). Francesco's fiancée, the widow Pina (Anna Magnani), is involved in the struggle as well; despite being pregnant, she helps incite riots against the shops that control food rations and keep the people of the city from getting enough to eat. Even her son, Marcello (Vito Annichiarico), joins the fight, as part of a gang of kids, led by a crippled boy, who go on late-night bombing runs against the Nazis.

Rossellini has crafted a portrait of a whole community — a whole people — united in opposition to the evils of the Nazis, with everyone contributing to the fight, even the children. Obviously working from his own experience of the wartime occupation and the tyranny of the fascists, Rossellini has made a deeply humanist work in which he gives equal weight to the everyday concerns of these people as they simply try to live, and to the urgency of the behind-the-scenes struggle against the Nazis. The need for bread, for food, drives the people, who are so starving that they must overcome their moral compunctions against stealing, simply in order to survive. In the midst of this chaos, Francesco and Pina still plan a wedding, still desire the normalcy of getting married. Pina's family excitedly gets ready for the day, baking a wedding cake — doubtless with whatever materials they could scrounge together — and planning a "feast" of the meager luxuries they can gather in this devastated city. Rossellini's casual presentation of these scenes emphasizes the sense of life staggering on, trying to approximate normality even in the midst of the terror and uncertainty these people feel.

The details mean everything for Rossellini, the small touches that demonstrate how thoroughly he understands this situation and these people — because not long before he was among them, living the life depicted here. At one point, when someone wonders if the Americans are really close, if the promise of liberation is really at hand, Pina nods towards a nearby destroyed building, a victim of Allied bombing. The only sign of hope for these people is often the evidence of the destruction wrought by the Nazis' enemies on the city. Others within the city are not as aware of the importance of this situation. Pina's callow sister Lauretta (Carla Rovere) works in a cabaret, and thinks nothing of letting German soldiers drive her home. She's sick of the squalor of her home life, embarrassed to be poor, and she wants only comfort and fun. She seems oblivious to everything outside herself. Her friend Marina (Maria Michi), Giorgio's girlfriend, isn't so oblivious, but she's still abstracted from the struggle, selfish and unable to truly grasp the import of events. She keeps looking for the missing Giorgio, who's hiding from the Gestapo, and seems annoyed that he hasn't been in contact with her, as though he could reveal himself so casually. Marina's weaknesses — including her drug use — make her easy prey for the Germans, who keep her under their thumb through the sinister spy Ingrid (Giovanna Galletti), who has a weird lesbian chemistry with her target.


Rossellini balances the film's darker moments with surprising humorous touches, particularly in the portrayal of the priest Don Pietro. The priest is an exceptionally pious man who is ashamed to even admit that he knows a popular song, sheepishly whistling along and then seeming embarrassed to even be aware of such worldly matters. Later, in a shop selling various religious and secular statues and decorations, he's troubled by the proximity of a figure of a saint to a statue of a nude woman. He turns the nude statue away from the saint, then realizes that now she's mooning the saint with her bare, rounded butt, and turns the saint away, sparing his stone eyes the sight of the voluptuous nude. Rossellini shoots this bit of silent comedy with the statues in the foreground and the priest framed between them, so that the nude statue's butt is turned provocatively to the camera as well as towards the saint, juxtaposing the statue's sexual charge against the priest's discomfort. The priest is a man who believes that the Nazi occupation is God's punishment for humanity's sins; he tells Pina that this "scourge" was deserved because of people's sins. But this belief doesn't stop him from joining the Resistance, from doing everything he can to help. His religion is judgmental, rooted in fire-and-brimstone and the fear of sin, but instead of judging those around him as individual sinners, he recognizes the real evil around him and turns his attention to that.

The sequence where the Nazis storm the apartment building is a brilliant example of Rossellini's mastery of tone. The sequence is tense and almost unbearably suspenseful, as the Nazis weave through the building, taking everybody outside, trying to find the men who are hiding and escaping through various secret passages. Rossellini balances this tension with the subtle humor of the priest's attempts to hide a machine gun and bomb before the Nazis find them: the priest's reaction when Marcello knocks the bomb off the table by hitting into the gun is hilarious, despite the high stakes. The priest's subsequent interaction with a cranky old man who he's pretending to help is equally fun, as the flustered priest tries to explain that he needs the old codger — who keeps excitedly shouting out how much he hates fascists and Nazis — to lie still and pretend to be sick. He finally has to resort to hitting the old guy in the head with a frying pan, which prompts Marcello to admiringly study the dents in the pan afterward. The mingled humor and suspense of this scene is especially potent because the whole sequence ends in such heartrending tragedy, which is even more jarring and unsettling considering the tone of what went before.


In the film's second half, in the aftermath of this shattering event, Rossellini shifts his focus onto the attempted escape and capture of Giorgio and Don Pietro by the Gestapo officer Bergmann (Harry Feist). The harrowing sequence where the Gestapo question and then torture Giorgio, while the priest is forced to watch, occupies much of the second half of the film. It is a powerful testament to Rossellini's belief in the power of the human spirit, in the strength of the men who dedicated themselves to the Resistance. Bergmann tries everything he can think of to get the two men to talk. He tries to split them apart by stressing to the priest that Giorgio is an atheist and a Communist, and by telling Giorgio that the royalists in the anti-Nazi Resistance will eventually betray the Communists. But neither man talks, no matter how much psychological or physical pressure Bergmann exerts on them. They are secure in their belief that they're doing good, and Bergmann's petty means of coercion prove insignificant to such men of strength. One of Bergmann's officers sums up Rossellini's point of view in a speech where the director, surprisingly, seems to put some of his own ideas into the mouth of an embittered Nazi officer who has belatedly realized how bankrupt his own side's ideas are. This man bitterly says that he once believed that the Germans were a superior race, but that seeing the resistance of the Italians and the French has changed his mind: if these men can be so bold, so honorable, can so stoically resist all manner of torture or threat of death, how can they possibly be inferior to the Germans who kill them? Even Bergmann seems to understand the logic of this.

This is the underlying message of the film: no matter how terrible things are, no matter how triumphant evil might seem, the ultimate victory of good is assured by the tremendous strength and persistence of those fighting on its side. The film presents evil as eternal, as preying on the weak, like Marina, who sacrifices everything for a fur coat that, in the end, is taken back from her after she faints at the sight of Giorgio's corpse. Ingrid walks out, arm-in-arm with the slimy Bergmann, and blithely declares that she's saving the coat "for next time." Such evil corrupts and destroys what it can, but Rossellini counters this image with an even more potent tribute to the spirit of men like Giorgio and Don Pietro. These two men, with such different opinions and ways of life, with different values and beliefs, are nevertheless united in their goodhearted insistence on helping others, on combating evil, on refusing to capitulate to the easy alternatives. This is the difference, too, between the strong, brave Pina and the flighty, insecure Lauretta and Marina. And the film's final image, a shot of the children walking together down a dusty road, seems to suggest that the next generation of such good men and women is already developing. It is remarkable that Rossellini, in the aftermath of a horrible war, could make a film of such hope and humanity and grace, a film that acknowledges the horrors the world had just lived through while paying tribute to those who had so bravely resisted these horrors.