Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero is a fantastic work and a perfect example of what the Italian Neo-Realist movement was. Despite being an Italian director, Rossellini was able to perfectly capture the mood of post-war Germany and strongly portray the struggles, both internal and external that many Germans were going through at this time.
The plot of Germany Year Zero is based around a young boy who is helping his family survive in post-war Germany. Despite being the youngest, he seems to be most mature but it is easy to see that his situation has forced him to take on the major responsibilities in the family. His sister stays at home to care for their sick father and his brother is so suffocated by the guilt of being a former Nazi soldier that he refuses to leave the house and help his family.
Like De Sica’s The Bicycle Thieves, Rossellini used real people and not actors to portray the characters in the film. This is impressive because while these people were experiencing a difficult life, it is often difficult for those same people to portray real emotion, in character, on film. Even some professional actors have a difficult time portraying a real person (see Hayden Christensen, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith). So the fact that Rossellini was able to find totally inexperienced people to play these roles as well as some of the top professional actors of the time is remarkable.
Also remarkable is the sets. This film was shot in the ruins of Berlin. Consequently, you can feel the depression and terror that lies within the characters because their surroundings are authentic.
Throughout the film you are able to understand the stress the main character, Edmund is going through. Rather than see his father suffer more and waste precious resources keeping him alive, Edmund decides to go behind everyone's backs and secretly poison him. While he thinks this will make everyone breathe a sigh of relief that he has passed, his former teacher (who originally jokes about Edmund doing something like this) calls him insane. Consequently, Edmund believes he cannot do anything right. In the end the pressures of his reality force him to jump from a building to his death.
As a result, this film does not have a happy ending. But that is necessary because this is an Italian neo-realist film and consequently needs to portray the reality of the German people's situations. It took years for Germany to recover and decades for East Germany to start seeing major results. The German’s people government (the Third Reich) failed them utterly.
As the textbook says, Rossellini, “willingly sacrificed polish for authenticity, sets for real locations, fiction for life” (Mast, 377). His was willing to take a risk by shooting this film in Berlin and using real Berliners as actors. He wasn't in it for the money and while there are some scenes where the video and audio quality is lacking, it only adds to the dire mood.
Rossellini was brilliant in capturing the mood of this difficult period so perfectly. Without films like these it would be easy to forget the horrific events of the past. These realist films are completely necessary and are perfect tools for future generations to use to better understand the past. We must learn from our past to move towards a brighter future. Normally, I usually like to include some humor in my writings but there just isn’t any to be found here. This was a serious time and a serious tone is necessary.
Germany Year Zero most definitely is not a ‘zero.’ It gets a 10/10. Below is a link to the end of the film. I believe it perfectly shows the talents of the young actor, the bombed out Berlin and the struggles of the period.
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