Roberto Rossellini's grim, though disappointingly flat melodrama Germany, Year Zero opens with a boldly written preface that attempts to make clear the reasons for the movie's existence. Attempting to place the film as something closer to a sociological artifact than a fictional drama, it rambles on about where it was shot, what it aims to do, the tragic location of the production and an implication of humanist ideology.
It's not an entirely convincing argument for the film to make, since there's a fair amount of dramatic artifice on display here, and it bares its weakness as insecure with the possibility of differing interpretations, which will happen anyway. Certainly, for someone whose extensive disclaimer emboldens its apparent aim to be completely objective, Rossellini is not being objective in this movie. There's an obvious ideological agenda astir in telling this story of a twelve-year-old German boy who does what he can to simplify his family's suffering in Germany's post-war bane. The director includes a pungent Christian moral that is prompt chiefly so audiences can be expected to have heavy hearts when it becomes distinct that owing to the boy's severe way of life, a strand of faith is not enough to pull him back from the height of condemnation. Rossellini also has no problem using his style to denounce most of his characters. Whatever he might include in the film's opening paragraphs, he is without a doubt cognizant that using an overhead shot or a close-up here has a clear inborn judgmental intention, and he doesn't arrest his style from including such cinematic language. Nothing demands that a film be necessarily impartial, so this one's emphasis on its own objectivity is dubious.
Even as Germany Year Zero promotes a definite agenda, it remains admirable, because it forfeits or forgets no technical and storytelling virtues, although . Rather than sets, real locations are used, but the film feels a bit less documentary-like than many other neorealist features. There's a strong sense of structure present in the plotting that makes the events feel more deterministic and less capricious than they should if a breeding of reality was this rubble film's decisive aim. By happy chance, this narrative coarseness comes off like a succession of lamentable twists of fate, and as such it doesn't blister the credibility of the film, even as it makes it feel more like a written piece. Fiction is by no means an art form to feel one is above, so Rossellini's beginning pretense might have more to do with his unwillingness to accept his material for what it is than his lack of understanding as to what he was doing in the film.
The cold sober atmosphere that dominates this transparent moral tale never allows the audience to take for granted how agonized conditions were while the movie was being made. The boy's father is withering on his death bed from malnutrition. A trip to a congested hospital is seen as a blessing, not only because it staves off the threat of his death, but because when he's not at home there's one less mouth to feed. Doses of grim truth like that seep past any innate contrivance in the film-making and coarsen the film with a sense of immediacy. It's about the hope of transcending the natural law of survival of the fittest as a way of ennobling the human race.
It's not an entirely convincing argument for the film to make, since there's a fair amount of dramatic artifice on display here, and it bares its weakness as insecure with the possibility of differing interpretations, which will happen anyway. Certainly, for someone whose extensive disclaimer emboldens its apparent aim to be completely objective, Rossellini is not being objective in this movie. There's an obvious ideological agenda astir in telling this story of a twelve-year-old German boy who does what he can to simplify his family's suffering in Germany's post-war bane. The director includes a pungent Christian moral that is prompt chiefly so audiences can be expected to have heavy hearts when it becomes distinct that owing to the boy's severe way of life, a strand of faith is not enough to pull him back from the height of condemnation. Rossellini also has no problem using his style to denounce most of his characters. Whatever he might include in the film's opening paragraphs, he is without a doubt cognizant that using an overhead shot or a close-up here has a clear inborn judgmental intention, and he doesn't arrest his style from including such cinematic language. Nothing demands that a film be necessarily impartial, so this one's emphasis on its own objectivity is dubious.
Even as Germany Year Zero promotes a definite agenda, it remains admirable, because it forfeits or forgets no technical and storytelling virtues, although . Rather than sets, real locations are used, but the film feels a bit less documentary-like than many other neorealist features. There's a strong sense of structure present in the plotting that makes the events feel more deterministic and less capricious than they should if a breeding of reality was this rubble film's decisive aim. By happy chance, this narrative coarseness comes off like a succession of lamentable twists of fate, and as such it doesn't blister the credibility of the film, even as it makes it feel more like a written piece. Fiction is by no means an art form to feel one is above, so Rossellini's beginning pretense might have more to do with his unwillingness to accept his material for what it is than his lack of understanding as to what he was doing in the film.
The cold sober atmosphere that dominates this transparent moral tale never allows the audience to take for granted how agonized conditions were while the movie was being made. The boy's father is withering on his death bed from malnutrition. A trip to a congested hospital is seen as a blessing, not only because it staves off the threat of his death, but because when he's not at home there's one less mouth to feed. Doses of grim truth like that seep past any innate contrivance in the film-making and coarsen the film with a sense of immediacy. It's about the hope of transcending the natural law of survival of the fittest as a way of ennobling the human race.