Watch Germany, Year Zero For Free

For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

This propaganda docudrama captures life in post-World War II Berlin, with real footage of the boomed out city. We see life through the eyes of a 13-year-old boy, Edmund (Edmund Meschke). He and his family live on rations; what little work there is to be had; what they could find in the streets (coal, potatoes, etc.); and the black market. Unemployment is extremely high. Each family is given their ration cards based on the number of persons in the family. However, Edmund is too young to work, his father (Ernst Pittschau) is too sick, and his older brother, Karl- Heinz (Franz-Otto Krüger), is afraid to come out of the house, anticipating that he will be sent to a concentration camp as an ex-Nazi rather than a German soldier. His older sister, Eva (Ingetraud Hinz), is working at a club to entertain allied soldiers. Edmund fears that she is prostituting herself, as other girls at the club do, but she assures him she isn't. When Edmund's father is able to go to the hospital, the household food situation lightens a bit when his father's food and medicine are taken care of. Edmund continues to secretly work at night, selling, bartering and scrounging the street. When he sees his old school teacher, the teacher has him sell things for him (including Nazi memorabilia); people are more likely to buy from young children than adults. The film makes it clear that, at this time in Germany, men are the least marketable group. In fact, the job marketability of men, women, and children is turned upside down from the usual peacetime levels.Don't expect great quality images in this film. In fact, some images are shot directly INTO the sunlight, leaving the people in the foreground as shadows (rather than subjects) of the overexposed background. But, in spite of the film's technical limitations, this Italian neorealistic work is effective and moving, and the ending is shocking. However, it is strange to hear Germans speaking Italian. I constantly had to remind myself that this is about Germans—not Italians. Such is the nature of foreign docudramas for me. This is SO close to a documentary that I think the characters—who WERE German--should have been speaking German. In any case, I would have been reading subtitles in either case. Still, the SOUND of German would have made the film even more authentic to me.

'Germany Year Zero' was the final film in Roberto Rosellini's acclaimed 'War Trilogy'. This particular film distinguishes itself from the preceding two due to the fact that the focus shifts from the lives of Italians to the lives of Germans, after the end of WWII. 'Germany Year Zero' might be the bleakest and most depressing of the three films in the trilogy. In 'Rome, Open City', even with the struggle and oppression, there is a clear celebration of togetherness and the power of human conviction, resistance and idealism in the face of torture. In 'Paisan' underneath the melancholic exterior, there is an intimate exploration of friendship and brotherhood that transcends geographical and linguistic barriers. Although there are some intimate moments of tenderness involving the Kohler family in 'Germany Year Zero', but these moments get drowned under a constant and inescapably thick layer of hopelessness and doom. The film's opening credit sequence is accompanied by extended tracking shots of Berlin ravaged by war. We get these chilling moving images of completely destroyed homes, endless ruins and huge piles of rubble everywhere. This haunting imagery of the ruined Berlin reminded me of Werner Herzog's 'Lessons of Darkness'. Rossellini evokes this visual aura where the viewer feels like an outsider getting a bird's eye view of a desolate, long deserted alien world that has undergone complete destruction. He again uses a similar overhead tracking shot of ravaged Berlin in a scene towards the middle of the film with Hitler's speech playing over the visuals which adds a haunting and ironic vibe to the moving images.The film's deathly hopelessness is epitomised in a way by the fact that the first scene of the film is set in a graveyard. There is very little in terms of levity or intimacy in the film. Rossellini is intent on capturing the struggle and pain of the people of Berlin, but I think he also made a conscious effort to keep moments of sweetness few and far between in order to reflect the bitter truth of post war Germany without the ornamentation of sentimentality. Another very important theme being explored in 'Germany Year Zero' is the theme of lost innocence and premature adulthood. This theme connects 'Germany Year Zero' with Tarkovsky's 'Ivan's Childhood'. One can see a bit of Edmund in Ivan and vice-versa. Edmund has to work tirelessly to help out his family. He goes out in the streets looking to do anything that he can so that he can earn something for his family without once thinking about his own needs. This premature loss of childhood is depicted in one scene towards the end where Edmund requests a group of young kids playing football in the streets to let him play with them, but they ditch him and he walks away alone, it's a heartbreaking scene, but it's immensely poignant.The character of Karl-Heinz symbolised all the ordinary Germans who supported Hitler back in the day and now after the war find themselves cheated and helpless. Unfortunately their acknowledgment of the guilt and past mistakes has come far too late. Rossellini also tries to distinguish between the ordinary Germans who acknowledged their guilt for supporting the Nazi party in the past and the people who continued to believe in the Nazi philosophies even after their defeat. There are a few characters in the film who are being forced to live in the post Nazi Germany while still holding onto their Nazi beliefs. However this is where I think the film stumbles by using a very unnecessary angle of pedophilia. The character of Mr.Henning could have just been a Nazi sympathiser struggling with his ideals and his identity in a post Nazi Germany which could have been a complex element in the narrative and also very compelling, but instead he is given this silly pedophilia element which undercuts and cheapens the scope of his character in the narrative. A similar treatment was also present in 'Rome, Open City' where Nazism gets equated with homosexuality(which is not just cheap, but also very offensive in today's context). I would've loved to have a more mature exploration and critique of Nazism.Visually, the film looks great. One can see the gradual development in Rossellini's visual style over the course of the three films in this trilogy. There are many examples of swift and intricate camera movement present in 'Germany Year Zero'. Rossellini shoots the interior scenes using long takes with the actors close to the camera to build up the claustrophobia. He juxtaposes that approach by using wide angle photography in the street scenes to make Edmund look especially tiny in the midst of the ravaged Berlin cityscape. However there is a weakness present in Rossellini's direction that was present in 'Paisan' too. 'Rome, Open City' had some powerful actors like Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi and they gave great performances. However it is clear from 'Paisan' and 'Germany Year Zero' that Rossellini at least at the beginning of his career found it hard to get good performances out of amateurs. There are many scenes in this film where the performances are extremely stiff, wooden and unconvincing. In a film which inherently is emotionally demoralising, the sub-par performances can at times make it even more tough to connect with it from an emotional standpoint.'Germany Year Zero' is upsetting, and it won't inflate the balloons of hope in the minds of the viewer. But I think all that is intentional as Rossellini wanted the film to reflect the genuine depression and hopelessness which engulfed post war Germany. I admire the themes being explored which involves loss of innocence, the distinction between ordinary Germans and Nazis,etc. Although the treatment of the character of Mr.Henning with his Nazi loyalties gets cheapened and the acting at times becomes cringeworthy, I still think there are enough exceptional aspects to this film to admire and 'Germany Year Zero' is certainly a solid finale to this influential trilogy.

What an awful position the despicable Nazis left their descendants at the close of the Second World War. Roberto Rossellini has the perfect, objective, almost documentarian painterly hand in his depiction of this, and I have the feeling that only someone from one of the losing Axis countries, such as he, could so astutely and profoundly bring across such a feeling of loss and guilt that haunted these so-called 'survivors'. A very sad film to watch, yet at the very same time necessary and healing. Clearly my favourite of Rossellini's works, next to his magnificent 'The Flowers of St. Francis', just a few years later on and decidedly different in atmosphere.

This movie is one of the three Rossellini's neo-realist movies that make the trilogy of war of his direction. The other two are "Roma Città Aperta" and "Paisà". Despite having won the First Prize at the 1948 Locarno Festival it was a commercial half-failure. In 1947 in Berlin, Germany, a city destroyed by the war, full of ruins and rubbish everywhere, with people and families living in awful conditions of poverty and housing squalor, a 13 year old boy resorts to petty thefts and tricks to get money and food to help to support his family composed by him plus an old and ailing father, a sister who wins money at night by going to dance and drink in nightclubs with the allied men and a brother who lives half-hidden and unregistered for fear of being arrested and sent to a prisoners camp since he had fought there till the end of the war. The best of this movie is its documentary value since it shows in a very realistic way the images of a Berlin almost totally destroyed by the war and the life conditions of its population. The story is not bad itself but in the end it introduces an unnecessary too dramatic ending by the boy poisoning his father to death partly out of pity and to put an end to his suffering and partly to alleviate the family of the burden he represented. It's however one of the best movies of the Italian neo-realist school that flourished in the forties and fifties of last century.