GERMANY, YEAR ZERO

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 653, 11 January 1952, Page 18

GERMANY, YEAR ZERO

(Rossellini-Superfilm) HAVE spent much time this week tapping the Barometer. For two pins I'd have thrown it out of the window. Yet I should be glad, for my problem was to grade two well-above-average films -not equally goed, yet both (I have decided), by a standard that I try to keep unvarying, Fine. Roberto Rossellini made Germany, Year Zero, in battered Berlin. Springing, I am sure, from a deep compassion, it tells the story of a 12-year-old boy, and through him the story of a nation. In taking this one person, and especially a child, and revealing his life, it reaffirms the value of each single human being. It is a warning, not just against the Nazis, but against whatever at any time makes possible the sort of conditions that followed the war. Germany, Year Zero, is an almost unbearably moving film. The stark, white ruins which spring to the screen the moment it starts, Renzo Rossellini’s music which plays on and on while the camera moves restlessly through the half-dead city, clutch instantly at the heart, in spite of the somewhat unfortunate foreword by Quentin Reynolds. Then we see Edmund Kohler (Edmund Meschke) trying to keep up with a labouring gang to earn enough to support his sick father, his sister and his ex-soldier brother-in-hiding who fears a prisoner-of-war camp, Edmund’s age is discovered and he is packed off. The film tells his story-between visits to the shattered building where he lives, his wanderings through the city, his association with the black market and a youth gang and with his former schoolmaster, Henning, whose caressing hands tell their own story. Henning’s absentminded remarks give Edmund the idea that the aged must go to the wall, and while Edmund’s father is wishing aloud that he were dead and out of the way, the boy poisons him. Edmund’s search for company, his growing realisation of what he has done, make a heart-breaking story. Childlike, he confesses to Henning, who is horrified and turns him out. The scene when the boy runs with clattering footsteps away from the building where Henning lives, across a wide expanse of pavement and out of sight, is the most terrifying single shot I can recall having seen in any film. Still the small boy, he wanders on, seeking a game with children: who don’t want him, hopping in the absorbed way children will from patch to patch along the pavement, to a terrible end. All of the players in this film except the father were German amateurs, and among these the boy gives a quite astonishing performance. The subject is treated with bold realism. Rossellini (writer, producer, director) and _ his photographer, Robert Juillard, have no obtrusive technical tricks. Germany, Year Zero is a film of quite unusual power. It does the sort of job the film should do more often. It is responsible and adult, and seen by adults must add something to the social conscience, It is grim but completely absorbing, and I should be surprised to find anyone who was not deeply grateful for having had the opportunity to see it.