-Devdutt Trivedi
Jean Luc Godard pronounced Rossellini as being ‘at once the most admired and the most attacked’ of all great directors. His 1948 masterpiece Germania Anno Zero, initially a critical and commercial failure, would go on to become amongst his most important films. Godard himself would make an ode to Rossellini’s masterpiece, mediating it with Godardian polemics in a post-modern world in Allemagne 90 neuf zéro(Germany Year Ninety Zero,1991).
Rossellini’s film about a young boy Edmunde who is misled by the hidden Nazi propaganda of his former school teacher Herr Enning, replaced a project Rossellini was to do in New York by the name of Christ in Concrete. Rossellini was wary of leaving Europe at a time he found engaging to his film craft and sought funding from Burstyn and the Hakim Brothers. Earlier Rossellini had decided to call the film Berlin Year Zero, which was lifted from film critic and philosopher Edgar Morin’s book L’Année zéro de l’Allemagne. However, as stated in Tag Gallagher’s exceptional book, The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini, no one knew the source of the name and the producers were puzzled by the name. Producer Burstyn’s partner, Arthur Mayer claimed in his text Merely Colossal:
“Every time we made an advance we wistfully asked what the picture was going to be about.…Whatever does the name Germany Year Zero mean…, we wondered.…‘Until the picture is finished it is sufficient if I know what it means,’ was all the satisfaction [we] got. After a suspenseful period, Burstyn and I finally gave up. The picture was eventually completed, actually financed in large measure by the more trustful French government.”
Rossellini picked up all of his actors had never acted before in film and were ‘collected’ by Rossellini on the streets of Berlin. ‘Most of my players’ Rossellini said in the press book for Germany Year Zero, ‘had never acted before, but anyone can act provided he is in familiar surroundings and given lines that are natural.’ When shooting began Rossellini after ‘believe his own publicity myth’, threw away the scarce outline and written script to improvise the film completely. In the original, according to Gallagher, Edmund blames his father’s anti-Nazism for Germany’s defeat and meets a teacher who echoes Nazi propaganda. At the end of the film he meets a German Communist Resistance leader and reforms his views on the world. Edmund Roberto who resembled Rossellini’s original character Romano (but was later changed to suit the ‘documentary’ nature of the film), was a circus boy whom Rossellini had found at the Barlay Circus.
When Rossellini was away from production, and back in Paris because of his ‘drugged lunacy’, Lizzani was assigned to direct portions of the film. Lizanni’s quote on Rossellini defines the approach of most future film makers who would try to make a feature film, while at the same time keeping the shooting approach ‘as documentary as possible.’ Lizanni stated “that the framing could be done this way or that, but if one shot enough footage and if the idea were clear, the material would be good in any case.”
Rossellini’s process of writing and rewriting in a chaotic fashion at the local trattoria and shooting on uncontrolled locations would influence his scriptwriter Fellini would ‘would
also attempt to re-create the chaotic mood typical of Rossellini’s sets during his own shooting in order to be open to intuitive inventions and serendipitous surprises.’
Rossellini echoes a technique of the post-modernists beginning with Godard and sensed in the writings of Deleuze, of making the narrative vanish so that the spectator is forced to confront the location space. According to Rossellini Germany Year Zero “was conceived specifically for the scene with the child wandering on his own through the ruins...I only [felt] sure of myself at this decisive moment.” The space of narrative withdraws, a withdrawal of the Bergsonian action-image, so that the spectator is not able to act on the perception-image and instead opposes action with location-observation or simply put, by observing the milieu of the location. This approach has been echoed in the works of several recent masters attempting to keep the settings ‘as documentary as possible.’ Rossellini’s approach of using actors, to in some sense be themselves and play characters in similar situations as their own in ‘reality’, echoed in the works of his fellow film makers of the ‘Neo-Realist’ movement, was worked upon in Abbas Kiarostami’s works especially in his masterful Close-Up(1989). Close-Up has the ‘fake’ Mohsen Makhmalbaf (the famous Iranian director), Hossein Sabzian playing himself in the film and recollecting events that have already occurred with the Akhankah family whose members are also replaying their roles in the film, from real life. Rossellini’s technique of dissolving narrative space is also echoed in Mani Kaul’s masterpiece Satah Se Uthata Aadmi (Arising From The Surface,1980) on the writings of Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh where the spectator is confronted with actors reciting text in the location space of the factory in the last portion of the film.
The emblem of the child committing suicide met with a variety of responses. Whereas for Rossellini, who had dedicated the film to his dead son Romano, it was a ‘liberation from guilt’, for the Communists it was a ‘kind of a Christ figure’ to redeem the dreary reality as it was for Tag Gallagher, ‘an impulse for freedom.’ The death of the child figure redeems the pathetic landscape with grace through withdrawal of violence, to an accidental surrender of the spirit. Jonathan Rosenbaum’s reading is the most accurate as he links Rossellini’s film with Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (1967) ‘in its depiction of a child oscillating between the contradictory reflexes and demands of childhood and adulthood, where suicide itself becomes the culmination of a child’s game.’
The film was received poorly especially in Germany where important critics thought it to be a ‘swindle’ worse than Hollywood and that Rossellini had ‘vomit (ted) into the coffin’ that was ‘new Germany.’ In his defense the Italian master claimed: ‘I show what I saw. I didn’t like what I saw.’
References:
The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini, Tag Gallagher, 2006
Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze
Jonathan Rosenbaum
The Films of Federico Fellini, Peter Bondanella, Cambridge University Press,2002
John Bailey