A Film Canon

Rossellini's most systematic, documentary elaboration of a desecrated cityscape, Germany, Year Zero turns on a young German boy (Edmund Moeschke) caught between his family - ordinary Germans, concerned about the Third Reich, but too apathetic, disorganised and isolated to have done anything about it - and the post-war Nazi underground, personified by a paedophilic father-figure (Eric Guhne), whose tactile, caressing confirmations of his Aryan physiology recall the equation of Nazism with homosexuality, or at least decadence, in Rome, Open City, and inadvertently induce him to perform a mercy killing of his real father, thereby effecting a sudden movement from two father-figures to none. This, in turn, transforms the uncharacteristically mobile camera and rapid script generated by the boy's movement between the two into the circuitous walk around Berlin that constitutes the third act, and is characterised by a series of increasingly self-defeating activities (kicking a ball in a circle, running up and down a flight of stairs) that culminates with an otherwise incongruous suicidal leap. In the process, Rossellini's sensitivity for evocative tableaux is heightened by the least liberated cityscape in his oeuvre to date - most dramatically in a makeshift war orphans' camp, in and around a bombed train line, but most poetically in the fragments of one of Hitler's speeches that periodically drift out from a gramophone in the devastated chancellery adjoining the bunker in which he and Eva Braun committed suicide.