Germany Year Zero

Reading about the making of the film is more interesting than actually watching it. You have to thank the crummy acting and general aimlessness for that. A real shame, since war-torn Berlin is just heartbreaking to look at and the themes about the disintegration of family ties and morality showed some promise initially.

Rossellini - auteur of unconvincing realism and shoddy acting. I much prefer his later works, when he lets go of these melodramatic devices, and can occasionally get a performance of worth.

This is a powerful story and a bleak dog eat dog look at postwar Germany. The acting is solid if slightly over the top. The characters are multidimensional if generally unlikable. The movie also features stunning imagery and great direction.

What a frustrating watch. As affecting as it is to witness the rubble of a city; a young teen scavenging for crumbs and getting force-fed the evils of manhood and a xenophobic survivalist ideology that no human can morally endorse... Conceptually, a coming-of-age film with these provocative images, parameters, and stakes is enough to fall in love with cinematically. However, I cannot emotionally connect when viewing through the smudgy lens of melodrama, bad acting, and relentless exposition.

On urban decay and postwar desperation, Rossellini is commendable for setting it somewhere other than his homeland and retaining the compassion and authenticity expected of this era in his work. The sequences in which Edmund desperately scurries around a destroyed Berlin trying to make ends meet are where the film is nearly perfect. The familial melodrama is less effective.

Yeah, I didn't care about the kid, so this whole movie ended up boring. Never really liked Italian Neo-realists anyway. Rossellini could have given us some better reason to care about the main character, other than being a child.

While the postwar Germany scenes of rubble were depressing, I was more troubled by trying to read a theme into this movie. We feel pity for young Edmund who has to grow up in poverty having no moral guidance (he literally turns away from the church before the final scene), but what of the rest of the Germans? If, as Rossellini seems to be suggesting, our actions are due to our upbringing, how do we stop something like this from ever happening again?

I don't care much for neo-realism anyway, but so far Rossellini's pictures have failed to impress me. This one opens with a statement about how the film is supposed to make you feel. So right off the bat I'm annoyed. The music is pretty horrible, and the plotting is insultingly manipulative. I had to roll my eyes at the creepy pedo Nazi guy. Other than those things, it wasn't all bad. The cinematography was decent, especially with all those photogenic bombed-out buildings.

This film, despite its bad acting and weird musical score, captures a moment and place in time that feels like no other. I doubt it's something that can ever be duplicated successfully, and thus it should remain an essential historical piece.

Good Movie

Vague, pointless melodrama with rudiments of ideas on what life after a war might mean to its survivors. All feels rushed to benefit from a bombed-out Berlin. What if somebody had worked this into a flip-side to People On Sunday? Alas Rossellini is just clueless.

Found this more uniquely fascinating to observe than feeling it was good. Simply because everything that was going on was so morally troubling. And that's fine. Germany Year Zero (1948) was provocative and made an impression, which I guess was its purpose.

I thought it was pretty good, though not perfect. Mostly, I just found it tragic. Seeing the world through this boy's eyes was just so sad. Especially the end. It has its problems, but I still recommend it.

I found this mainly pretty boring but it works quite well as a little allegory for the rise and fall of fascism, through the story of a young boy

I'm happy to have seen this for the historical document that is, but in terms of filmmaking, it is nearly worthless - a contrived script, declamatory acting and a score that interferes with the movie more than it supports it.

It's sad to see the destruction of Berlin post Second World War but interesting just the same. The story is sad as well but the below average acting kind of throws things off. Worth a look.

A harsh look at post-war life in Germany for a very regular family who each have their own different problems in this climate. There's some kind of suggestion that things will improve for them, but nope, everything gets a hell of a lot worse and worse. Grueling, made all the more so by some excellent acting from all and the historic mise en scene showing the war's effects on the city.

A powerful look at post-war Germany, struggling with social and economic issues. The strongest parts of the film are the shots of bombed out buildings and the terrible living conditions. It must have been even more despairing in 1948 without the knowledge that things would improve relatively quickly. All that said, the film didn't quite move me as much as it should have, some parts just seemed silly and there was never a deep connection to any characters.

Neorealism at its most nightmarish, and also one of the saddest movies ever made. Made my heart leap out of my chest on multiple occasions as it brutally illustrates the aftermath of World War II on a demolished Berlin. If some of the directions the film goes in seem implausible then, well...World War II kinda seems implausible as well, right? The best of Rossellini's War Trilogy.

# 223

Rossellini's expressive approach of seeing real life tragedy through equally hightened melodrama and realism just works and comes into full force here. There is realism (Which to Rossellini meant 'truth') in melodrama and vice a versa, and Rossellini is telling us exactly that.

For being neo-realist, I was surprised that Rossellini felt it necessary to make the Nazi teacher a pedophile as well. As if one or the other wasn`t enough. Otherwise the movie is kind of significant as an artifact of the time in which it was made, but not all that important from a 21st century perspective. The ending is shocking, which I think makes people like it more, but my Italian Cinema class spoiled the ending for me several years ago. I think this made me immune to its charms.

236

I liked this one a bit less than the other two in Rosselini's War Trilogy for a few reasons: the overbearing score annoyed more in this one, the lightning was pretty bad in some scenes and there is a lot of expository dialogue.

Star Rating: ★★★1/2

87.00

Very remarkable film, done in post-war Berlin and not in some studio, which is very very impressive.

better and more focused from rossellini. explores the plight of the germans during allied occupation immediately following the second world war, which is interesting when compared to the strongly anti-fascist views of his previous two war films, and suggests he is more concerned with the effects of war on the poor than with any particular ideological stance. still, it doesn't escape the familiar trappings of melodrama, and the music is almost always unsuitable, being far too blunt and bombastic.

Alemanha ano zero estreava há 75 anos em Milão. Não pude deixar de notar as semelhanças com outro clássico do pós guerra feito naquele ano que mostrava a deturpação da filosofia de Nietzsche pelos nazis: Rope do Hitchcock. Ambos os filmes lidam com a juventude levando às últimas consequências a teoria do ubermensch que guiou os nazis naqueles últimos 15 anos na Alemanha. Box Versátil Trilogia da Guerra.

Very unique but it didn't really have an impact on me, apart from the setting.

I may not be crazy about De Sica's borderline-corny warmth and humanism, but goddamn if it isn't preferable to Rossellini's dour heavy-handedness here. Surprisingly, the best thing about this is actually the kid, but even the evocative scenes of him walking around the bombed-out city are marred by clunky editing (those wipe transitions, ugh) and that bombastic, interminable score. The plot is far too contrived and melodramatic to pass convincingly for "realism", neo- or otherwise.

There's something especially powerful going on here as indicated by the title. You're watching a society that in a very real sense has destroyed itself, and is in "year 0" in the sense that it can't rebuild on the foundations of the past.

251

Good in all aspects other than the acting, which drags it down considerably. A melodrama that almost plays as noirish at times (maybe thanks to the noirish score) in the backdrop of postwar Germany that really brings you there and shows you the struggle. I'm not entirely sure if the relationship between Edmund and his teacher is supposed to come across as quite as creepy as it does to the modern eye. It's very bleak. The ending shares an oddly specific similarity with Europa '51.

Beautifully expressive filmmaking. The opening credits sequence gives a brief hint of the bombed out devastation of Berlin, a hint that the film expands upon in all kinds of ways: families breaking apart due to ideology, illness, and laxity, children roaming the streets and using their basest instincts to survive, and men who prey on children. The world of these people has disintegrated, and not even the church (whose minister plays a tragically beautiful organ) is acting for the people.

Unique for its depiction of a post-war society, however the ending is amateurish.

Well of course those times' reality was enough for a drama and yet amateur acting is understandable within Neo-realism. But with all the misery and agony, if there was a good storytelling (like Bicycle Thieves) this film would be a masterpiece. And that older brother was an idiot?

#243