Roberto Rossellini is a director of paradox. No filmmaker was more fastidiously attentive to the physical world of the stories he told, and no filmmaker was more furiously devoted to ideas as a motive force in history and private life. It makes sense: matter is given meaning by ideas, ideas are embodied in matter, and the filmmaker’s analytical eye captures the paradox itself—a world in which the struggle of ideas has cruel physical results and in which the stakes of that struggle are on constant view in symbols.
Thus, Rossellini was also one of the great symbolists ever to wield a camera (and, as his career advanced, he literally wielded it—for “Vanini Vanini,” in 1961, he invented a remote-control zoom that he operated while the action unfurled before the camera). One striking scene in “Germany Year Zero,” from 1947, which I discuss in the clip above, features a record that the young protagonist, Edmund, is given by a predatory teacher who seeks to infuse him with an unrepentant Nazi ideology—a recording of a speech by Hitler, which the boy takes to the ruins of the Reichstag, along with a portable record player, in the hope of selling the relic to American or British soldiers doing the victors’ tour. As the dead tyrant’s vaingloriously hectoring voice resounds through the political Ground Zero of the land he led to its destruction, Rossellini’s notion of the physical power of ideas comes to life with a sardonic irony—one which foreshadows the incomparable pathos to which the movie builds, in its focus on young Edmund and the warp that such ideas wreaks on his unformed character.
“Germany Year Zero” is part of Criterion’s boxed set featuring Rossellini’s “War Trilogy,” which I recently reviewed in the magazine; I also reviewed two other Rossellini sets last year. But there’s one, a natural to compile, that doesn’t exist, and its absence from home video is perhaps the single most grievous cinematic blind spot in the marketplace: the five features and one short film that he made with Ingrid Bergman (whom he married in the course of their collaborations), between 1949 and 1955.
