The great Italian director Roberto Rossellini became an unlikely member of the glamorous international movie set after his marriage to Ingrid Bergman. But this life didn’t soften the film-maker’s work, which was admired by Magnum photographers such as Elliott Erwitt, who recognised Germany Year Zero as representing a new kind of post-war cinema. The film is indeed a masterpiece, but not for the qualities of ‘realism’ that are usually associated with Rossellini’s work. In this powerful story of a fifteen-year-old boy living with his family in wretched conditions in post-war Berlin, Rossellini decisively abandons the trappings of neo-realism. Germany begins in the mode of seemingly straightforward ‘documentary’ reportage and becomes ever more hallucinatory and allusive, charting a journey through a strange, devastated landscape full of pain, danger and fear.

Italy-France-Germany, 1947.
Subtitled.
72 mins.