Documentary News Letter (1947-1949)

DOCUMENTARY FILM NEWS 53 This new film directed by Roberto Rossellini has not yet been released in London. It deals, as its name suggests, with life in Berlin the year after the war. Germany Year Nought A new Rossellini Film this is the third Rossellini film since he burst on the world outside Italy after the war. It is not such a good film as either Open City or Paisa, but all the same it has more real movie in it than anything else one is likely to see in a long time. Rossellini has got right inside the physical and psychological Berlin of today; that is, he has completely understood the feeling of living in a very slow, dark, and hopeless nightmare of mental and bodily misery. Germany Year Nought, which he has dedicated to the memory of his own son, tells the story of a small boy who is led by circumstances, and by the general human conditions around him, to poison his ailing father and commit suicide himself— a plot at first sight so grotesquely melodramatic as to be almost comic, but, when fitted to the uncompromising and imaginatively presented realism of the Berlin landscape, both convincing and moving. With the exception of the old father, who is an actor, all the characters are ordinary Berliners (the boy Continued from previous page and as a result I had a chance to improvise everything at the moment of shooting. As this particular technique lent itself more readily to creating visual change rather than to action (side to side, and to and fro displacement of image on the screen) I intentionally avoided the use of action, partly because it suited the theme, and partly out of curiosity to see if change in itself could be a strong enough cinematic factor to sustain interest. The technique also invited me to take chiaroscuro out of its usual role as a dead element in the decor of animated films, and put it to work as the foremost factor with a life of its own. In this I hope that perhaps I am on the way to bridging the gap that has always existed between painting proper and the animated film. Sometimes the demands of a theme dictated a technique which was remote from my stickwith-camel-hair philosophy, as in the case of the Chant Populaire, C'est L'Aviron. My only hope, then, was to get as close to the technical mechanism as possible and thoroughly exploit the intimacy— in this case with the zoom stand, shutter and wind-back possibilities of an animation camera. But, on the whole, themes incompatible with the camel-hair approach were avoided. To sum up, the conception and execution of most of my work for the National Film Board has probably depended on four things : (1) Attempting to keep at a minimum the technical mechanism standing between my conception and the finished work. (2) Handling personally the mechanisms that do remain, in as intimate a way as a painter his painting, or a violinist his violin. (3) Making the very limitations of these mechanisms, when brought in touch with the theme, the growing point for visual ideas. (4) Making sure of a chance for improvising at the moment of shooting or drawing. was found working in a circus), and, apart from one or two interiors, the film was shot on location. Technically, Germany Year Nought reveals once again Rossellini's unusual and often revolutionary style. Dialogue sequences are shot in constricted spaces, with both the camera and the characters moving restlessly in varying focal planes. Moments of great significance are pointed by the sudden withdrawal of the camera to extreme long shot — there is a moment when the boy hears an organ playing in a roofless and ruined church, and the camera suddenly shows us the scene in a high angle perspective, which recalls a painting by Chirico. But all these technical points arise, invariably, from Rossellini's conception of what the film must say. Take for example the portable gramophone playing a recording of Hitler's broadcast on the defence of Berlin, while the Tommies and the Yanks wander listlessly around the Reichschancellery, and the ruins stretch mile after mile, masking one knows not how many skeletons or how many living dead. This is not just a clever or striking sound trick; it is a sequence integral to the plot and motivation of the film. What one misses is the different sympathy of observation which could have come had the director seen Berlin as an Italian; it is no doubt one of Rossellini's greatest assets that he is able to enter so deeply into the feelings and outlook of those around him, but here he has identified himself so completely that it might be a film made by a German. This has happened, I suggest, for two perfectly valid reasons; firstly, no film director worth his salt could fail to reflect in his shooting the architectural and human atmosphere of Berlin (which is unforgettably horrible); and secondly, Rossellini has, with a passion that shines clear and lucid from the screen. concentrated on expressing, through the boy Edmund, the whole pity and terror of that martyred innocence which, with the atom bomb, has become the hall-mark of our modern world. It is perhaps significant that the finest part of the film is the finale, where the boy is utterly alone; \\c follow him, aimlessly wandering, through the city's gritty and repulsive dusk, observe, almost with horror, the traces of simple, childish interests and childish play which break across his misery, and feel, with the anonymous passer-by who sees him fall to his death, that it is, obscurely but none the less certainly, our fault. Then the camera pans up as a shabby tram trundles past, and carries us off with it on the final fade-out ... b. w. A scene from Greenpark's film for British Overseas Airways Corporation The name is Three Dawns to Sydney; a review will follow in June