PASTORALI (Otar Iosseliani, 1976)

Be no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even Worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God’s name! ’Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called Today; for the Night cometh, wherein no man can work. — Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, German Professor of Things in General

I have seen three earlier films of his (April, 1961; Falling Leaves, 1968; Once Sung a Thrush, 1970), but the great Georgian film artist Otar Iosseliani’s first truly signature work is Pastorali. Typically, Pastorali ran afoul of Soviet complaints and censorship, and by the time it saw the light of public showings Iosseliani had already fled to France, where he currently resides. (He returned home, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, to make the remarkable 1996 Brigands, Chapter VII.) Otar Mekhrishvili and Revaz Inanishvili co-authored the script of his that Iosseliani brilliantly directed.

Pastorali opens in the city—Iosseliani’s own Tbilisi, in fact—where arrangements are being made for a string quartet to spend the summer in the country. The reason? As usual, Iosseliani doesn’t bother us (or himself) with details of plot. Who can say why the four young musicians—two guys, two gals—leave the city, civilization as they know it, for a half-dozen fortnights. When they arrive at their arranged lodgings, at the home of kolhozniks, they rehearse, so perhaps they left Tbilisi for what they (inaccurately) anticipated would be the sheer quiet and tranquility of a rural setting. Perhaps they desired to enrich their classical reflexes by immersing themselves in the folk musical traditions that prevail in farm country. While there, they end up becoming cultural anthropologists by recording the kolhozniks’ singing. But we have no way of knowing, because Iosseliani doesn’t tell us, whether doing this was a motive for their visit or something that came to them once, there, they had been swept up by the enchantment of the local music. And, of course, Iosseliani is right not to tell us. This is a film about what people do, not about why they do it.

What people do in this film is work. Only once have I seen a film in which people do so much work, of so many different kinds. (The other occasion: Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, 1928.) Oh, the village men quarrel a bit (well, a lot, then), and there is a communal feast replete with song and spirits; but, mostly, the collective farmers and their womenfolk work—as, mostly, do their guests from Tbilisi. Iosseliani doesn’t suffocate us with plot, but his film richly details the work that the characters do.

A good deal of the labor that the film shows is farm work: chopping this, hauling that, shepherding animals, milking a cow, and so on. Perhaps the Soviet authorities, still angling to promote the fantasy of a workers’ paradise, were upset by Iosseliani’s implicit exposure of the fact that, in this “socialist” society, kolhozniks competed with one another for more or less income based on the amount they produce—although by this time the state had instituted income guarantees, and more and more farmers worked their own plots rather than state-owned land. (In the 1990s, after the Soviet Union’s collapse, nearly 44% of farms throughout the nation and its Eastern bloc satellites chose to remain state-owned rather than becoming privatized.) But I digress from my own work here. When the four musicians from the city arrive, one of them kicks aside a bottle that had been upright in the road. Later, in this wondrous comedy that’s chock-full of Tatiesque moments, a farmer lugging a hill of hay so huge that it completely conceals his or her identity pauses at the spot in order to reset the kicked bottle into an upright position—if you will, work inside other work. (It is also a lovely human moment interrupting what might otherwise seem labor akin to animal labor.) The women are shown endlessly engaged in cooking and housecleaning. Moreover, activities that we normally do not consider work impress us as such in the context of working that the film provides. For instance, a teenaged daughter in the family that is hosting the musicians takes an immediate shine to the younger male in the quartet. We see her grooming her hair while looking into a mirror so she can look her best, in hopes of catching his attention. Her intentness, her earnestness, her concentration as she goes about this ordinary task converts it into pressing work. It’s a revelatory moment.

As is his delightful wont, Iosseliani has fashioned a mostly silent film. (It is also in black and white, and beautifully cinematographed by Abessalom Maisuradze.) There is minimal dialogue. The sounds we hear in the film are mainly those of musical instruments and voices in song, and the squawking, mooing, oinking, barking and chattering of all kinds of animals—farm, domestic and wild. There are wonderful shots of these animals. In an early one, a herd of pigs of all sizes move along, away from the camera. It is a very funny shot. Later, when a skinned pig is roasted for a feast, the discretion of the camera placement, retroactively, lends unexpected poignancy to the earlier shot. Another shot features a large herd of sheep crossing a road. A bus disturbs the orderly procession of part of the herd up ahead, while in the same shot another part of the herd, closer to the camera, remains uniformly intact. The image is visually complex and, like so much of this film, it delights. We cannot help but relate the two different forms in which the party of sheep appears to forms of humanity as they also appear in the film: lives structured and controlled by the work they must attend to, and boisterous lives bursting out of this structure and control.

This is also a film of faces, in which Iosseliani directs his camera to find what is distinctive in the face of each ordinary person. Iosseliani shows great affection for all his characters, who come in all ages, sizes and shapes. Concerning the musicians, Pastorali avoids “fish-out-of-water” material; neither city nor country is used to give the other a comical beating. The guests are treated graciously and courteously by the villagers, and they remain guests; there’s no sentimental nonsense here, where these four become new members of an extended country family. One guest mingles, giving the teenaged girl a piano lesson that draws from her an unexpected warm smile; another refuses to socialize on account of the hosts’ “cheap wine.” The latter remark, along with the bottle-kicking incident, helps underscore the different worlds to which these two groups of people belong, and this in turn helps spare the conclusion, with the musicians back in Tbilisi, of a bogus feeling of regret for having left behind them some idyllic summer. Pastorali sticks to reality and condescends to no one, including us the audience.

I am reminded of Tennyson’s Ulysses: “He works his work; I, mine.”

But then what doesn’t remind me of Tennyson’s Ulysses?

BOLIVIA (Adrián Caetano, 2001)

In grainy black and white, its style journalistic-cinéma-vérité, its length a trim, no-nonsenscial hour and a quarter, Bolivia is a small gem, sharply observant, finely expressive. It follows Freddy, a Bolivian husband and father of four, who has separated from his family in order to find work in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he tries to alleviate his family’s poverty as a short order cook in a cheap restaurant. His pay is commensurate with the illegal status of his labor, and he must contend with the natives’ bigotry at a foreign interloper in their midst. With Argentina reeling from its own severe economic recession, Freddy is seen as one of the “niggers” who is taking jobs away from locals when, of course, what Freddy is also doing is keeping the prices on the menu affordable, however indigestible the sausage sandwiches he serves up appear to be. The establishment’s waitress, Rosa, is from Paraguay.

Context is everything. Freddy had had a job at home, as a field worker; but, in its war on drugs, the United States scorched Bolivia’s fields, casting adrift in even worse poverty the already impoverished. Freddy’s family, once hungry, is now starving. The film opens with a televised football—what we U.S. Americans call soccer—match in which the Argentinian team is trouncing the Bolivian team. Buenos Aires holds no great expectations for Freddy. At night, the police stop and harass him on the street, he is treated with contempt by everyone except Rosa and the frazzled restaurant owner, Enrique, who is, of course, exploiting him, and it is impossible to see how his meager pay and tips allow for anything at all to be sent home. Poverty isn’t sentimentalized here, nor is it outrageously ignored, in order to wax lyrical over the dignity to which the poor rise, as in the Brazilian film Me You Them (Eu Tu Eles, 2000), by Andrucha Waddington. Bolivia is the real deal, about an ordinary human being, whose dignity suffers a few lapses, who is trying hard to stay afloat.

The film reminded me of two others, one creditable and the other horrible. Recall Jan Schütte’s Dragon Chow (Drachenfutter, 1987), the West German gem, also in (although smooth and satiny) black and white, about an illegal Pakistani immigrant in Hamburg? The violent denouement that takes away Freddy’s life also brought to mind the combustible American film Do the Right Thing (1989). Whereas Bolivia is humane and analytical, though, Spike Lee’s piece of addled tripe is ersatz-stylish, with its hot and steamy colors, and belligerence. Restaurants provide the setting for films both good and bad.

Bolivia is a documentary-style nondocumentary, peopled (I presume) by nonprofessional actors, their first names matching those of the characters whom they portray. (One of these players is superb: Enrique Liporache, whom the Argentinian Film Critics Association named best supporting actor.) Epitomizing bigotry that targets the outsider in an environment of unemployment and frustration, one of the perpetual patrons of Enrique’s joint provides the vehemence and violence that slip this highly objective film into a subjective envelope. But the film slips right back out, with a terse Brechtian distancing device: Enrique’s new sign in the window, “Cook Wanted.”

The filmmaker is Adrián Caetano. His script, adjudged to be the year’s best by the Argentinian critics, proceeded from an original story by Romina Lafranchini. The title is sorely ironic. Freddy epitomizes the plight of his poor country as it is assaulted by globalization as well as by the war on drugs, but this plight also predicts, in this landscape, the fate of the marginally better-off Argentina. Caetano’s Bolivia can be seen as the companion-piece to an even more trenchant (and, again, black-and-white) examination of socioeconomic stress by another young Argentinian, Pablo Trapero’s 1999 Mundo grúa (Crane World).

Bolivia won the best Spanish-language film award at San Sebastián and critics’ awards at both Rotterdam and the London Film Festival. The citation for it at the latter read as follows: “For its direct, unsentimental treatment of one of the most important social questions facing urban societies everywhere.”

THE GODFATHER (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)

There is no accounting for taste, and there is no accounting for those who maintain the fiction that the ’70s were anything other than the dreariest decade in the history of American cinema. There were, of course, some excellent films: Jon Jost’s Last Chants for a Slow Dance (1977), John Huston’s Fat City (1972) and Wise Blood (1979), Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979), and Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), The Long Goodbye (1973) and Nashville (1975) come immediately to mind, along with the decade’s best American film, John Hanson and Rob Nilsson’s stirring ode to the American labor movement, Northern Lights (1978). At the other end of the scale was a steady stream of nasty, violent movies. Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather is among the worst of these.

Adapted from co-scenarist Mario Puzo’s potboiler novel, Coppola’s lavish saga of the American Mafia past its heydey is inflated and vague, its tone and sympathies so far out of his control that Coppola felt driven to “correct” the impression it widely made; hence the sequel, The Godfather Part II (1974), where he insists he isn’t pro-mob. One is thus reminded of D. W. Griffith who, to erase the (accurate) racist charge incurred against him by The Birth of a Nation (1915), made Intolerance (1916)—for Pauline Kael, the height of cinema; for most of us, a ho-hummer. In fact, one needn’t venture beyond the first installment of Coppola’s “epic”—a third, purely to fill coffers, arrived in 1990—to find Griffith’s heavy imprint; one example is the crosscutting crescendo alternating between church ritual anointing new life and bloody vendetta.

Spanked by the industry with (in light of the film’s promotion) a measily three Oscars, The Godfather is little more than a clichéd genre piece cruelly punctuated by mob violence. The “little more” consists largely of a vivid portrait of the dynamics and social rituals of Italian-American families. A family wedding, for instance, provides the occasion for the film’s most intricate set-piece, and there is fleeting charm and irony in scattered domestic glances—for instance, a mobster’s cooking spaghetti sauce from scratch in his home kitchen. Alas, this likeable glimpse of a meal preparation turns out to be mere set-up for a view of the sometime-cook, right after the kitchen scene, at work at his real job, where the benign red of sauce is replaced by spilt blood, leaving us with an aftertaste of manipulation.

The film, though empty, is very heavy, very self-important. But one can’t find in it the slightest concern for any of its characters. And it’s boring—but for one cold trick. It is this dramatic gimmick to ward off audience boredom that accounts for the film’s enormous popularity. With cruel calculation, Coppola keeps his audience in a state of heightened anticipation of each new eruption of violence. In short, he uses violence to stimulate and titillate. This method of captivating an audience with scenes of vicious carnage The Godfather helped make the highly profitable engine of a still chugging train of manipulative, mean-spirited “entertainments.” Like Griffith, Coppola is a pioneer of sorts.

To be sure, the film seems to possess merit. Early on, it can be visually entrancing, due in large measure to the contributions made by Dean Tavoularis, the production designer, and Gordon Willis, the color cinematographer. However, even the film’s loveliest images are decorative rather than expressive. Moreover, its best mise-en-scène so heavily leans on that of Luchino Visconti, a director whom Coppola (like Scorsese) admires, that the extent of the visual borrowing continually points up just how unsure of himself Coppola is.

Nor is Coppola much good with the actors, most of whom perform routinely. A favorite among his fellow actors because his reputation legitimizes big, feel-good histrionics, Marlon Brando indulges hammily in mimicry rather than pursuing truthful, detailed characterization. Nevertheless, his relatively small role of the Corleone family patriarch affords him an effective moment or two. And, hey, it’s Brando. Among the other actors—the cast is huge—only Diane Keaton, as Kay, prevails over Coppola’s ineptitude or indifference. Hers, by the way, is the one female character given sustained attention—and rightly so, since Kay has not quite been brought into the Corleone family yet, where women, no longer complete beings, function as childbearers, homemakers, and touchstones of family honor.

Of all the actors, the one who is most decisive for the film’s failure is doe-eyed Al Pacino as Michael Corleone. As usual, Pacino is dreadful; every gesture, every expression, every intonation is selfconscious and phony. There is no facet of the character that survives his mauling touch. Pacino bungles the college boy’s transformation into (with added ice water) a chip off the old block, and he passes over completely the contribution presumably made to this changeover by Michael’s stint at soldiering—a potential potent irony dulled, if not lost, given that Michael’s military moment later confers on him, in the eyes of the law-abiding, the status of hero. Neither this nor its implications seem even to have crossed the minds of either director or star.

The truth is, Coppola couldn’t care less. He placed his cynical (and winning) bet instead on his ability to get more and more Americans hooked on the recreational drug of violence, helping it to become his industry’s staple, for both domestic use and export. Coppola isn’t an artist. He is a merchant of mayhem.

GRAND HOTEL (Edmund Goulding, 1932)

“Grace, irony, gravity, timeless loveliness: Greta Garbo is cinema’s most enchanting tragedienne—all in all, its greatest actress.” This is how I described Garbo in a list of the fifty greatest film actors and actresses. Grand Hotel, which won the 1932 Oscar as best picture, gave Garbo her most famous line, the one that capped her iconic status and sealed her immortality as probably the greatest, if most elusive movie star ever: “I want to be alone.” Her character is Grusinskaya, the temperamental Russian ballerina whose international career is on the skids, deepening her insecurities and dampening her enthusiasm for life: a potent metaphor for the ravages of the Depression and of the breathless passage of time. Critic Pauline Kael marveled how, at 26, Garbo could project exhaustion so persuasively. Garbo’s Grusinskaya seems all used up. Ah, but then Grusinskaya meets Baron Felix von Gaigern, who has stolen into her hotel suite in order to pilfer her jewels, and she falls impossibly, deeply, unalterably and tragically in love, reviving her spirit, her taste for life. How realistic is it that this woman would fall so hard for a thief? Psychologically, absolutely realistic; for the whole point of Grusinskaya’s transformation is that, having hit rock-bottom with half-empty houses at her performances, she is grabbing onto whatever, and whoever, she can in order to survive. And the Baron is gentlemanly and sweet: John Barrymore, in a fine performance. The impoverished Baron, reduced to theft: he, too, is revived by his and Grusinskaya’s sudden love. The tragedy of the outcome for one is inextricable from the tragedy of the other’s outcome, and Garbo in particular achieves an ecstasy of romantic rapport that anticipates heartbreak—heartbreak that is all the more haunting for occurring offscreen, as we know that the Baron has been shot dead while Grusinskaya sets off to rendezvous with him. (Imagine a Hollywood film today opting for dramatic irony over sentimental extravaganza.) Only one other performance by an actress in an American film would match the quality of Garbo’s Grusinskaya, and only one would surpass it: Garbo’s in As You Desire Me (the same year); Garbo’s Marguerite, the Lady of the Camellias, in Camille (1937). Garbo’s closeups in Grand Hotel are to die for, and when Grusinskaya, the most graceful soul in motion one can imagine, happily glides across the floor of her hotel room the morning after her night with the Baron, Garbo achieves a brilliant, thrilling moment of resurgence.

Grand Hotel is atmospherically directed by Edmund Goulding, who drew upon F. W. Murnau’s German silent The Last Laugh (1924) even to the point of duplicating certain shots. The fine script was adapted by William A. Drake from his own play, which in turn was based on Vicki Baum’s novel Menschen im Hotel. It is set in Berlin, in a luxurious, art-deco Grand Hotel of Hollywood imagination, in the early 1930s, that is to say, between the Great War and the advent of Adolf Hitler, and comprises the intersecting lives of some of the guests and others working at the hotel: different classes, different personalities—but all in one sort of crisis or another. Clumsy, uncouth, immoral, Preysing the industrialist (Wallace Beery, who so loved jazz, on target) is desperate to keep his father-in-law’s textile factory from unraveling; Otto Kringelein (Lionel Barrymore, ham-fisted and labored, as usual), Preysing’s low-wage accountant, whom Preysing doesn’t recognize, who is dying and blowing his savings on a last holiday; Flaemmschen, Preysing’s stenographer (Joan Crawford, likeable but lacking in depth—and with Garbo in the picture, not the most beautiful woman around), whose marginal economic situation may force her to “accompany” her married employer on a business trip; Senf (Jean Hersholt, serviceable), a member of the hotel staff, who cannot leave work to join his wife as she gives difficult birth to their child and must worry his way through phone calls to the hospital. The dipsomaniacal hotel doctor, Otternschlag (Lewis Stone, trenchant—if only there had been supporting acting Oscars then!), is a cynical observer of the scene at the hotel: “People come, people go. Nothing ever happens.”

It is ironic that he should think this; and, of course, he does so only because he himself is not quite alive anymore. Hideously scarred from the war, Otternschlag is more or less sitting out his remaining time on the stage of Life. Two shadows cross everyone’s life in this film: the Great War; the depressed economy that followed.

Lean, spare rather than overstuffed, Grand Hotel in splendid fashion introduced the portmanteau genre that Robert Altman would successfully mine beginning several decades later—the zigzagging intersection of various characters’ lives in a single space or locale. Its all-star cast helped make Grand Hotel an important cultural event as well as a popular hit. One more terrific performance needs to be noted: that of Rafaela Ottiano, who movingly plays Grusinskaya’s loyal, anxious attendant, Suzette.

So many lousy films have won best picture Oscars (Cimarron, Cavalcade, Casablanca, On the Waterfront, Around the World in 80 Days, West Side Story, A Man for All Seasons, The Godfather, Rocky, Amadeus, Out of Africa, Dances With Wolves, Silence of the Lambs, Schindler’s List, Titanic, Million Dollar Baby, Crash, among others); but every now and then a really good one wins, if only by accident. Grand Hotel sharply portrays a world on the brink of a kind of madness. Subsequent history would add prophecy, then, to the film’s long list of accomplishments.

GERMANY, YEAR ZERO (Roberto Rossellini, 1947)

Roberto Rossellini is the filmmaker most important to the Italian Neorealist movement. His Rome, Open City (1945) and Paisà (1946), two beautiful works, are justly celebrated. However, the movement’s singular masterpiece is his next film, Germany, Year Zero (Germania, Anno Zero)—although it’s a measure of the breadth of Rossellini’s body of work that one of his films in another direction, Francesco, giullare di Dio (1950), surpasses it, and The Age of Cosimo di Medici (1973) and Blaise Pascal (1972), in still another direction, match its level of attainment.

Receiving French and East German financing, and filmed in German in Berlin with a nonprofessional cast, Germany, Year Zero was written by Rossellini and Max Colpet, with Sergio Amidei contributing to the dubbing script of the Italian version. (It’s the latter that’s currently available on DVD in the States, although the German-language version is available on VHS.) The film took the top prize at Locarno in 1948. Its cool box office reception, though, helped move Rossellini into the arms of Ingrid Bergman, with whom he collaborated on a series of brilliant films that—with the exception of Joan at the Stake (1954), perhaps—blended neorealist and more personal elements.

To begin with, Italian Neorealism has literary roots in Zola’s naturalism in France and, in cinema, can be traced to Visconti’s apprenticeship to Jean Renoir, on whose Toni (1934) Visconti worked as a production assistant. Renoir thus described (in 1956) his approach in making this splendid film: “The cinema is based above everything on photography, and the art of photography is the least subjective of all the arts. Good photography . . . sees the world as it is, is selective, determines what merits being seen and seizes it by surprise, without change . . . . My ambition was to integrate the non-natural elements of my film, those elements not dependent on chance encounter, into a style as close as possible to everyday life. . . There is no studio used in Toni. The landscapes, the houses are those we found. . . . The script was from a true story . . . No stone was left unturned to make our work as close as possible to a documentary. Our ambition was that the public would be able to imagine that an invisible camera had filmed the phases of a conflict without the characters unconsciously swept along by their being aware of the camera’s presence.”

While one must adjust these aims in the case of Rossellini to include a most highly visible camera that in fact becomes, perhaps, the principal “player” in Germany, Year Zero, one detects in Renoir’s description the foundation of neorealismo, which came into being, enjoined to the fatalism of French poetic realism, with Ossessione, Visconti’s sweeping version of James M. Cain’s American novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. Rossellini, along with De Sica, however, moved their neorealism away from literary claims and into rougher visual territory. Their on-location shooting eschewed the somewhat studied compositions and gorgeous aesthetics of Visconti’s aristocratic method, connecting instead with the pulsating random energy of Dziga Vertov’s documentary forays into Moscow streets in the 1920s. (In truth, De Sica’s approach fell somewhere between Visconti’s and Rossellini’s.) Background and foreground, the latter occupied by nonprofessionals (Renoir, in Toni, blended professional actors and nonprofessionals, a procedure that Claude Chabrol would fall heir to), became in a sense interchangeable, the result an encapsulation of everyday life. In the case of Rossellini’s film, this aspect befitted the juncture of a clinically observed case study, that of Edmund, a 12-year-old boy coping with the aftermath of the Second World War in a blasted and blighted Berlin, and the generalization of discombobulated life that the difficulties of his situation exemplify. Germany, Year Zero pursues the general, then, through the particular. Its immediate aim is immediacy—the immediacy of the boy’s experience amidst the immediacy of his environment, each lending compelling credibility to the other and in a sense becoming the other, their interchangeability stressing, in addition to the causal connection in environment’s shaping of the boy’s actions, a sense of random character selection wherein some other selection—for instance, one of the other afflicted children with whom Edmund interacts—might have produced a thematically similar or identical result. The unpolished visual style, partly owing to the use of hand-held camera, is of a piece with this aim of immediacy; indeed, this style, with its implicit banishment of studio tinkering and artifice, comes to encapsulate this immediacy. Nothing must derail this immediacy; hence, neorealism’s use of post-synchronized sound so that the filming could focus on the visual recording of action and milieu without the claim on attention that simultaneous sound recording would impose. So much in Germany, Year Zero collapses figure and ground, theme and method.

To be sure, Rossellini imparts a heightened dramatic sense to Edmund’s misadventures (something the music in particular stresses), but this, too, serves a thematic purpose, for Rossellini hopes to erase the possible complacent reaction that the commonplace of suffering contained in Edmund’s example should reduce its claim on our social consciousness. (The music is by Renzo Rossellini, the filmmaker’s brother. For decades I deemed its emphatic contribution a mistake deriving from nepotism. Now I find the music apt and essential.) The opposite is Rossellini’s aim: that the common nature of such suffering should alert our attention to each and every example and to the task of remedying the conditions that generate so many like instances.

Rossellini’s approach is too clinical, too objective, to admit sentimental notes of wallowing in some sort of guilt for the social distress generated by the collapse of Fascism. Critic Penelope Houston finds in Italian neorealism “[t]he driving urge to rehabilitate the national reputation.” I (happily) find nothing of the sort in Germany, Year Zero. Such an “urge” here would compromise the film’s immediacy; backward-in-time recriminations would prove a distraction. On the other hand, Rossellini’s own need to address his participation in his nation’s recent derelict politics—his need, that is, to do this on his own time, not ours through the film—is another matter entirely. Rossellini, after all, did not share the Marxism of Visconti, De Sica and many other of his fellow neorealists.

About a child, Germany, Year Zero is dedicated to a child. The film begins: “In memory to my son Romano.” This personal note becomes a part of the film, lending startling emotional depth to the film’s clinical approach. In addition, the film’s lack of manipulative sentimentality itself helps account for the pure consideration we as viewers extend to Edmund in light of his hopeless and tragic situation. Like all suicides, but especially those of children, his at the end of the film cannot admit our perfect comprehension, but at the same time it has none of the arbitrary quality of suicides in Hollywood soap operas. It makes perfect sense, even if the sense is too enormously painful to take in and clarify as to causality. Everything we have seen throughout the film, both in Edmund’s own life and in the life everywhere around him, which I have said become in a sense one and the same thing, leads to his ultimate act, but the act itself retains an enormity with which cause-and-effect cannot cope. I know of no other film in which the death of a young child is so stunningly painful. Only one other film, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (1943), leaves me with such inconsolable grief over the loss of a fictitious life. Surely it is part of the greatness of both these films that they find some way that other films don’t to convey to the full the illimitable value of human life.

In a sense, Edmund is crushed by the burden of his milieu, the social panorama that war has wrought. In effect, he is a casualty of the war—a reminder that wars exact casualties even once they have officially ended. Thus the film, after proclaiming its aim to be “an objective assessment” so that the viewer, used to sentimental filmmaking, won’t be thrown by its clinical approach, makes generalizations about Berlin and its children: the city is “almost totally destroyed”; there, “3.5 million people live desperate lives”; “German children need to relearn to love life.” There is no point whatsoever for a film like Germany, Year Zero to be less than perfectly plain about its sense of reality; since the film’s aim is to foster the kind of social consciousness that will search out remedies for appalling social conditions, the opening commentary is entirely justified. It orients viewers—a particular help here, since the actions that will unfold include events one is unlikely to anticipate: a boy killing his father with poison before dropping to his own death from a gutted neighborhood building. It becomes the film’s immediate task following this introduction to locate Edmund in the milieu that will in effect crush him, urging his very young life to suicide. This is effected by a brilliant panning shot of the city that finds Edmund working at digging graves. We will learn that he is pretty much (besides government food rations) his family’s sole financial support—a burden no set of 12-year-old shoulders can hope to bear. But the situation is worse than that, for he won’t even be allowed to succeed in his attempt to bear such a burden. In this opening scene of hard labor—and labor, note, identifying Edmund with death at the outset, hence, indirectly, with his own death at film’s end—he is fired from the job for being, officially, too young for it. Edmund is between a rock and a hard place.

The grave digging introduces two themes. One, because this school-age boy isn’t going to school due to his family’s need for support, is war’s disruption and theft of simple childhood. Indoctrinated by the Nazi regime during the war, Edmund has yet to be returned to any kind of normalcy afterwards. The other theme is war’s relegation of human life to the discardable and disposable. The course of Edmund’s own life and death will bring this theme to fruition, but in the meantime its principal agency is Edmund’s elderly, ailing father. “I’d be better off dead,” he tells Edmund, his youngest child. “I have to watch all of you suffer without being able to help.” The family’s situation is stressed because Edmund’s older brother, a soldier fearful of retaliation from Occupiers, has declined to apply for work or a food ration card for himself. Edmund also has an older sister. His mother is deceased. His family shares quarters with other families. One member of one of the other families helps Edmund when possible by donating a household item so that Edmund can sell it (for himself and his family) on the black market. But Edmund’s father, who during the war hated Hitler, now is equally opposed to black marketeering, either having been or being, it is implied, an affront to his dignity and sense of lawfulness. He must rely on his small son to stay alive, but at one point he slaps Edmund across the face because of the child’s shady associations and activities—because in their service he has stayed out all night. Again this is like Edmund’s losing his grave digging job. It has been left to him to keep family intact body and spirit, but other paternal forces, whether nation or father, oppose this attempt. They have their standards; they have their guilt. But what is Edmund to do?

Edmund is in the process of being all used up. In a scene out of Dickens, he is used by other thieving children, who even confiscate the precious money he had made by selling an item that his neighbor has donated for that purpose. Nor is he safe from adults. A former teacher, whose sexual interest in him Edmund mistakes for pure affection, also uses Edmund. This teacher, a Nazi still, is involved in clandestine political activity in which he involves Edmund, who is unaware of the use he is being put to. Edmund looks up to this man as a father; the teacher is indeed a father’s age—in years, Edmund’s own father could be Edmund’s grandfather—and he is someone to whom Edmund feels he can confide, someone who seems to listen to him. One day, Edmund tells his former teacher about his father’s hopeless remarks, his father’s courtship of the idea of suicide. Distracted from his own political activities, the teacher thoughtlessly says things that Edmund interprets as meaning that killing his father, for his father’s sake and the sake of the family, would be the right thing to do. People are discardable and disposable, after all. Edmund steals poison from the hospital where his father stays for a spell. At home, once his father returns, he poisons his father, who dies. But when he tells his former teacher what he has done, expecting the approval, the gold star, he so desperately needs, the man, fearing political exposure and legal consequences for himself, turns on the boy. In killing his father, the boy has done a horrible thing. How could he do that? How can he now say that the teacher directed this act? The boy is left shattered. He has lost all three of his fathers: his nation; his actual father; his former teacher.

A child is lost before our eyes. We can do nothing to bring him back because we can do nothing to bring his father back. Some acts are irreversible, and a child especially is trapped in their emotional consequences. If you started from a point of barely coping with a burden that no child is emotionally equipped to bear, where do you end? What is Edmund to do? At the close of the film, the day of his father’s funeral, we see Edmund for the first time at play. Searing irony. He is by himself on the pavement and then up in a bombed-out building, playing. Down below, his family, unaware of where he is, call out for him to join them. His eyes go blank, a train passes, taking all hope with it, and he takes his fall. A shot to the pavement confronts us with the result. Some acts are irreversible, and even if you are safely watching a film you are trapped in their emotional consequences.

Edmund: is he the lead character? Certainly the most dynamic “character” is Rossellini’s camera—a darting, sweeping, probing, burrowing camera representing Rossellini’s need to know about the consequences of war in a fallen foreign country. War is responsible—and Hitler. Hitler. In perhaps the film’s most celebrated shot, the voice of Adolf Hitler, giving a rousing speech, plays off the phonograph record that Edmund has unwittingly transported at his former teacher’s behest. (By symbolic association, Edmund is one of Hitler’s children.) We hear that bodiless, empty, still shadowing voice, while what we see—what the camera shows—consists of the ruins of the Chancellery. What we see matches what we hear, and what we hear matches what we see.

But the conclusion of the film: How does something so tragic as Edmund’s death become so satisfying, so beautiful to behold, and how does the beauty advance rather than detract from the tragedy? This is part of the majestic mystery of art that George Santayana attempted to explain near the turn of the century: “Art must not create only things that are abstractly beautiful, but it must conciliate all the competitors these may have to the attention of the world, and it must know how to insinuate their charms among the objects of our passion. But this subserviency and enforced humility of beauty is not without its virtue and reward. If the æsthetic habit lie under the necessity of respecting and observing our passions, it possesses the privilege of soothing our griefs. There is no situation so terrible that it may not be relieved by the momentary pause of the mind to contemplate it æsthetically.” With Rossellini’s neorealism, the beauty of his camera’s eye consoles our grief even as the content, both releasing and containing our inconsolable grief, urges us to take social action. We are participants in that shot of Edmund face-down, crushed, on the pavement because it completes and invigorates our passion: our love for children; our love of life.

Edmund Meschke plays Edmund. Germany, Year Zero could have been Meschke’s story. Acting it out perhaps spared him its becoming his story. This boy gives an indelible performance. It would remain cinema’s most brilliant portrait of a boy for a dozen years, until Jean-Pierre Léaud’s Antoine Doinel in François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows.