Mar 19, 2018
Germany Year Zero dir. Roberto Rosselini (1948)
Something of the classical tragedy to this film. Edmund, like Macbeth and Oedipus, makes the wrong move in a moment of crisis. For this he must pay the ultimate price.
There’s a moment in which an illicit speech by Hitler is played on a record player in the ruins and it echoes out among the toppled walls and roofless buildings and assorted rubble of it’s own aftermath. A beautiful moment and a perfect instance of associative montage.
According to Rossellini, the whole film was in service of the sequence of the boy wandering along through the rubble, which was his initial inspiration.
