FS110: Film and the City, Week 02 - Germany Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, 1948)

Course Logistics and Administrative Information

  • Teaching Assistants (TAs):

    • Jacob Carroll (carr7760@mylaurier.ca): For T1 or T2 tutorials.

    • Alek Szaranski (szar3320@mylaurier.ca): For T3 or T10 tutorials.

  • TA Responsibilities: They lead tutorials, mark assignments, and serve as the main point of contact for all FS110 inquiries.

  • Office Hours:

    • Jacob’s: Wednesday, 2:30–3:30pm in DAWB 3-129

    • Alek’s: Tuesday, 3:30–4:30pm in DAWB 3-127

  • Tutorial Structure: Held each Tuesday, tutorials are a continuation of the previous week’s lecture material, not a preview. It is advisable to review prior material to be prepared for discussions and writing activities.

Special Film Screening

  • Film: Taipei Story

  • When: Monday, October 27 at 7pm

  • Where: LH1011

  • Importance: This film is typically difficult to access, making this screening the best opportunity to see it.

Recap of Last Week's Lecture

  • Georg Simmel's "The Metropolis and Mental Life": Used as an entry point to understand the concept of the city and its inhabitants.

  • Key Definitions: The related concepts of the city and modernity were defined.

  • City Symphony as Representation: Explored as an approach to representing modernity in a modernist way, with Berlin: Symphony of a Great City serving as the primary example.

  • Transition to This Week: The focus remains on Berlin, but moves forward in time from the pre-World War II era to the immediate post-war period.

Introduction to This Week: Berlin Before and After

  • Post-War Urban Transformation: Many Germans who fled and then returned to cities like Berlin found them utterly transformed. The vibrant Berlin of Weimar cinema, characterized by entertainment, industry, traffic, and crowds, had vanished.

  • A Landscape of Desolation: It was replaced by "a landscape of rubble and desolation" (Mennel 110), marking a stark contrast to its pre-war state.

Nazi Art and German Cinema Under the Third Reich

Nazi Art in Theory

  • Joseph Goebbels's Philosophy: The chief Nazi propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, emphasized and even equated art with politics.

  • Central Role of Art: He fixated on art's crucial role in constructing his idealized vision of a public unified around the Nazi Party.

  • Politics as the Highest Art: According to Goebbels, "Politics, too, is an art, perhaps the highest and most far-reaching one of all, and we who shape modern German politics feel ourselves to be artistic people, entrusted with the great responsibility of forging out of the raw material of the masses a solid, well-wrought structure of a volk" (Heck 24).

  • Function of Nazi Art: A primary function of Nazi art was the "unification of the inchoate actions and events of a national social life into a coherent and singular body" (Heck 24).

Nazi Art in Practice

  • Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935): Susan Buck-Morss critiques how the film's visual spectacle, with "mobilized masses fill[ing] the ground of the Nuremberg Stadium and the cinema screen, so that the surface patterns provide a pleasing design of the whole, letting the viewer forget the purpose of the display, the militarization of society for the teleology of making war" (quoted in Heck 25).

German Cinema Control Under the Third Reich (1933–1945)

  • Gradual Government Control: The Nazi government progressively assumed more control over the film industry.

  • 1934 Legislation: A law was passed requiring government approval for all film projects.

  • 1936 Ban on Criticism: Goebbels banned film criticism, allowing only neutral descriptions and positive reviews, explicitly prohibiting analysis or negative assessments.

  • Tax Exemptions: Films deemed "especially politically and artistically valuable" were tax-exempt, creating an incentive for films promoting Nazi ideology in appealing ways.

  • Peak Popularity: German film reached its highest popularity under Hitler's Third Reich, a level "never reached before or since" (Brockmann 144).

  • Decline in Exports: Film exports sharply declined from 40% of revenue to only 6% in the first four years of Nazi rule.

  • Exodus of Jewish Talent: Jewish workers (actors, directors) were banned, leading to an influx of talent into Hollywood.

Joseph Goebbels on Effective Propaganda

  • Subtlety is Key: Goebbels believed that effective propaganda never appears overtly intended. "The moment people become conscious of propaganda, it becomes ineffective" (quoted in Brockmann 142).

  • Embedded Propaganda: Propaganda is most effective when it "remains in the background as a tendency, as a character, as an attitude, and only becomes apparent through plot, through development, through actions, and through contrasts among people" (quoted in Brockmann 142).

Kracauer’s Critique of Berlin: Symphony of a Great City

  • Indifference and Mechanization: Siegfried Kracauer argued that the film suggests universal indifference through "the formalization of social contrasts as well as from the repeated insertion of window-dressings with their monotonous rows of dolls and dummies." He contended that human beings are "forced into the sphere of the inanimate," portraying society's life as "a harsh, mechanical process" (Kracauer 186).

  • "Proto-Nazi Cinema" Elements: Carl Mayer's critique of Berlin as a "surface approach" condemned director Walter Ruttmann's formal attitude towards a reality that demanded criticism and interpretation. Kracauer argued that a humane filmmaker would not have recorded increasing mechanization without "objectifying his horror of it" (Kracauer 187).

German Cinema After the Third Reich

  • Post-War Silence: Immediately after the war, "All public utterances, whether mediated through the press, radio, literature, universities, theater, or music, were silenced" (Shandley 1-2).

  • Allied Filtering and Control: The Allies began a "thorough and deliberate process of filtering the voices that were allowed to speak" (Shandley 1-2).

  • Film Industry's Delayed Re-entry: The film industry was the last medium allowed to re-enter the public sphere due to its strong propagandistic role in the Nazi state and Germany's economic potential as a market for Allied cultural products.

  • Prevention of Nazi Hegemony: The Allies aimed to both capitalize on the German market and prevent those who managed Nazi film culture from regaining control.

  • Law 191 (May 12, 1945): This law "banned immediately" the "production, publication, distribution, sale, commercial rental, and showing of motion pictures of all kinds, as well as the activity of movie theaters, film studios, film laboratories, and distribution organizations" (Wickham 34).

  • Licensing and De-Nazification: Post-war, all new film releases and projects required licensing in their respective Allied zones, and film professionals underwent a de-Nazification process, often through questionnaires.

DEFA (Deutsche Film AG - East German Film Industry)

  • West vs. East German Filmmaking: Unlike the ad hoc filmmaking in the West, DEFA quickly established a functioning structure similar to Ufa (the major German film studio during the Nazi era).

  • Open Environment: In its early years, DEFA offered a more open environment and greater artistic freedom to directors compared to those under Goebbels's Ufa.

  • Project Approval Process: Studio management accepted proposals from various artists, pursuing commercially and ideologically viable ones. There was little evidence of controlling content beyond project acceptance.

  • Creative Hub: DEFA showed promise as a creative center for film talent from across Germany and Europe. Roberto Rossellini even worked with DEFA on his 1947 film Germania Anno Zero (Germany Year Zero).

  • Superior Technical Capacity: DEFA studios provided technical capabilities that facilities in the Western sectors initially struggled to match.

The Trümmerfilme (1946–1949)

  • Definition: "Rubble films" were a cycle of German films produced in the immediate post-war period (1946–1949).

  • Ruins as Metaphor: Destroyed cityscapes were not just settings but also metaphors for the human condition, atmospheric determinants, elements of emplotment, and starting points for memory processing and future projections (Wickham 24).

  • Historical Moment: The ruins marked precise historical moments, serving as sites "for negotiating guilt, redemption, and rebuilding after the Holocaust and the Second World War" (Mennel 105).

  • Mission: Eric Rentschler defined their mission as "clearing away the rubble, restoring human agency, and creating the conditions for a future community" (quoted in Wickham 42).

  • Vergangenheitsbewältigung: This German term refers to the process of coming to terms with the past, specifically regarding the war and the Holocaust.

  • Allied Influence: Robert R. Shandley suggests that Trümmerfilme may not truly express "actual postwar German culture" due to Allied censorship. Instead, they cast "certain versions of history into the public memory of that period, versions that then serve as models for how that past is remembered" (Mennel 110).

  • Shift to Pejorative Term: The term Trümmerfilme quickly evolved from a descriptive label to a pejorative one, as audiences began to avoid these often "preachy and unpleasant" films in favor of escapism.

  • Postwar Victimhood (German Perspective):

    • Conflation of Guilt and Suffering: Most Trümmerfilme treated the question of guilt as one of many post-war problems, often conflating the wrongs committed during the Third Reich with the Germans' own post-war suffering (Shandley 4).

    • Symbolic Equivalence: Former German soldiers returning from war were frequently placed in the same symbolic position as survivors of death camps (Shandley 4).

Roberto Rossellini's Germany Year Zero (1948)

  • Contrasting with Nazi Cinema: In opposition to the "pleasing pattern" of Nazi cinema, Germany Year Zero "proposes no pleasing pattern; it pushes the audience to pay attention to the circumstances on display but without the ordering function upon which Nazi cinema so heavily relied" (Heck 25).

  • Narrative Focus: The film's narrative largely revolves around "negotiating the shared space with each other, how to survive and address the past, and how to be a moral person amid corruption" (Mennel 115).

  • Political Implications of Decay: The film depicts a world "ruined by violent attempts to orient meaning in a particular way." Its refusal "to render a particular future and insists instead on decay is exactly what makes it a political film, for through these pauses and disruptions Germany Year Zero casts doubt on those who might present a solution" (Heck 28).

  • Simmel's Relevance: Georg Simmel's concepts of the blasé attitude and the money economy are highly applicable. The film illustrates the zero-sum competition and high tension among individuals crammed together and forced to compete for scarce resources.

    • Simmel noted that "The self-preservation of certain personalities is bought at the price of devaluating the whole objective world, a devaluation which in the end unavoidably drags one’s own personality down into a feeling of the same worthlessness" (Simmel 15).

  • Generational Guilt and Trauma: The film portrays "three generations of Germans caught between two world wars and their loss of identity" (Cadel 277).

    • Karl Heinz: Edmund's elder brother, a veteran traumatized by his experiences in the Wehrmacht during campaigns in Africa and Russia, including the Battle of Stalingrad.

    • Battle of Stalingrad: Occurred between August 21, 1942, and February 2, 1943, it was the turning point of WWII in Europe and is considered the bloodiest battle in human history, with over 1.5 million casualties.

    • Edmund: Represents the third generation and takes on responsibility for everything.

Italian Neorealism: Context for Germany Year Zero

The Surface of Italian Neorealism

  • Distinctive Visual Style: Characterized by a preference for:

    • Location filming.

    • Use of non-professional actors.

    • Avoidance of ornamental mise-en-scene.

    • Preference for natural light.

    • Freely-moving, documentary-style photography.

    • Non-interventionist approach to film directing.

    • Avoidance of complex editing and post-production processes that might draw attention to the artifice of the film image.

  • Cinema of Fact: André Bazin advocated for neorealism as a cinematic agenda, perceiving it as a "cinema of 'fact' and 'reconstituted reportage'" (Shiel 1-2).

Under the Surface of Neorealism

  • Major Project: Marsha Landy defines neorealism's primary goal as "the demystification of the ideology and practices of fascism." These films explored themes such as "authoritarianism; bureaucracy and power; violence; consensus and conformity; the oppression of workers, and passive obedience to tradition, the law, and the state" (Heck 26).

  • "Aesthetics of Rejection": Mira Liehm characterized neorealist cinema as such, emphasizing its rejection of the visual style, mythology, politics, and working methods of the fascist-era cinema (Shiel 2).

  • Commitment to Realism: Neorealist filmmakers visually expressed a commitment to highlighting the lives of ordinary, everyday Italians, especially the working class.

Comparison: Somewhere in Berlin vs. Germany Year Zero

Somewhere in Berlin's Didacticism

  • Socialist Ideology: This film illustrates a socialist ideology of collective work where "labor provides the path to redemption" (Mennel 113).

  • Example Narrative: The story involves Willi stealing food, falling from a ruin and dying, and Gustav mourning. Gustav's uncle explains the need for a mission. The film concludes with children rebuilding a garage, emphasizing the communist preference for places of production over private dwellings.

Germany Year Zero's Objectivity

  • Absence of Inner Conflict: In contrast to didacticism, Germany Year Zero portrays Edmund's patricide as a calculated act, directly inspired by a Nazi schoolmaster's words ("the weak must perish so that the strong may live"). However, the film avoids showing "any sign of indifference, or cruelty, or possible sorrow" on Edmund's face (Bazin 123).

  • Filmmaker's Concern: The film does not delve into "how, and at the cost of how much inner conflict" the decision was made, as "This is not the filmmaker’s concern" (Bazin 123).

  • Emotion Filtered by Intelligence: André Bazin noted Rossellini's unique ability to engage audiences in an action while maintaining its objective context, arguing that the audience's "emotion is thus rid of all sentimentality, for it has been filtered by force through our intelligence" (Bazin 124).

Upcoming Material

  • Next Film: The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949). A streaming link will be available on MyLS.

  • Next Readings: Mennel, "The dark city and film noir: Los Angeles."

Works Cited

  • Bazin, André. Bazin at Work: Major Essays & Reviews from the Forties and Fifties. Edited by Bert Cardullo, translated by Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo, Routledge, 2014.

  • Brockmann, Stephen. A Critical History of German Film. Camden House, 2010.

  • Cadel, Francesca. “Mutations and Mutants in Europe after World War II: Germany, Year Zero by Roberto Rossellini.” ITALICA, vol. 93, no. 2, 2016, pp. 274–285.

  • Hake, Sabine. German National Cinema. 2$^{nd} ed., Routledge, 2008.

  • Heck, Kalling. After Authority: Global Art Cinema and Political Transition. Rutgers University Press, 2020.

  • Mennel, Barbara. Cities and Cinema. 2$^{nd} ed., Routledge, 2019.

  • Shandley, Robert R. Rubble Films: German Cinema in the Shadow of the Third Reich. Temple University Press, 2001.

  • Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” The City Cultures Reader, edited by Malcolm Miles and Tim Hall, with Iain Borden, 2$^{nd} ed., Routledge, 2004, pp. 12–19.

  • Shiel, Mark. Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City. Wallflower Press, 2006.

  • Wickham, Christopher. “Postwar Tales of Two Cities: Rubble Films from Berlin and Munich.” Film Criticism, vol. 37, no. 3, 2014, pp. 24–47.