•
Rating: The great cinema on debaser, or Dado and the history of cinema.
I have never been a film buff. However, as I was nearing the end of my time in the elementary schools of a not-so-cheerful village in the Cagliari area, a series of VHS tapes titled "L’Unità e Ricordi presentano i Capolavori italiani" arrived at my house.
The young Dado thus consumed, before entering the difficult adolescent phase, between a tennis match and a soccer kickabout, the first great classics of (his) film collection: he memorized lines from “Per un pugno di dollari” and “Totò a colori,” but was moved only by empathizing with the story of little Edmund Koeller.
This is how I discovered Rossellini's cinema, and Germany Year Zero was the first film I saw from the extraordinary trilogy about the fascist and anti-fascist war by Rossellini.
Only later did I watch the equally pathetic and more famous Rome, Open City and the more neorealistic and challenging Paisà.
Years and years later, the now-adult Dado watches that work again, wondering if a film with a thousand artistic merits and pedagogical purposes like this one can still be watched without catastrophic reactions by a young audience of millennials. And he doesn't have an answer.
The film opens with three minutes of wide shots and tracking shots that show us a destroyed city, Berlin, with a documentary spirit.
At the end of these three minutes, to tragic music, a voice-over communicates the motivations and purpose of the work:
"This film, shot in Berlin in the summer of 1947, is intended to be an objective and faithful depiction of this immense semi-destroyed city, where three and a half million people lead an existence that is appalling and desperate, almost without realizing it, living in tragedy as in their natural element, but not because of strength of spirit or faith, but out of weariness. It is neither an indictment against the German people, nor a defense, but a serene statement of facts; but if someone, after watching the story of Edmund Koeller, thinks that something must be done, that German children must be taught to love life again, then the effort of those who made this film will have been rewarded."
In this real context, only one story is told, that of Edmund, a hungry thirteen-year-old German; it is an imaginary but plausible story that gives resonance to all the stories that tragically end in the anonymity of the Berlin multitude.
Edmund lives in a single room with his sick father, his brother Karl Heinz, and his sister Eva. The landlords, who accommodate five families, are grumpy and resentful towards Edmund and all the guests. Of the three family members, the first is bedridden by illness, the second, Karl Heinz, is a German war veteran who hides because, being defeated, he is afraid of surrendering to the victors, and the third, Eva, takes care of the family as she can, between food queues and bars frequented by foreign victors, yet remains faithful to her fiancé missing in the war.
Edmund feels the weight of the entire family on his shoulders and seeks every way to bring something home to eat. But the task is fraught with obstacles.
The film follows two days in the boy's life. A life hardened by the city streets. In a place where men and women live desperate existences, there is no room for solidarity and love for the weakest, but everything is reduced to a struggle for survival (and we quote the title of the extraordinary historical documentary by Rossellini's son).
Thus, the mass of desperate adult Berliners does not rebel against an inhumane employer but drives away the boy, too young to have the right to a work card and thus to a job.
Being excluded from state care, Edmund must rely on the solidarity of individuals, ending up out of the frying pan into the fire.
Edmund thus confronts a hell where children survive by pilfering and small tricks (something worse than the violent life depicted by Pasolini) and the adults are spiteful (see the landlord) or, worse, are sycophantic, sly, and ambiguous (such as, in particular, Edmund's old Nazi elementary school teacher).
In such a world, there is no light for Edmund.
In his events, there is no space for the unpredictable and irrational; instead, they are governed by a deterministic idea of life: where there is the deepest despair and misery, and solidarity between men and women is lost, life becomes impossible.
And little Dado discovered a passion for a certain kind of pathetic cinema with dramatic and desperate stories.
Is it any surprise that over the years I've become passionate about the victim protagonists in Lars Von Trier's films?
And the film closes with a new wide shot of the other protagonist of the film, Berlin, a semi-destroyed city, a symbol of a nation on its knees.
Loading comments slowly
