Before beginning to shoot on a shoestring budget in March of 1947, the director described his experience of the desolate city. "The city was deserted. The gray of the sky flowed back into the streets and from the height of a man, one could look over the fallen roofs. To find the streets again under the ruins, people had cleared the rubble away, into piles." Employing, as usual, non-professional actors to achieve a greater objectivity, the director nonetheless shapes a drama of chilling power from the simplest of materials. Despite the ubiquity of the sobering spectacle of devastation, in the quiet scene of Herr Enning playing a Hitler speech to the attentive boy, Rossellini suggests the damage which had been done to an entire generation through the relentless brainwashing of fascism. By making Edmund neither especially sympathetic nor heroic, the director heightens one's identification, making the final subjective, almost hallucinatory tracking shot almost unbearable in its intensity.