Guilt And Rubble: 15 Essential Post-War Films

This week, "Phoenix," Christian Petzold's noirish investigation into identity, loyalty and guilt in immediate post-war Germany, arrives in cinemas (our rave review from last year's Toronto International Film Festival can be found here). It's a heady, beautifully shot and deeply mysterious story, but perhaps more than anything, it's about the unknowability of a person's heart and the deceptiveness of appearances. These are particularly resonant themes given the film's fascinating setting in place and period: within this richly evocative environment, people become more than characters in interpersonal dramas —they become metaphors for Germany's guilt, shame or resentment about the recent Nazi past or symbols of the desire to simply forget.

For anyone interested in the points at which the history of film irrevocably intersects with world history, World War II marks an abrupt caesura, a before-and-after moment in time that fundamentally remade the world, as well as...