The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from Germany, Scandinavia, Finland & Austria list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis
Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s 7½-hour Hitler—ein Film aus Deutschland bombards eye and mind with a staggering vision of Nazism. The non-narrative film fuses Wagnerian opera, political cabaret, wax figures, German film references and fairy-tale mythology (“the World Ice Spirit . . . rebirth . . . master race”), starry heavenly vistas, paintings, speeches, songs, lectures, voiceover, assorted set-pieces to penetrate the fascist German psyche.
Imagined interviews of “men in the street”—those who “elected” Hitler—collapse time and blur the line between history and imagination, finding Hitler at their crossroads. Hitler filled a need for faith in one’s discredited, demoralized nation; he loomed as a god demanding self-sacrifice that appealed to the German appetite for self-debasement.
One remarkable segment: Does it correspond to actuality by dint of metaphor or historical accuracy? What revelation either way! Dressed as Caligari (1919), an actor lectures us, describing the schools for boys that the Nazis instituted. Hitler loved birds, he tells us, and, because cats eat birds, as part of their “education” schoolboys gouged out the eyes of cats. Darwin’s Nature is thus translated into politics “red in tooth and claw,” and self-pity and cruelty, both monstrously enlarged, become indistinguishable. Syberberg’s Caligari proceeds to draw the Nazi identification of Jews with rats.
Another segment draws upon past German cinema: Syberberg redoes the scene in Fritz Lang’s M (1931) in which Peter Lorre’s child-rapist/killer breaks down, explaining to the court that he cannot help doing what he does, that he is in the grip of a compulsion beyond his means to resist. In the new version, the man is a Nazi protesting his inability to resist his own politics! On second thought, though, we may wonder whether this constitutes a reimagined M or a critical analysis of M. What revelation either way!
This entry was posted on September 27, 2007 at 8:38 pm and is filed under Formal Capsule Film Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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OUR HITLER (Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, 1978)
The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from Germany, Scandinavia, Finland & Austria list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis
Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s 7½-hour Hitler—ein Film aus Deutschland bombards eye and mind with a staggering vision of Nazism. The non-narrative film fuses Wagnerian opera, political cabaret, wax figures, German film references and fairy-tale mythology (“the World Ice Spirit . . . rebirth . . . master race”), starry heavenly vistas, paintings, speeches, songs, lectures, voiceover, assorted set-pieces to penetrate the fascist German psyche.
Imagined interviews of “men in the street”—those who “elected” Hitler—collapse time and blur the line between history and imagination, finding Hitler at their crossroads. Hitler filled a need for faith in one’s discredited, demoralized nation; he loomed as a god demanding self-sacrifice that appealed to the German appetite for self-debasement.
One remarkable segment: Does it correspond to actuality by dint of metaphor or historical accuracy? What revelation either way! Dressed as Caligari (1919), an actor lectures us, describing the schools for boys that the Nazis instituted. Hitler loved birds, he tells us, and, because cats eat birds, as part of their “education” schoolboys gouged out the eyes of cats. Darwin’s Nature is thus translated into politics “red in tooth and claw,” and self-pity and cruelty, both monstrously enlarged, become indistinguishable. Syberberg’s Caligari proceeds to draw the Nazi identification of Jews with rats.
Another segment draws upon past German cinema: Syberberg redoes the scene in Fritz Lang’s M (1931) in which Peter Lorre’s child-rapist/killer breaks down, explaining to the court that he cannot help doing what he does, that he is in the grip of a compulsion beyond his means to resist. In the new version, the man is a Nazi protesting his inability to resist his own politics! On second thought, though, we may wonder whether this constitutes a reimagined M or a critical analysis of M. What revelation either way!
This entry was posted on September 27, 2007 at 8:38 pm and is filed under Formal Capsule Film Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.