Word: hitlers
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Syberberg indicts the German lawyers, "those hard-working conscientious citizens," who legitimized Hitler's dream. He indicts Hollywood, which determines the quality of its productions democratically--at the box office. "The customer is always right," and "Business is the freedom of democracy," and "One for all and all for one," these were the axioms of the German dream. And so, when the dream was blighted, Hitler declared that "worker equals artist" and instituted the rule of mediocrity. "He legitimized trash," the ventriloquist says. And we are reminded that Hitler was a failed painter and a man who enjoyed the cinema...
Failing as an artist, Hitler went into politics. Politics, "the art of the possible," Syberberg says. And there he directed his banal drama...
...Hitler reappears later after he sinks back into Wagner's grave. He is a puppet. A mannequin. A marionette. A ventriloquist's doll. "Is this the world you pit against mine?" he asks. "In the United Nations, 110 out of 159 countries torture and murder, so each time the U.N. votes, a purely democratic majority votes for inhumanity. Without the extinction of the Indians, the progress in America would have been impossible. I am immortal as long as the world exists," he says, as the ventriloquist undresses him through a series of suits and costumes. "Well done...
THERE IS A CONSTANT undercurrent in this film, background monologues that threaten to convert Our Hitler into a polemic, recordings of speeches by Hitler, Goebbels, Goering. The props, the voices, the music (mostly Wagner, Beethoven, Mozart and Nazi Party songs) play off each other to produce the ideological confusion that is the character of this film, that was also Nazi Germany...
...well as German history from Ludwig I. With this background, with the physical patience to sit through a seven-hour abstraction, one can understand the twists and evil that forged the Nazi ideology from German culture, but that understanding quickly fades back into confusion as Syberberg asks, "Was he [Hitler] too made in God's image?" Invariably, as the title implies, Adolph Hitler is related to everyone, and the most important effect of Our Hitler is the introspection it forces, the realization that Hitler was human--not an aberration--and humans still populate the earth...