Word: syberberg
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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...
...order to understand this hellish confusion, Syberberg demands an intellectual involvement with Hegel, Schiller, Nietzsche, Wagner, as 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...
...culture that Hitler created has been preserved in bits and pieces in the years since 1945, in plastic and asphalt and machines, and they are abstracted on Syberberg's set. The puppets (crafted with cracked faces and a preserved realism) and mannequins are at least half-human, and the actors sometime pose as mannequins. It all seems jerky, not serious, but at the end of every visual fantasy Syberberg's rejoinder emerges out of the monologue to remind you how serious he is: "God created ten men beating their breasts, lamenting, and one who entertained them, laughing. Which...
...SYBERBERG'S VISIONS of the Hitler phenomenon are tied together from part to part by the wanderings of Amelie Syberberg--the director's child--through the mise-en-scene. Cuddling a stuffed dog with swastika tags, hurrying from corpse to corpse, the rubble of the bombed Reichstag. She begins and ends each part of Our Hitler, and she leads us to Hitler's last stand, where the ventriloquist approaches his Hitler dummy and puts him on trial. "You are to blame for the successful imperialism of Moscow, Adolph Hitler. You are to blame for the eternal Jew, wandering, for homes...