Word: syberberg
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...spared in Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's seven-hour misty epic, Our Hitler, least of all the audience. Syberberg seeks to resurrect Hitler and pit him against the world he left behind--a filmic judgment day for Der Fuhrer--and the audience is forced to look into its own eyes. Confusion. No connections. No conclusions. "The results are exhilarating, confounding, and not at all closeended," critic David A. Rosse from the University of California at Berkeley, correctly pointed out. Ultimately, your judgment of Syberberg's Hitler hinges on how you judge your most intimate self...
This is not a film for the masses, Syberberg seems to say in every frame. The authoritarian director guides the work through monologues, dialogues with Hitler, the confessions of Himmler and Hitler, all of it set in the same small studio. The props reconstruct a dream world--often surrealistic--and the actors walk amidst the mannequins in front of slide projections of Hitler's Obersalzburg mansion, his party rallies, old photographs. There are four parts, 22 chapters, and significant hunks of the work deliberately bore, like a condescending challenge, 'Are you good enough to keep up with...
...PHILOSOPHY of Nietzsche echoes in the background: "You must walk the paths of greatness." And it is too bad, Himmler (played admirably by Heinz Schubert) reflects later under the hands of his obese masseur, that "the path of greatness is strewn with corpses." Syberberg never shows the corpses, but traces the phenomenon back to its birth as fantasy, a dream in the Nazi mind, with tortured mannequins hanging from the gallows, dismembered dolls, as the film proceeds from its first parts, "The Grail" and "A German Dream" to "The End of Winter's Tale" and "We Children of Hell...