Word: syberberg
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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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...
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...
...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...