Word: syberberg
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...Union City has other things on its mind. For a start, this is a film noir in garish, ominous primary colors; the design takes its cue from the camp surrealism of modern Germanic directors like Daniel Schmid and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. More important, however funny-peculiar the plot, Union City tracks its characters' shabby lives and squalid passions so relentlessly that it becomes a portrait of lower-middle-class despair. And Lipscomb's performance is devastatingly acute. His gestures are just too broad, his harsh voice much too loud; Harlan's swagger and insecurity...
...Germany, a volume of modern myths that has almost Biblical significance for those that lived through The War and knew Nazi Germany; and for the younger generation, for whom the swastika and the "heil" are the lost trapping of a confusing, all too-recent past. Even Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's seven-hour nightmare, Our Hitler, with its pounding Wagner and Beethoven, acknowledges Oskar's drum. It beats in time to the modern German effort to recreate Hegel's sense of history, Goethe's sense of self, Nietzche's sense of strength and Gunter Grass' cheeky sense of post-modern myth...
...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...
...Amelie Syberberg follows this cue, in the last scenes of the film, stripping down to a white, flowing dress, hurrying past a projection of Frankenstein's bride. She sits on the moon, the stars above--out of human reach--she sits with her hands over her ears...