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This weekend, the most popular thing in New York is a more than seven-hour film about Adolf Hitler.
Screened only once at Film at Lincoln Center, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s rarely screened epic “Hitler, a film from Germany”, according to the programmers, is out of print despite its gigantic duration (which includes some pauses). It’s a curious sort of event film.
Distributed by Francis Ford Coppola, it was first released in the United States in 1980, when it also played to sold-out theaters. Presumably, these viewers were intrigued by the enormous scope of his ambitions. Susan Sontag’s seal of approval was the icing on the cake; she considered it a masterpiece. “There is Syberberg’s film and then there are the other films one admires,” she wrote.
Some 442 minutes later, although the audience leaves the theater coinciding with Sontag, one thing remains true: there is nothing like it.
Divided into four parts, the film is a Wagnerian acid opera, composed of theatrical sketches inspired by the life of the German dictator. Footage from German film classics like “Nosferatu” and “M” are interspersed with archival footage from World War II, creating a surreal collage made even more disorienting by bursts of Beethoven and overlapping stream-of-consciousness narratives. If this “primal scream therapy,” as a voice in the film says, sounds overwhelming, it’s just an example of the film’s dizzying powers. Syberberg didn’t lack a sense of humor either: in one scene, steam rises from a sculpture of a butt. The caption reads: “The biggest fart of the century.”
Given these details, it should come as no surprise that the director was not interested in playing the real Hitler. For him, realistic depictions of Nazi Germany satisfy our morbid fascination and simplify a disturbing and complicated reality.
For its U.S. release, Coppola retitled the film “Our Hitler” because it explores the mythologies and images we associate with the German dictator, meaning that Hitler is not presented as a single man but as a projection of one’s deepest fantasies and desires. dark moments of humanity throughout history. . Various actors play him, as do puppets, cardboard cutouts, and a dog. The film is “about the Hitler in all of us,” Syberbeg once said.
As Sontag writes at length in her article In the film, Syberberg imagines the Nazi leader as a film director. The real Hitler “never visited the front and watched the war every night through newsreels,” he wrote, drawing attention to the way images, even in a documentary, confuse our understanding of reality.
Movies, books, and television shows about the Holocaust and Nazi Germany implore us to never forget it. Keeping the memory of the victims – as well as the forces that conspired to commit such atrocities – fresh in our minds is widely understood as a historical obligation, lest amnesia condemn us to repetition. At the same time, there is an enormous fixation with Hitler that gives these works a disturbingly seductive force. Consider the cliché of suburban parents glued to the History Channel, which tends to emphasize World War II programming. Or Hollywood’s tendency to accord prestige and importance to Holocaust films, which some would call the epitome of “awards bait.”
I’m not sure Syberberg would have liked Jonathan Glazer’s “The Hot Spot,” one of several recent films that seem to actively oppose traditional Holocaust dramas that rely on pathos, like “The Pianist” or “The Schindler’s List. .” On the one hand, Glazer’s hypnotic vision of denial, in which a Nazi couple leads their lives in staged ignorance of the carnage occurring beyond the walls of their property, refuses to recreate the violence of the camp for our voyeurism On the other hand, there is something frustratingly careful and self-righteous about the drama. His ideas of evil as a condition of extreme self-absorption only reconfirm our damning assumptions about the perpetrators of the worst crimes in history. In other words, it is a horror film that disturbs but never offends.
“Hitler, a film from Germany” offends. “The Hot Spot” and its Oscar-nominated sisters “Killers of the Flower Moon” and “Oppenheimer” explore the breakdown of moral compasses and show protagonists confronting their places in history, dealing (some better than others) with their decisions at any given time. existential tone. In the age of smartphones, there is a heightened awareness of global injustice, making art that takes into account our varying degrees of complicity in atrocities feel especially resonant.
Syberberg’s Phantasmagoria strikes a different nerve, one connected to the way works of art (films in particular) filter reality, creating heroes and villains who soothe our troubled relationship with the past. “Hitler” is a mirror facing a world saturated with images released from their usual containers. No wonder he is rude, loud and uninhibited. It’s the closest the movies have come to creating a direct missive from hell.
Other films in the series
Syberberg’s film is part of a series dedicated to French film critic Serge Daney on the occasion of a new translation of his writings, “Footlights,” by Nicholas Elliott. Film at Lincoln Center’s programming features a selection of provocative and politically charged titles from the 1970s. “Histoires d’A,” a moving documentary about the fight for abortion rights in France (it was banned upon its release and sparked protests after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival), shows an abortion procedure in its entirety. “Sàlo, or the 120 Days of Sodom”, the famous last work of Pier Paolo Pasolini, is a theater of sexually deranged cruelty on the perverse foundations of the fascist mentality.
“Hitler, a Film from Germany” is part of “Never Look Away: Serge Daney’s Radical 1970s,” which runs through Feb. 4 at Lincoln Center. For more information, go to filmlinc.org.