We're told that Hitler could be surprisingly oblivious to clothes, and that the man who killed millions of human beings couldn't bear to see a cat kill a bird. If no man is a hero to his valet, Hitler was human-sized to his, living simply, capable of a sentimentality that made him weep at the sight of a Christmas tree. Left to himself, he'd revert to looking baggier and more rumpled than you'd expect from the supreme being of the Third Reich, otherwise a genius at marketing himself. Hitler sensed what a shamed post-WW I Germany wanted and served it up on a massive scale, with an unerring instinct for theatrics. Although taking great pains to link himself to mytho-heroic antecedents, he was shrewd enough to stress that he was anti-elitist, a man of the masses in an age where mass culture was launching itself, especially through movies, of which Hitler was a great devotee. Social evenings at the Reichschancellory, we re told, ended with movie showings in Hitler's private screening room. (Among his favorites: Broadway Melody, Disney animations, Die Nibelungen of Fritz Lang, who had the good sense to flee Germany.)
This is not the History Channel Hitler. Our Hitler isn't a documentary in the usual sense. It's a large-spanned meditation on Hitler, where he came from, culturally speaking, what he tapped into, and how he changed Europe and the rest of the world. It's no coincidence that Syberberg had already filmed similar takes on King Ludwig II of Bavaria, Karl May, king of German pulp fiction, and Winifred Wagner, the composer's daughter-in-law who ran Bayreuth and was Hitler's friend. At times, the film seems an extension and logical destination of those films, a cinematic equivalent of Ludwig's extravagant castles or Wagner's Ring Cycle.
Utilizing Brechtian distancing to the max, Syberberg fills a huge stage with vivid tableaux and resonant props a snow globe, hanged corpses in uniform dangling from gallows, a little girl with a stuffed toy (Syberberg's daughter, Amelie). Most notable of all is an almost life-sized puppet of Hitler as a ventriloquist's dummy, staring severely from beneath his signature haircut. Syberberg, addressing the puppet, sinks into something like a reverie in a pretend dialogue cataloguing the resonances, including Hitler's so-called legacy. All including a huge screen on which archival footgae is projected upstage as backdrop -- is surrounded by darkness. There are lots of shadows, lots of mist. Much is seen through apertures, as if we're peeping through various keyholes into the psychic history of Germany.
The Hitler puppet bristles with something like malignant life. But while there can be no question that Our Hitler contextualizes Hitler with a breadth (if not quite depth) no other film has, Syberberg does tend to drone on. It's at times fascinating, at times exasperatingly self-indulgent. Syberberg's words (he's on camera a lot) are punctuated by radio clips of the voices of Hitler, Goebbels, and the like. (Why, you ask yourself, does Hitler's method of address to a populace we are told adored him, involve so much shouting?) Lots of Wagner on the soundtrack, too, of course, to go with the crazed rant. Lots of death in both. One vivid stage picture involves an actor dressed as Hitler in a toga, rising up from Wagner's grave.
The "Our" in the title, by the way, isn't Syberberg's. It was affixed by Francis Ford Coppola, who trimmed the film from 442 minutes to 407 in releasing it in the U.S. The "Our" also presents something of a problem, tilting the film toward a share-the-guilt view. Syberberg goes to great pains to point out that Hitler is a particularly Germanic product German romanticism gone psychotic. Not that he fails to add that Hitler's model for genocide could have been the American extermination of what he calls Red Indians, or that subsequent models were developed by Stalin's Soviet imperialism and other monstrous slaughters in the name of political abstractions. As Syberberg tells the unseeing Hitler puppet: "You've poisoned everything with your touch." And, he adds, the malignancy is far from extinct.
In making you shudder at the industrial scale of Hitler's hate-fueled killing and lunatic ravings, the film also makes you shudder at Hitler's perversion of language, the barbaric actions to which he affixed the labels bravery, heroism, nobility and so on. Syberberg knows his Orwell. The more horrible Hitler's horrors, the loftier and more abstract the language became. It doesn't help that Syberberg has his own language problems. Possibly he was doing an ironic riff on kitsch when he begins the film by telling us "The mysterious path goes inward, into night" or ends it by calling what we have just seen "a projection of the bloodbath of the future." Although some of his pronouncements and connections are pretty contorted and others are simply bloated and shaky, he has a brain, but he doesn't have much of an ear. One might almost say, with apologies to Cole Porter, down, down, down he goes, into the ground he goes, in a spin, loving the spin he's in, loving that old black magic of death. Or at least transfixed by it.
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by Jay Carr
