Quote:
The third and longest part of Syberberg’s extraordinary trilogy on German culture, history and nationalism (the two earlier films were Ludwig – Requiem for a Virgin King and Karl May), best described as a high camp, heavy-duty analysis of both history and historical analysis itself. The chosen method is to single out, act out, alter, and finally comment on the lives of a handful of ‘awkward’ German historical figures, from Ludwig of Bavaria through fantasy author Karl May to Hitler, the ‘madman’. Behind aesthetic complexity lies a simple purpose: to show up the sort of historical contradictions solved by Marxists with bare economic models, and by others with suspect reference to the ‘greatness’ or ‘madness’ of the figures involved. Visually lyrical, the style is eclectic to the point of hysteria; and the tone oscillates between the operatic (Wagner figures large) and the colloquial (Hitler in conversation with his projectionist) without ever quite coming unstuck. Humour mixes with mythology and analysis in the attempt to reunite art, history and ideology. It’s a quite remarkable film, with a sense of metaphor equal to its intellectual courage.
Quote:
Susan Sontag has been one of the most perceptive critics to engage Hans Jürgen Syberberg’s Hitler, A Film from Germany , which was released in the United States under the title Our Hitler by Francis Ford Coppola. The film itself, made in twenty days of shooting after four years of preparation on a budget of $500,000, caused an anormous controversy when it was released in 1979, and continues to call for responses, both positive and negative, in critical circles today. […]
Sontag begins her analysis of Syberberg’s film with the claim that the Romantic desire for the “great work” of art, thought by many to be impossible, returns in Syberberg’s film in a powerful rereading that takes into account its own anachronism. Modernism, according to Sontag, has been stripped of its heroic nature as an adversary sensibility.(138) The untimely nature of Syberberg’s undertaking is brought to the fore: it purports to be, once again, a “great work of art,” one that has incorporated a self-reflection concerning what it means to construct such a “great work” in the late 20th century, and the complicity of this art-form with the grandiose staging of Nazi Germany.
Syberberg’s two themes are film and Hitler, the art medium of the twentieth century and the subject of the twentieth century. One might include here all of the permutations of these two terms: Hitler as film, Hitler in film, film as Hitler’s privileged medium, and our own, contemporary construction of Hitler as one that is, ultimately, cinematic in the sense that Hitler functions as a “screen” for many of the internal projection machanisms of modern mass culture, Germany in particular. These two themes in their entwinement are articulated and interrogated on a grand, even “mythic” scale, enacted theatrically on a stage, combining and mixing different modes, genres, media: the puppet show, the fairy tale, circus, morality play, philosophical dialogue, and, of course, film itself.
Syberberg dispenses with all realistic representation. According to Sontag, to simulate atrocity requires the passification of the audience, something that Syberberg struggles against. It also reinforces stereotypes and simplistic generalizations, and confirms our distance from the event and the practice of Nazism. For Syberberg, there is a morally appropriate or apt way to confront Nazi Germany and the Holocaust: one must dispense with realism and realistic conventionality. Simulation of the Genocide as fiction transforms realistic representation into a form of pornography.
including:
– german audio track
– english audio track (only the narrator’s off-screen voice is in english, the rest in german)
– english subtitles for the german parts of the english track (.srt files)
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/3934204F4B4A0C1/Hitler1.avi
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/1B360B210131585/Hitler1.srt
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/C003F21D43601E8/Hitler2.avi
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/8DA405C20FB8FCD/Hitler2.srt
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/3A67F90817FC07E/Hitler3.avi
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/ACC9A1CB7208FBF/Hitler3.srt
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/194DC403C8441F5/Hitler4.avi
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/1EF742598F93309/Hitler4.srt
http://keep2s.cc/file/8addbf59779ac/Hitler1.avi
http://keep2s.cc/file/a644d6f62465a/Hitler1.srt
http://keep2s.cc/file/f9aca59e2d403/Hitler2.avi
http://keep2s.cc/file/b5ec60f34faf3/Hitler2.srt
http://keep2s.cc/file/a52739c144ba0/Hitler3.avi
http://keep2s.cc/file/0e820afd4445d/Hitler3.srt
http://keep2s.cc/file/bdc8e2fb011ae/Hitler4.avi
http://keep2s.cc/file/082f0429f3874/Hitler4.srt
Language(s):German, English
Subtitles:english.srt
