Among the many new DVD titles listed for sale at
Luminous Film and Video Wurks is Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's 7-hour-long magnum opus
Hitler, a Film from Germany (1977). It's not clear from the LFVW site whether this an imported copy of the BFI box set from 1994 -- but at $14.95 it's a real bargain. (For those with really high-speed connections and limitless patience, the entire film can also apparently be viewed online at
Syberberg's own Web site free of charge).
"Originally presented on German television in four parts, Syberberg presents a simple theme: Such evil as occurred in Hitler could never have existed without the support, however unwitting, of the rest of humanity. The presentation is the stuff of nightmares. The music of Hitler's beloved Richard Wagner is included to suggest a sort of decadent, modern Wagnerian opera. Syberberg's vision is not an optimistic one; it is forthright and brutal in its honesty, a vision of humanity's dark, unsettling dreams."
"
Susan Sontag [was] one of the most perceptive critics to engage 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 enormous controversy when it was released in 1979, and continues to call for responses, both positive and negative, in critical circles today.
"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. "
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posted by Steve Gallagher @ 4/25/2005 02:53:00 PM
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