Merry Christmas From Hans and Adolph

Hans Jurgen Syberberg’s Hitler: A Film From Germany aka Our Hitler (1978) is one of the most unusual movies ever made, a 7½ hour meditation on Hitler and what he meant, played out on a black soundstage in front of ever-changing slide projections, with actors in multiple roles, puppets, dry ice, and various symbolic objects, the whole thing accompanied by the soaring music of Richard Wagner. And here’s the best part , you can watch the entire thing on Quicktime FREE right here, thanks to the folks at Subterranean Cinema.

To quote Susan Sontag: “Syberberg assumes importance both for his art (the art of the twentieth century: film) and for his subject (the subject of the twentieth century: Hitler). The assumptions are familiar, crude, plausible. But they hardly prepare us for the scale and virtuosity with which he conjures up the ultimate subjects: hell, paradise lost, the apocalypse, the last days of mankind. Leavening romantic grandiosity with modernist ironies, Syberberg offers a spectacle about spectacle: evoking ‘the big show’ called history in a variety of dramatic modes, fairy tale, circus, morality play, allegorical pageant, magic ceremony, philosophical dialogue, Totentanz, with an imaginary cast of tens of millions and, as protagonist, the Devil himself.”

Also available on DVD. Demanding, to say the least, but for anyone interested in what can be done with film , inspirational.