There is no genre to accurately describe Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's seminal 1977 film Hitler: A Film From Germany. It's definitely not a documentary — it's mostly filmed on stages with actors reading lines — but it can't be called a narrative either. It's certainly not fiction. And even at 442 minutes, it's too accessible to be called experimental — although that descriptor comes close. But for many years, Hitler was something else: unseen. After its legendary theatrical run in New York in 1980 (during which Susan Sontag called it the most extraordinary film she had ever seen), it went missing. Screened rarely, and long unavailable on video in the U.S., it has now appeared as a welcome DVD from Facets Video.
Using tableaux, speeches, archival documents, musical passages, puppet theater, you name it, the film explores the many essences of Adolf Hitler and their relation to his nation's psyche. Contrary to the lone-nut theory of history, which posits that Hitler came out of nowhere, Syberberg argues that Hitler was a manifestation of Western culture's darkest aspects — a myth made man, propelled to power in part by the culture around him, and in particular cinema. So, we get Hitler as a ventriloquist's dummy, Hitler as a toga-wearing figure rising out of Wagner's grave, Hitler as Charlie Chaplin, Hitler as film director/viewer. (It's kind of like I'm Not There, only instead of Richard Gere there's a puppet.) Most films reassure their viewers that they are normal and sane and good. (When we are made to identify with villains in films, that's usually a good sign that the villain in question will have a last minute change of heart, die a redemptive death, or turn out to be an undercover cop.) Syberberg's film does the exact opposite. It says that Hitler was us and that we are him.
That's not an easy charge to swallow. (And it most certainly wasn't in 1977, at the height of the Cold War, when the bad guys were supposed to be someone else.) But Syberberg is no ordinary filmmaker or theorist: Hitler is a spellbinding film, an aesthetic extravaganza that repeatedly achieves its own Wagnerian heights of glory (but only in the most self-aware way) while keeping us transfixed with its disturbing vision of history and culture. Syberberg charts the development of cinema alongside the development of Hitler, and there's a more subtle and overarching theme here: that the mesmerizing gaze of cinema is somewhat akin to the mass cultural hypnosis of the Nazi era. Just as Hitler used the power of myth and image to pass on his hateful ideologies to his people, so Syberberg utilizes the power of cinema to make palatable a very disturbing indictment of the Western soul. Enjoy it if you can. — Bilge Ebiri
SPECIAL FEATURES: A film so dense with thought is virtually its own special feature, so there's little in the way of extras in this set. (Besides, who wants to kick back with outtakes after seven-and-a-half hours of this film?) That said, Facets has provided a valuable booklet of essays, which includes Sontag's historic gush.