Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Hitler movie is coming out
I feel compelled to see it.
Critics are giving "Der Untergang" mixed reviews, but there is a general consensus that Swiss-born actor Bruno Ganz's creepily convincing portrayal of the Nazi tyrant is a small masterpiece. In his humanity, Hitler comes across as all the more ghastly.
"If you portray a character like Hitler, you have to portray him as he was," said Bernd Eichinger, the film's producer and screenwriter. "And he was a human being. He was not an alien. He was not another species. I think it's dangerous simply to show him as a maniac or a monster."
Eichinger based his screenplay on the writings of Joachim Fest, a respected historian, and the memoirs of Traudl Junge, Hitler's secretary during the final days.
"We don't have to forget that this man had a charisma. He had the ability to suck millions of people into his ideas and to keep them convinced that he was the one who would lead them out of their misery," Eichinger said.
Eichinger, whose credits as a producer include "The Mists of Avalon," "Resident Evil" and the newly released "Resident Evil: Apocalypse," said that for today's audiences, a feature film often was more "real" than a documentary.
"In a documentary, you have people flicker around in black and white, and you see them mostly in official situations and you don't understand what was it that made everybody follow this man with this strange voice," he said.
"What we did was to take it out of the faraway historical situation. With a feature, you bring these things alive now. Every time the movie is screened it's sort of here and now, and you have to include yourself. You are part of the events and you ... are forced to ask, `What would I have done?'"
. . .
Wolfgang Wittermann, a historian at the Berlin Free University, said all of this was good in that it helped create an audience for serious research into Germany's Nazi past, but bad because movies tend to gloss over the complicity of the German people in the crimes of the Nazi regime at a time when many Germans are beginning to absolve themselves of the sins of their fathers and grandfathers.
Critics are giving "Der Untergang" mixed reviews, but there is a general consensus that Swiss-born actor Bruno Ganz's creepily convincing portrayal of the Nazi tyrant is a small masterpiece. In his humanity, Hitler comes across as all the more ghastly.
"If you portray a character like Hitler, you have to portray him as he was," said Bernd Eichinger, the film's producer and screenwriter. "And he was a human being. He was not an alien. He was not another species. I think it's dangerous simply to show him as a maniac or a monster."
Eichinger based his screenplay on the writings of Joachim Fest, a respected historian, and the memoirs of Traudl Junge, Hitler's secretary during the final days.
"We don't have to forget that this man had a charisma. He had the ability to suck millions of people into his ideas and to keep them convinced that he was the one who would lead them out of their misery," Eichinger said.
Eichinger, whose credits as a producer include "The Mists of Avalon," "Resident Evil" and the newly released "Resident Evil: Apocalypse," said that for today's audiences, a feature film often was more "real" than a documentary.
"In a documentary, you have people flicker around in black and white, and you see them mostly in official situations and you don't understand what was it that made everybody follow this man with this strange voice," he said.
"What we did was to take it out of the faraway historical situation. With a feature, you bring these things alive now. Every time the movie is screened it's sort of here and now, and you have to include yourself. You are part of the events and you ... are forced to ask, `What would I have done?'"
. . .
Wolfgang Wittermann, a historian at the Berlin Free University, said all of this was good in that it helped create an audience for serious research into Germany's Nazi past, but bad because movies tend to gloss over the complicity of the German people in the crimes of the Nazi regime at a time when many Germans are beginning to absolve themselves of the sins of their fathers and grandfathers.
