Swastika (film)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Movie
German title swastika
Original title swastika
Country of production United Kingdom
original language German
Publishing year 1973
length 93 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Philippe Mora
script Philippe Mora,
Lutz Becker
production David Binney Puttnam ,
Sandy Lieberson
music Richard Wagner ,
Ludwig van Beethoven a
. a.

Swastika ( Sanskrit : "Das Heilbringende", term for the swastika ) is a British documentary by director Philippe Mora from 1973. The film was supposed to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival , but the showing was canceled after tumult.

content

Swastika is a compilation of newsreels from the 1930s, other Nazi propaganda material and Eva Braun's private films. The montage from the various traditional, moving documents of the time consciously contrasts appearance and reality or connects them: On the one hand, official idyllic everyday impressions that show a happy, ambitious common good called Germany, and those mass marches and apotheotic cheering processions for those who - so should be suggested - made possible the "Führer" Adolf Hitler . On the other hand, private recordings from Obersalzberg , where the Nazi clique holds coffee parties, flirting with children and dogs on the side, indulging in recreational fun at the lake or celebrating a contemplative Christmas party with pretzels in swastika form. In the case of the latter, the viewer gets to see scenes in which Hitler appears rather profane and awkward and which “leave little of the myth of an evil, demonic leader”. The bestiality that the whole world has now learned about has evaporated in the overall scenery of the Berghof into banality and mediocrity.

The cutting sequences stand for themselves; they are with no didactic voiceover backed, but "with pompous Wagner sounds or lieblichem Beethoven ". The silent film passages from the meetings on Obersalzberg were analyzed by lip-reading professionals in order to subsequently synchronize them after verification by contemporary witnesses such as Albert Speer .

The beginning of Swastika is reminiscent of the opening sequences of Walter Ruttmann's Berlin - The Symphony of the Big City . Scenes like those with the ideal typical girls of the " Bund Deutscher Mädel " strutting and singing in the forest make one think of Leni Riefenstahl . There are two moments in the film in which harmless reality and cruel reality collide: “Suddenly, about halfway through the film, after the well-fed Speer children at the Berghof, there are the starving children of the Warsaw ghetto who are begging on the street assembled. The cut is designed as a shock, but the material remains a foreign body in its brevity. Just like the end of Swastika , which after all the Hitler pathos and Hitler banality inserts a few takes from Bergen-Belsen . There are shots of the dead and the iconic scene of a tractor pushing mountains of dry corpses into a mass grave. "

Shown people

Adolf Hitler, Eva Braun, Gretl Braun , Hermann Göring , Joseph Goebbels , Rudolf Heß , Reinhard Heydrich , Heinrich Himmler , Albert Speer, Werner von Blomberg , Martin Bormann , Dirk Brinkley, Wilhelm Brückner , Neville Chamberlain , Fräulein Christians, Count Ciano , Hermann Esser , Wilhelm Furtwängler , Heinrich Hoffmann, Fritz Kuhn, Benito Mussolini , Dr. Theodor Morell , Joachim von Ribbentrop , Baldur von Schirach , Miss Schröder, Franz Xaver Schwarz , Julius Streicher , Adolf Wagner , Arno Breker , Josef Thorak , Jesse Owens , Albert Einstein .

background

Originally, the Australian filmmaker Philippe Mora and the German historian Lutz Becker wanted to film Albert Speer's autobiography together in 1970 . During the archive research they came across a photo that shows Eva Braun filming Hitler with a 16mm handheld camera. An inquiry to the Pentagon revealed that eight celluloid cans with 16 mm paint material had been found and confiscated in Eva Braun's bedroom on Obersalzberg in 1945. In 1972 in London they contrasted the well-known high-pitched propaganda material with the previously unpublished material.

When it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973, there was tumult. Out of protests and arguments among the audience and with the director, fights developed which caused the performance to be broken off. A German distributor who wanted to bring the film to the cinema withdrew its interest and in France a copy was stolen from the projector room and scattered over Jewish graves.

New edition

On the occasion of the 200th birthday of the Humboldt University , director Philippe Mora traveled to Berlin in 2009 to present his long ostracized film on November 23.

In the following year the film was shown for the first time in German cinemas and was available on DVD .

Reviews

Sonja M. Schultz from critic.de found that "the attempt to expose the Nazi elite with their own pictures [...] has something bumpy, ultimately unreflective" attached to it. Disparate materials would create ruptures and the music setting, which reinforces the weight of the propaganda, would undermine one's own concern for deconstruction .

Andreas Thomas from filmgazette.de has the opposite opinion on one point and the same opinion on one point. He writes that there is no real break between the staged passages and the petty-bourgeois, idyllic sociability, which is why “the history of the Third Reich is “ switched on ” with the private figure Hitler ; and in a very naive way ”. He also writes: “The film is probably only an imposition because it affirmatively continues the spirit of Nazi propaganda and takes it to extremes in its intoxication and fanaticism, not only without any critical and distancing comment, but on the contrary, with all means of dramatic heightening through image and sound collages. ”But it is precisely the inflation of the original aesthetic that can be used to understand the mechanisms of popular delusion. In this respect, the film is aimed at educated, responsible people.

In the Berliner Zeitung , Alexandra Seitz noted that Swastika 1973 "was ahead of its time with its irreverent and manipulative image-sound montages and its fundamentally absurd approach". Today we know (and Mora started his film with this statement back then) that the common man aspect in the crime context is more shocking than something that is always evil. Seitz thinks the film is fascinating and important.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Andreas Thomas: Swastika. No button to switch off , filmgazette.de, ed. by Sven Jachmann, accessed August 12, 2019.
  2. ↑ a b c d e f Sonja M. Schultz: Swastika Critique , Critic.de, ed. by Frédéric Jaeger, October 1, 2010 (accessed August 12, 2019).
  3. ↑ a b c d e f Bernd Sobolla: Hitler in a leisure mood . Scandal film "Swastika" was shown in Berlin , Deutschlandfunkkultur, ed. by Andreas-Peter Weber, from November 23, 2010 (accessed August 12, 2019).
  4. ↑ Petra Schubert: The devil wears brown. Screening of the documentary “Swastika” in the presence of the director Philippe Mora , Humboldt University, accessed 11 August 2019.
  5. ↑ Alexandra Seitz: Hitler, Kitsch and Horror . In: “Kulturkalender”, supplement to “Berliner Zeitung” 252, October 28, 2010, p. 2 (Kulturkalender. Film. DVD tips).

Web links