Chez Hitler, 1942:   A study in banality

Benjamin Halligan

The arrival of Aleksandr Sokurov's Mat' i syn (Mother and Son, 1997) on the international festival circuit was one of the cinematic highlights of 1998; the one-time Russian dissident film-maker - and protégé of Andrei Tarkovsky - had arrived triumphantly on the world's screens.

Praise for the film, "difficult" even by Art Cinema standards, was plentiful and as much from other film-makers as from critics. Musician Nick Cave's confessional piece "I Wept and Wept, from Start to Finish" (The Independent on Sunday, London, 29 March 1998) lent street kudos to the film and it was widely seen and discussed.

The anticipation that greeted Sokurov's subsequent film - Moloch (1999) - still doing the rounds on the international film festivals - soon gave way to bafflement. News of the film's subject matter - Adolf Hitler - had given rise to the suggestion that Sokurov would present a meditation on European fascism from the dying moments of the century of fascism and the first full century of film. Moloch precipitated hopes of a study of the actual figure of Hitler and what drove him to such evil (characters are rarely more "present" than in Sokurov's films), a "meta-history" of the type identified in Mat' i syn and a film with mythic considerations (the term "Moloch" refers to a deity found in several ancient cultures - Greek, Israeli, Cathari - associated with the sacrifice of children.) Perhaps, Moloch would present the antidote to recent Hollywood excursions into this territory.

The Nazis behind the    screen image

Defying all expectations, Sokurov's Hitler, a neurotic and hypochondriac, spends the majority of his screen time moaning about his health. His coterie consists of the enigmatic (Eva Braun) and the clownish (Martin Boormann) - only Dr Josef Goebbels (seen at one point privately screening propaganda films) seems to possess intelligence. The decor recalls the camp Nazi paraphernalia of Liliana Cavani's Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter, 1974), the murky internal scenes seem, at times, to be shot through a drained fish-tank and the setting, the Führer's Alpine retreat in Berchtesgaden during the late spring of 1942, seems almost incidental.

The reaction at the Cannes premiere and in the press was overwhelmingly negative. It seemed as if Sokurov (and his screenwriters, Yuri Aarabov and Marina Koreneva) had fallen foul of the usual problems of the representation of Fascism by European auteurs, such as Bernardo Bertolucci in Novecento (1976), Luchino Visconti in La Caduta degli Dei (The Damned, 1969) or Federico Fellini in Amarcord (1973), by resorting to caricature and the grotesque to visualise the nature of evil.

In the midst of this unreality, Hitler-as-man is defiantly presented, a countercurrent to the kind of postmodern reading of Hitler-as-historical-figure expressed in Don DeLillo's novel White Noise (1985). However, Hitler's obsessions with defecation, his inane on-screen musings - at one point that Finnish people are all stupid because of the long periods of darkness they must endure and that Czech people have down-turned moustaches because of their lineage with the Mongolians - and even the concentration he pays to his soup, reduce this figure too to clownishness.

After the film's reception in Cannes and at the London Film Festival, Sokurov was lumped in with Peter Greenaway as an auteur given to wilful mystification on screen, the courting of controversy (at one point, Hitler claims sincere ignorance of Auschwitz) and convoluted utterances in interviews and at press conferences. He could only add to his notoriety when he rejected the Grand Prix awarded to Moloch at the Sochi Film Festival in protest against the other winning films.

The film, however, continues to demand a response (it played to full houses at the London Film Festival, for example) and, to this end, CER presents initial reactions to this difficult film in the form of a dialogue between Andrew J Horton, Benjamin Halligan and Donato Totaro.

BLH:

To me, the establishing shots of the castle, Hitler's cloud-capped mountain-top retreat, are the most immediately striking thing about the film. They recall similar shots in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926) and F W Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) - even Wim Wenders' Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire, 1987).

AJH:

Mat' i syn:   Death and image distortion

Sokurov presents the power of Hitler's mountain retreat, but I think it is quite ironic. Very different from the Germanic influences in Mat' i syn, where mist over the fir-covered mountains is more pictorial and representative of inner anguish, which almost represents a kind of humanity. Here, the music and the mist are more menacing. Maybe the linking factor is that in both mist represents some sort of weakness, a shrouding of inner feelings.

DT:

The aesthetic did make me think of those German mountain films - but it seemed utterly contemporary - perhaps more in the blocking? The only director who comes close to the stylistic appropriation Sokurov is doing is a Canadian director most of the readers probably won't be familiar with, Guy Maddin. In his films Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), Archangel (1990) and Careful (1992). Maddin uses low-tech, in-camera effects (greased lenses, soft focus, iris effects, superimpositions), high contrast lighting (usually black & white) and manipulated soundtracks to recreate the textures of silent and early sound film history (German expressionism, kammerspiel, the mountain films, Universal horror); but with a decidely contemporary, postmodern feel

BLH:

Berchtesgaden's Heimat kitsch

Sokurov seems to compose in one dimension so that the blocking often becomes a question of the relative size of the characters. Perhaps this "Germanic" aspect of the film's aesthetic, mentioned above, clocks into the tradition of German Romanticism, evident in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, which had a direct influence on those early UFA films - characters framed and dwarfed by landscapes. Lang was inverting it in Metropolis while Leni Riefenstahl danced around in it in Das Blaue Licht (The Blue Light, 1932). It has sinister implications - exactly that "menacing" aspect.

AJH:

I was interested in the colours. It seemed to me that it was very much trying to recreate the tonal palette of the early colour films. The spatial architecture also suggests the cinematographic capabilities of an earlier age. Could not that scenery have been used in a 1960s James Bond movie?

I don't know how much attention was displayed towards historical detail in the film, but it does seem that the mock-heroics of Nazism are being parodied via the mock-heroics of early colour films (maybe Sokurov is thinking here of early Russian colour films, such as Mikhail Chiaureli's Padenie Berlina [The Fall of Berlin, 1949], which, incidentally, also portrayed Hitler).

There is certainly a large element of non-naturalism in Sokurov's films (the famous anamorphic effects, for example). I found this the clearest of Sokurov's films, but then maybe I am just getting accustomed to his visual language.

BLH:

I agree about the camp aspect of the film. Camp is often a way of approaching history in film and here it's as if Sokurov is revisiting "Fascist" aesthetics - alluding to German Romanticism and the reworking of that in Riefenstahl and the other film-makers of the Third Reich.

Broken spaces, bored Nazis:   Eva Braun chills out

But then you've got some characteristic Sokurov compositions thrown in - those in-camera tricks of bending perspective and the jarring eradication of depth-of-field. To go one further, he seems to be presenting some sort of visual "critique" on fascism and aesthetics in cinema. I'm not sure how else Sokurov would have formulated a methodology for such a project, which leaves the negative response to the film as somewhat surprising. To implicate fascism is to implicate aesthetics; to implicate Hitler is to implicate cinema (made explicit in the scene of Goebbels watching propaganda films), hence both are vilified.

Maybe it is this that is unpalatable.

DT:

I think the central question/problem revolves around what sort of portrait of Hitler is being offered in cinematic terms: one of psychological realism, historical accuracy, projection and so on.

BLH:

The whole notion of the presentation of the very figure of Hitler is fascinating. To turn to such a figure after the anonymity of the protagonists of Mat' i syn is very bold. It's significant too that this film was made in 1999. Fascism is the one thing - and Hitler the one person - that defines the twentieth century. Even Spielberg has realised that!

"These people, the people of power, turned their lives into theatre. Guided by a myth, they conceived and modified their lives, staged real mise-en-scène and subordinated their behaviour to rituals and ceremonies. This pattern is by no means unique, and Hitler was not exceptional. It's a common occurrence that grandiose shows driven by vanity end up in the dustbin of history." Sokurov - Cannes 1999.

Perhaps all the recent attempts to talk about that period of history reflect fear at the dawn of the new millennium with a post-1989 European map that suddenly recalls the 1890s. Sokurov's film seems to make attempts to approach a notion of history, as defined through the presentation of historical figures - and the impossibility of understanding or comprehending.

It's as if all the thought and writing on Hitler has lifted him "out of time" - like the shots of the castle on the mountain - and it's proving near impossible to humanise him again. Hence these fragments of "human" scenes are all that remains. It's the same feeling of the distance and unknowability of history that can be found in the films of Federico Fellini and Walerian Borowczyk. Film is a medium perversely suited to this type of approach.

AJH:

In terms of portrayal of the man, the film relies on historians, such as Norman Stone, who have portrayed Hitler as pathetic and out of control rather than firm and domineering. As has been pointed out, he is portrayed in the film as having no knowledge of Auschwitz and those around him do not even want him to know of the place. The scenes where Hitler dances, pontificates on his theories about nettles in the Ukraine and falls asleep in company and then pretends he was always awake (amongst others) back up this view.

BLH:

Hitler: Young fogey

He seems to see Hitler as a young-fogey (itself a form of defence) and quite mad and brilliant - but all this comes across as utterly inconsequential; neurosis and madness are the overwhelming characteristics. He's a self-obsessing bore, somewhere between Woody Allen and Hannibal Lecter - less the charisma.

The film strikes me as genuinely unique in that it really turns the whole notion of "psychological realism" on its head. I have no idea if we're watching history or "projection" (Hitler's subjective point of view or, to use Pasolini's term, Free Indirect Subjectivity) or a point in-between. And the odd clips from newsreel footage problematises this further in a manner not dissimilar to Tarkovsky's Zerkalo (The Mirror, 1976) or Klimov's Idi i smotri (Come and See, 1985) - they rupture the aesthetic of the fictional representation of historic periods. In these ways, Sokurov is frustrating psychological and historical readings of the film and problematising the notion of the filmic recreation of historical events.

AJH:

Well, the primary philosophical influence seems to be Hannah Arendt, whose analysis of fascism centred around the concept of "the banality of evil". This emerges in the climax of Moloch (if we can talk of a Sokurov film having a climax), when Eva Braun declares the depth of her feeling for the Führer but at the same time says "You have always feared banality. The reason you became so severe." Braun even loves him, despite the fact he is a "big zero." Fascism

"For a Christian, it's through love that one finds the essence of salvation but can one save one's soul by loving a monster? That's the question that troubled me the most. Eva Braun, according to existing memoirs, was capable of sacrificing herself for love. Because of this, she was doomed for a tragic existence. She is the real main character of the film." Sokurov - Cannes 1999.

is depicted as something in a torpor or decay. It is ultimately boring and unsexy, and in opposition (or in a paradoxical relationship) to Riefenstahl's depiction of it.

Wilhem Reich in his book The Mass Psychology of Fascism points out that this ideology acts as a form of "body armour." Sokurov shows the extent to which this armour exists and the extent to which it fails: the fact that the Nazis do not get on with each other, the fact that Hitler cannot form a real relationship with Braun and the fact that an expression of love under Fascism ultimately means nothing.

As an essay in the "banality of evil," I think it is superb. But then again Arendt's ideas are not exactly new. Still, I found it a gripping film and one possibly designed to widen his audience and build on the success of Mat' i syn whilst trying not to alienate the faithful.

Benjamin Halligan, 24 January 2000

Benjamin Halligan is a lecturer in film at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

Andrew J Horton is the Culture Editor of Central Europe Review.

Donato Totaro is the Editor of Offscreen.

For more articles on Sokurov

Staring into the Soul: Sokurov's Povinnost' The "stare" in Sokurov's existential marine epic.

Angels or UFOs?: Sokurov's Dni zatmeniia Religious, political and sci-fi symbolism in Sokurov.

Sokurov Resources More information on Sokurov on and off the net.