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04 Nov 2009 07:06
Wednesday, 04 November 2009
Susan Sontag on Syberberg's Hitler
This week I'm watching Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Our Hitler: A Film from Germany — a pleasure not to be undertaken lightly. I first saw the seven-
hour film upon its original US release in the late 1970s, and I'm glad to say it remains an extraordinarily powerful work, perhaps the epitome of film as the quintessential Modernist art form, daring to approach the central catastrophe of the twentieth century with an unjaundiced eye. It considers Hitler as dream, as collectivist hero, as the inevitable outgrowth of German Romanticism, as "the greatest film- maker of all time" — and, as the English title indicates, as inevitably one of us. No personification of an abstract evil, unrepeatable, but the embodiment of the human being as catastrophe himself. I first wrote about Syberberg's film in 2003; that can be found here. But a better introduction to the film is available on YouTube. The below ten-
minute clip presents excerpts with a commentary drawn from Susan Sontag's essay "Syberberg's Hitler," which is available in the collection Under the Sign of Saturn as well as the booklet that accompanies the DVD. off ("fired," he insists) sales executive, Mel Edison, who becomes addicted to Valium and suffers a nervous breakdown; no well- oiled laugh machine, this. Again, this is perhaps an instantly recognizable situation even for the American middle-
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