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Arts 8a Life

At The Movies

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3/17
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52

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248.737.7918

Best Foreign Language Film nominee reflects
Hitler's 12 years in power through his last 12 days.

ANDREW SARRIS
Featurewell.com

0

liver Hirschbiegel's Downfall
("Der Untergani) dramatizes
the last days of Adolf Hitler in
his Berlin bunker as the Russian Army
surrounded the city in 1945.
The screenplay, by Bernd Eichinger,
is based on the book Inside Hitler's
Bunker by Joachim Fest and also on
the memoir Until the Final Hour by
Traudl Junge and Melissa Muller.
The same basic story has been told
on the screen several times before,
first in G.W. Pabst's Der Letzte Akt
("The Last Act"), in which Albin
Skoda played Hitler and Oskar
Werner supplied the audience with a
politically acceptable point-of-view
character in the form of a morally
stricken, guilt-ridden German officer
who seems to have been the only anti-
Nazi in the bunker.
There are no such dissidents in the
current film, as indeed there wouldn't
have been in Hitler's real-life bunker,
which was packed with Nazi true
believers (even down to the cooks and
the servants).
A more strikingly similar screen
predecessor to Downfall was Blind
Spot: Hitler's Secretary (2002), in
which German documentarians Andre
Heller and Othmar Schmiderer sim-
ply recorded the recollections of 81-
year-old Traudl Junge, who served as
Hitler's private secretary from 1942
until his death in 1945. In this
remarkable exercise in oral history,
Ms. Junge's stunningly graphic words
created their own mise-en-scene as
Hider and his entire entourage were
extracted from the entrails of history
to receive a final rite of passage before
a richly deserved oblivion.
Indeed, if you've seen Blind Spot
fairly recently, as I have, the early
scenes of Downfall may seem eerily
familiar, so vivid were the elderly
Junge's verbal descriptions. Some may
question why there should be another
film about Hitler at all. The 60th
anniversary of the liberation of
Auschwitz, and with it the inevitable
memory of the 6 million Jews who
were exterminated by the Nazis, hap-
pened to coincide with the opening of

Downfall

At the same time, a member of the
British royal family, no less, chose to
prance about in a Nazi costume fes-
tooned with swastikas and, after the
resultant uproar, apologized profusely
— which is not to say that even more
maliciously motivated swastikas are
not being scrawled all over the world,

even as we condemn the hapless
prince.
From the various testimonies of the
cast and crew of Downfall (the film
was Germany's Oscar nominee for
Best Foreign Language Film but lost
out to Spain's The Sea Inside), the
project was not so much a labor of
love as one of duty to a shameful por-
tion of German history that must be
faced by a new generation of
Germans.
Hence, except for the Swiss-born
Bruno Ganz, who plays Hitler, almost
all of the other real-life characters are
played by prominent German per-
formers, many of who felt it was their
duty as actors to find the human
beings lurking inside the genocidal
Nazi monsters they played.
Ulrich Matthes, who played Hitler's