News

What, another docu about Nazis? Rüdiger Suchsland’s show tells the entire story — with many rare clips and interesting actor and filmmaker profiles — of the hundreds of state-produced German films made during the Third Reich. It’s the most thorough, informative and eye-opening show on the subject I’ve yet seen. It comes with revelations about some surprising names, like Douglas Sirk and Ingrid Bergman.

Hitler’s Hollywood

DVD

Kino Lorber

2017 / Color & B&W / 1:78 enhanced widescreen / 105 min. / Street Date July 10, 2018 / Hitlers Hollywood: Das deutsche Kino im Zeitalter der Propaganda 1933 – 1945 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Narrated by Udo Kier

With film clips of Hans Albers, Heinz Rühmann, Zarah Leander, Ilse Werner, Marianne Hoppe, Gustaf Gründgens, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Alfred Abel, Lída Baaroví, Willy Fritsch, Gustav Fröhlich, Lilian Harvey, Johannes Heesters, Brigitte Helm, Paul Henreid, Margot Hielscher, Emil Jannings, Pola Negri, Magda Schneider, Kristina Söderbaum, Anton Walbrook.

Film Editor: Ursula Pürrer

Produced by Gunnar Dedio,...

She was the Nazis’ pin-up, the Aryan sex symbol whose films fired up the SS. In this previously unpublished interview, Kristina Söderbaum talks about Hitler’s charm, shooting scenes as the Allies closed in – and being nicknamed the State Water Corpse

In the early 1990s, I interviewed a large number of Germans who had risen to prominence in the film industry under the Nazis. I spoke to actors, directors, critics and politicians. I met Leni Riefenstahl’s cameraman, the composer who wrote Lili Marleen, and the woman who could be called the Nazi Marilyn Monroe, Kristina Söderbaum.

We drove to Horw, near Lucerne, to interview Söderbaum, star of many films, most of them directed by her husband, Veit Harlan. These included Jud Süß, widely regarded as the most antisemitic film ever, and the ridiculous epic Kolberg, about the Napoleonic siege of the Prussian city. Söderbaum was so often drowned in...

The Criterion Collection adds to its handful of contemporary releases this week with Christian Petzold’s Phoenix, a film that has received near-universal acclaim since its 2014 premiere at Tiff, despite a common caveat that its story conceit is exceedingly implausible. Perhaps, as Justin Chang puts it at Variety, “in a movie of exacting subtlety, it sometimes takes the baldest of contrivances to cut straight to the heart of the matter.” He goes on:“World War II has just ended, and Nelly Lenz, a Jewish singer and an Auschwitz survivor, is about to undergo reconstructive surgery after a disfiguring gunshot wound. When she is later reunited with Johnny, the faithless husband who betrayed her to the Nazis to save his own skin, he fails to recognize who she is. Still, he discerns enough of a resemblance to propose a lowly scheme: Nelly — or Esther, as she calls herself — will pass herself...

Son Of Saul director László Nemes: "We wanted to convey something that goes against the perception through films, that it is a mixture of organisation and chaos." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Son Of Saul (Saul Fia), this year's Grand Prix du Jury winner at the Cannes Film Festival, will première in New York tonight at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, featuring a post screening discussion with Géza Röhrig (Saul), moderated by Anne-Katrin Titze, following the 6:00pm show.

When László Nemes was in New York, he discussed with me his work with cinematographer Mátyás Erdély and the garments by Edit Szücs, the stature of Claude Lanzmann, looking at the natural elements in Auschwitz, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Stanley Kubrick's abandoned Holocaust film, Kristina Söderbaum and what's up next for the Son Of Saul director.

Géza Röhrig as Saul Ausländer: "These are marked people."

Anne-Katrin Titze: Fairly late in the film, you...

Claude Lanzmann with Kent Jones on The Last of the Unjust: "The general tone of Shoah was epic. This is not epic." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

In part two of our conversation, Kent Jones and I continue with questions of memory and justice and discuss the connective tissue of World War II in Jimmy P: Psychotherapy Of A Plains Indian with Claude Lanzmann's The Last of the Unjust and Shoah, Stanley Kubrick's unfinished Aryan Papers, Kristina Söderbaum, Thomas and Veit Harlan and the positioning of Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List.

In part one we discussed the loops to Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, the place of the American landscape, why Sam Shepard's mystical west is radically different from what is shown in Arnaud Desplechin's Jimmy P. and how the relationship of cinema and psychoanalysis falls flat - from Alfred Hitchcock to Robert Bresson and François Truffaut.

What a difference a year makes! Just after World War II, hundreds of French citizens who like Maréchal Pétain and Pierre Laval collaborated with the Nazi regime, became "resistance fighters." So it seems in Germany as well, as tens of thousands, perhaps millions of Germans who shouted "Heil Hitler" became "disgusted" with everything to do with Nazism, particularly with the Holocaust. With the film "Harlan-In the Shadow of Jew Süss," writer-director Felix Moeller deals with a filmmaker who quite obviously collaborated with the Nazi ideology in that he made anti-Semitic films while glorifying the Third Reich but who, like Adolf Eichmann and so many other top criminals, caviled that they were forced to do as the apparatchiks commanded.Harlan-in The Shadow Of Jew SÜSS (Harlan-Im Schatten von Jud Süß)

Zeitgeist Films

Reviewed for Arizona Reporter by Harvey Karten

Grade: B

Directed by: Felix Moeller

Written By: Felix Moeller

Cast: Stefan Drössler,...

One of the world's great film culture apostates, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg is mostly notorious for the seven-hour-plus 1977 film "Our Hitler," and for Susan Sontag's rocket-to-Mars essay, ambitiously praising it to the heavens, and for being the most recalcitrant of the New German Cinema's unholy four (with Wenders, Fassbinder and Herzog).

Finally, two of his famous earlier films have been released on video to contextualize that later behemoth, "Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King" (1972) and "Karl May" (1974), the three of which supposedly comprise a "German trilogy." Syberberg hardly seems disposed to ever make films about anything else, and it's an unassailable career project, especially in light of the last decade or so of Holocaust movies produced in Germany and elsewhere, which have tried to straitjacket and even romanticize the horrifying mystery of German culture's evolution.

Syberberg has always regarded it as a monstrous enigma, and his movies reflect his position in every frame.