Hitler, a Film from Germany

Final encore screening added! Tickets on sale now. Parts 1 & 2 (227 minutes) will screen on Wednesday, March 13 at 6:30pm, Parts 3 & 4 (201 minutes) will screen on Thursday, March 14 at 6:30pm. Ticketholder will receive one ticket to gain access to both nights, separate ticket for Parts 3 & 4 not required.

Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s rarely screened masterpiece is a peerless work of mourning that explores German collective guilt through a dizzying assemblage of monologue, pastiche, and grandiose theatrical visions. Its great admirer Susan Sontag wrote: “Syberberg assumes importance both for his art (the art of the twentieth century: film) and for his subject (the subject of the twentieth century: Hitler). The assumptions are familiar, crude, plausible. But they hardly prepare us for the scale and virtuosity with which he conjures up the ultimate subjects: hell, paradise lost, the apocalypse, the last days of mankind. Leavening romantic grandiosity with modernist ironies, Syberberg offers a spectacle about spectacle: evoking ‘the big show’ called history in a variety of dramatic modes.” While Serge Daney shared Sontag’s position that Syberberg’s achievement was so important as to dwarf most contemporary film production, his own seminal text about Hitler, a Film from Germany focused on Syberberg’s position as a filmmaker battling a master of propaganda: “As a filmmaker closer to [Walter] Benjamin than to Brecht, he’s going to hold Hitler, that other (bad) filmmaker, accountable. And he defeats him, by turning his own weapons against him, at the end of a titanic seven-hour duel: a film.” 

Please note: The screenings will include a 10-minute intermission.