Italian Food and Nazi Reviews
An Italian student just moved into the apartment next door. Normally, I could accept this without comment, but this is an exceptional circumstance.
It's not a nationality thing, I swear. However, I've taken a little pride in being the most intense cook in the kitchen for the last few weeks. Not the most successful, mind you; maintaining focus is altogether different from producing quality. Instead, I've been the most dedicated. Regularly, I engage in questionable cooking endeavors simply because I'm intrigued by the process. I spend entire evenings slaving over a hot stove to produce strange dishes that no one will consume. I'm collecting recipes, experimenting, and gnoshing, all because I can.
But now there's this Italian neighbor of mine, who effortlessly trumps me at the stove. (It's one thing to recieve a Silver Medal, but it's another thing to come in second place by such a wide margin.) The way she controls three simmering pots, while putting away groceries and carrying on multi-lingual conversations, totally blows me out of the water. Like all Italians (horribly stereotypical statement ahead!), she must have been born with a spatula clenched in her hand. Clearly, I'm still cooking in the Pony Leagues.
"Der Untergang" is a snuff flick forty-years overdue. All the suspense would seem to be whisked away, given that at the beginning of the film you see Adolf Hitler as a defeated, cornered Führer, desperately seeking refuge in his underground bunker. It's no secret that he's going to die; even he knows it.
That is not to say that "Der Untergang" lacks any credibility or forces unnecessary twists in an otherwise see-through plot. (After all, even if there are only seven different movie plots, this one has to better documented than most others[1].) Partially due to this plot issue(2), the German media has focused closely on the Bruno Ganz's characterization of Hitler as a tirade-prone, passionate (in the bad sense), and stooped leader who at times seems wholly removed from reality. It certainly represents a departure from the belligerent, stubborn Hitler of American cinema who stands tall in the face of his enemies(3). Ganz's Hitler has been completely demolished by three years of military setbacks. What is left to him is the timeless, nightmare-like last days he spends underground, surrounded by his generals.
Give credit to the screenwriters, then, for making the gruesome sidenotes of this event into relevant and suspenseful plot points. (Catastrophe, often inflicted by the husband, visited several families of high officials shortly before the Russians captured the last sectors of Berlin.)
Instead of a disjunction with the screen, however, the audience is pulled right into the (admittedly slow-paced) action. We travel through the winding corridors of the bunker, with long trailing shots following actors through doors. The even flourescent lighting casts no shadows, and the varying lights of night and day are surprising, almost shocking, when the actors venture out.
Moreover, there is very little fighting. The facts of war, as if taking a cue from Ganz's early outbursts, spend the majority of the movie brooding far away from the central actors. Instead, the end stages of the war play out exactly as Hitler himself would have seen them: battle lines on maps, each line contracting, the maps becoming progressively smaller in scale, choking the last hopes of a doomed leader.
(1) See anything ever written by Stephen Ambrose. And if you want something more interesting than a Greatest Generation rehash of America's heroic defeat of (all forms of?) facism (everywhere?), skip Ambrose and read Bis zur letzten Stunden, by Traudl Junge and Melissa Müller, instead.
(2) But mostly because Germans are prickly when it comes to the post-Weimar period. Making a talking piece of the actor instead of the role turns the whole problem inside out. Suddenly, the story is about a modern person engaged in an art form, rather than a ruthless, xenophobic facist that everyone would rather forget.
(3)Or the alternative: the unportrayed Hitler. A rhetorical Villain, this Hitler is the butt of the GI's curses, a distant finishing line for a war that seems to stretch forward into an indefinite future. This is the Hitler who is on the end of every boastful GI's rifle. ("If I could get one shot at him, this whole war would be over."[1])
It's not a nationality thing, I swear. However, I've taken a little pride in being the most intense cook in the kitchen for the last few weeks. Not the most successful, mind you; maintaining focus is altogether different from producing quality. Instead, I've been the most dedicated. Regularly, I engage in questionable cooking endeavors simply because I'm intrigued by the process. I spend entire evenings slaving over a hot stove to produce strange dishes that no one will consume. I'm collecting recipes, experimenting, and gnoshing, all because I can.
But now there's this Italian neighbor of mine, who effortlessly trumps me at the stove. (It's one thing to recieve a Silver Medal, but it's another thing to come in second place by such a wide margin.) The way she controls three simmering pots, while putting away groceries and carrying on multi-lingual conversations, totally blows me out of the water. Like all Italians (horribly stereotypical statement ahead!), she must have been born with a spatula clenched in her hand. Clearly, I'm still cooking in the Pony Leagues.
"Der Untergang" is a snuff flick forty-years overdue. All the suspense would seem to be whisked away, given that at the beginning of the film you see Adolf Hitler as a defeated, cornered Führer, desperately seeking refuge in his underground bunker. It's no secret that he's going to die; even he knows it.
That is not to say that "Der Untergang" lacks any credibility or forces unnecessary twists in an otherwise see-through plot. (After all, even if there are only seven different movie plots, this one has to better documented than most others[1].) Partially due to this plot issue(2), the German media has focused closely on the Bruno Ganz's characterization of Hitler as a tirade-prone, passionate (in the bad sense), and stooped leader who at times seems wholly removed from reality. It certainly represents a departure from the belligerent, stubborn Hitler of American cinema who stands tall in the face of his enemies(3). Ganz's Hitler has been completely demolished by three years of military setbacks. What is left to him is the timeless, nightmare-like last days he spends underground, surrounded by his generals.
Give credit to the screenwriters, then, for making the gruesome sidenotes of this event into relevant and suspenseful plot points. (Catastrophe, often inflicted by the husband, visited several families of high officials shortly before the Russians captured the last sectors of Berlin.)
Instead of a disjunction with the screen, however, the audience is pulled right into the (admittedly slow-paced) action. We travel through the winding corridors of the bunker, with long trailing shots following actors through doors. The even flourescent lighting casts no shadows, and the varying lights of night and day are surprising, almost shocking, when the actors venture out.
Moreover, there is very little fighting. The facts of war, as if taking a cue from Ganz's early outbursts, spend the majority of the movie brooding far away from the central actors. Instead, the end stages of the war play out exactly as Hitler himself would have seen them: battle lines on maps, each line contracting, the maps becoming progressively smaller in scale, choking the last hopes of a doomed leader.
(1) See anything ever written by Stephen Ambrose. And if you want something more interesting than a Greatest Generation rehash of America's heroic defeat of (all forms of?) facism (everywhere?), skip Ambrose and read Bis zur letzten Stunden, by Traudl Junge and Melissa Müller, instead.
(2) But mostly because Germans are prickly when it comes to the post-Weimar period. Making a talking piece of the actor instead of the role turns the whole problem inside out. Suddenly, the story is about a modern person engaged in an art form, rather than a ruthless, xenophobic facist that everyone would rather forget.
(3)Or the alternative: the unportrayed Hitler. A rhetorical Villain, this Hitler is the butt of the GI's curses, a distant finishing line for a war that seems to stretch forward into an indefinite future. This is the Hitler who is on the end of every boastful GI's rifle. ("If I could get one shot at him, this whole war would be over."[1])
<< Home