Post by Jaga on Jan 11, 2007 0:22:00 GMT -7
Controversial Hitler satire opens today
Berlin-based director Dani Levy, who is Swiss and Jewish, wanted to “exaggerate through comedy” Hitler’s dictatorship in his new movie
Berlin – A new movie satirizing Adolf Hitler as a loony, drug-addicted gnome whose depression is lifted by a Jewish comedian yanked from a concentration camp opens today at Potsdamer Platz. The acceptability of such a film, directed by no-holds-barred Swiss director Dani Levy, has been heavily debated among Germans, where this period in their history is considered a deep embarrassment.
www.theberlinpaper.com/etc,%20home/43538.html
Hitler as a comedic figure isn’t unheard of: Charlie Chaplin and Mel Brooks have given the subject a treatment too. Yet, the thought of this kind of film appearing in Germany, with German actors, makes many uncomfortable.
So why did Levy make this movie?
“I think it is important that we create new pictures of our own, also of the Holocaust or Nazism, and not always work off the old, realistic pictures, because I think that just makes us lazy and tired, and we don't learn anything from it,” the director told the Associated Press.
Whether or not the film will captivate audiences remains to be seen (it certainly hasn’t pleased critics, who’ve panned it roundly).
The consensus in the press seems to be that laughing at Hitler could be ok, but that this film might make Hitler’s grotesque traits “human and understandable, so that one is left thinking: Oh well, things weren’t always easy for Adolf Hitler either,” as the Berlin Sunday culture newspaper Welt am Sontag put it (read article in German here).
Cinestar theater at the Sony Center on Potsdamer Platz is showing the film with English subtitles. Enter the first word of the movie’s title, “mein,” in our English-language film search (link), to see show times. (tbp, 10 Jan 2007)
Berlin-based director Dani Levy, who is Swiss and Jewish, wanted to “exaggerate through comedy” Hitler’s dictatorship in his new movie
Berlin – A new movie satirizing Adolf Hitler as a loony, drug-addicted gnome whose depression is lifted by a Jewish comedian yanked from a concentration camp opens today at Potsdamer Platz. The acceptability of such a film, directed by no-holds-barred Swiss director Dani Levy, has been heavily debated among Germans, where this period in their history is considered a deep embarrassment.
www.theberlinpaper.com/etc,%20home/43538.html
Hitler as a comedic figure isn’t unheard of: Charlie Chaplin and Mel Brooks have given the subject a treatment too. Yet, the thought of this kind of film appearing in Germany, with German actors, makes many uncomfortable.
So why did Levy make this movie?
“I think it is important that we create new pictures of our own, also of the Holocaust or Nazism, and not always work off the old, realistic pictures, because I think that just makes us lazy and tired, and we don't learn anything from it,” the director told the Associated Press.
Whether or not the film will captivate audiences remains to be seen (it certainly hasn’t pleased critics, who’ve panned it roundly).
The consensus in the press seems to be that laughing at Hitler could be ok, but that this film might make Hitler’s grotesque traits “human and understandable, so that one is left thinking: Oh well, things weren’t always easy for Adolf Hitler either,” as the Berlin Sunday culture newspaper Welt am Sontag put it (read article in German here).
Cinestar theater at the Sony Center on Potsdamer Platz is showing the film with English subtitles. Enter the first word of the movie’s title, “mein,” in our English-language film search (link), to see show times. (tbp, 10 Jan 2007)
