THE ARCHITECTURE OF DOOM
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1992 Frank Maloney
THE ARCHITECTURE OF DOOM is a documentary film by Peter Cohen. It is narrated in German by Bruno Ganz. Subtitled in English. (Sweden, 1991.) It is unrated, but contains scenes of the Holocaust.
THE ARCHITECTURE OF DOOM is a detailed exposition of a unique interpretation of Hitler and Nazism, namely that Hitler's ultimate goal in all that he did was "beauty" (as understood by his limited, bourgeois standards). The mass murders of 70,000 mental and physical handicapped, as well as the extermination of more than 10 million Jews, Gypsies, gay people, and Slavs, as well as the burning of "degenerate" art and the promotion of "Aryan" art, all these are expressions of the overriding concern for beauty, according to Peter Cohen, a Swedish-German documentarian.
The film begins with Hitler's own paintings, kitschy postcard views of old buildings. Cohen documents the large number of failed or frustrated artists that surrounded Hitler in the top echelon of the Nazi leadership. Cohen pulls together all the insane threads of the Third Reich to create a coherent picture of the period as an immense, evil art project. Racial purity, eugenics, art, sculpture, architecture, genocide are all aspects of the ultimate goal.
Cohen depicts Hitler as the ultimate artist manque, designing the party uniforms and emblems, planning a vast opera and thereby picking up the work of his musical idol, Richard Wagner, designing national art galleries, museums, opera houses, the Reich Chancellory, redesigning Berlin as the capital of his world-empire-to-come, as well as the vast rallies and art exhibits.
Seeing the Third Reich, the Holocaust, and World War II as an art project may seem at first blush to be reductive and trivializing to the seminal events of our century. Quite the opposite is the actual effect. It makes one see the insidious threat behind every effort to limit concepts of art and beauty to one standard, a la Strom Thurmond and Pat Buchanan in the U.S. currently. To perpetuate these enormities in the name of beauty makes it even more of a betrayal of our entire civilization, emphasizing through the inherent irony perversion and crimes too horrible to encompass. And it makes ones suspect anyone who speaks of beauty as if it were a tangible reality, not merely a way saying "I like it".
Cohen also makes a cogent argument that the Holocaust, the Final Solution, the extinction of European Jewry, was so important that trains for the death camps had priority over transport for his crumbling armies. Cohen tells us that Hitler realized after his armies bogged during the Winter Campaign in the Soviet Union that he would not be winning the war, but that Hitler felt that if he destroyed the Jews then the great act for beauty would be Hitler's lasting legacy, that if he left behind monuments, especially a racially pure Germany, and his own legend, these would sufficient to inspire future generations to take up Nazism again. That Hitler nearly did succeed in wiping out European Jewry is certainly true; that Nazism is not dead is also all too true.
The film uses a vast store of stills and archive films to illustrate the art, architecture, the propaganda, the war, the Holocaust, and the "eugenics" program that was a dress rehearsal for the Final Solution. It ends with a basement full of oil portraits of the Nazi leadership, a brilliant homage to the end of CITIZEN KANE.
This is a very disturbing film that provides the viewer with a closely reasoned and thoroughly argued thesis. It is a sober and serious film, long, gruelling, intellectually exciting, morally disturbing.
THE ARCHITECTURE OF DOOM was booked into Seattle for long weekend run and will play spottily elsewhere, I'm sure. If you can, see this film. Ask your art-house manager to book it; it is distributed by First Run Features. Look for it later in the video stores; it may become available. It will richly reward whatever efforts you must expend to see it.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney .
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews