1001 Movies - Downfall (Der Untergang)

The largest loss of human life in modern history can almost be directly attributed to one man. A man that instructed the killing of Jewish people by the thousands and started a war with such devestating consequences, we still feel them today. Adolf Hitler was guilty of atrocious crimes against humanity yet was, without doubt, one of the pioneers of political celebrity. He understood the power of the filmed image and even produced astonishing, well crafted, films to push his agenda. How fitting, then, that the medium of film is also one that weakens him and his memory.

Whilst many may only know it for it's famously parodied bunker scene, in full, Downfall portrays an unsettling balance, a likely truth that we would rather not believe. It draws out Hitler the monster but also, even more so, Hitler the man. A man that was kind to his secretaries and loved his dog. A man that suffered from several health issues, physically and mentally. A man that felt the stinging arrow of a friend's betrayal penetrate the vulnerability of his emotional armour. All this to remind us of the horror that it was not, in fact, a monster that thought Jewish people were a plague on the face of the Earth, but a man.

It takes a truly brilliant screenplay to portray Adolf Hitler sympathetically, but that's what we have here. We hear him discuss his plans for the new Berlin, a hub of culture and art, and its not the embodiment of evil that we've come to think of when we think of the Nazi party leader. He's gentle and kind, frail and ill. But he's also madly paranoid, quick to anger, unrepentant in his treatment of those that disappoint him and proud of his headway in the annihilation of the Jewish race. Bruno Ganz plays the Führer constantly on the edge of this kind fragility and mania to make him unpredictable, adding menace to his meltdowns but also a softness in his quieter moments.

It's a delicate balance and one that's needed. The audience need to care for Hitler to keep them in the story, they have to be emotionally involved with his titular downfall, but also distant enough that they're not saddened by it. At the end of it all, Hitler's death is human and deserved. There's no superhuman death matching the superhuman evil, just a bundled up body in a blanket (note - something that the Harry Potter books nailed with Voldemort's death and the films completely missed. A helpful point to see why the slumped body is so effective in the narrative of Downfall) and that's it. After all he seemed to be, after the devastation he instigated, after the hatred he fuelled, here he is: a lifeless lump doused in gasoline to be burned by his final remaining followers.

Do not be mistaken when I describe the treatment as sympathetic - there is nothing here to suggest Hitler and his cohort are redeemable. The mass suicides, family deaths, child soldiers, and violent anti-semitism are all presented here as brutal reality and there's no pretence that the war produced anything positive. But we have to see the humanity of the great dictator to be reminded of the painful truth that it wasn't a supernatural evil that inflicted these terrible events on man, but man itself.

TRAILER: