Downfall has been sitting on my DVD shelves for a number of years now but at well over two and a half hours long I hadn't found the time to watch it. What I had been watching instead, of course, were the innumerable parodies or 'mashups' that pepper YouTube and that appear whenever an apparently minor issue produces an overblown response in the popular press and media. My first encounter with the form was after the Oasis split and I found myself laughing for the entire three or four minutes of the sequence. The juxtaposition of Bruno Ganz's incredible performance as the ranting Hitler with the banality of the Oasis split made the re-edited subtitles work perfectly. In some cases the text isn't sufficiently carefully crafted to carry off the parody but ultimately it is the incongruity of the subtitled subject matter and the enraged Hitler that make these parodies work. The most recent example - and this demonstrates how this type of parody functions - has Hitler complaining that the Vuvuzela is ruining his experience of the World Cup:Interestingly, there are now self-referential versions that feature subtitles that complain about the removal of the parodies from YouTube, as a result of Constantin Film AG submitting a copyright claim earlier this year (here):
So what about the actual film itself? Well, there is no doubt that Ganz's performance is incredibly powerful. Despite the melodrama evident in the parodies, he produces a sustained portrait of Hitler's final days in his Berlin bunker that keeps the viewer enthralled, horrified and emotionally engaged. Much of the film takes place inside this bunker and the claustrophia and the fear that inhabit it with the personnel effectively trapped within it is almost palpable. The film's account of the capture of Berlin is also carefully managed, revealing the futility of German situation but also the cost of the war in terms of the German people, a people that Hitler is shown to have no concern for other than as an abstract concept. As Peter Bradshaw notes in his review of the film (here), it was criticised for 'humanising' Hitler but while it does indeed do this, it renders him 'in consequence, far more grotesque and sulphurous than any of the dozens of picturesque newsreel documentaries on TV. It restores to him evil's banality, in Hannah Arendt's phrase, and its silliness and cheapness. Any movie which removes the great dictator from the horrors of the camps and places him in a situation which he is history's biggest loser, risks conferring, if not tragedy exactly, then the pathos of a cut-price Götterdämmerung. But Hitler has never looked more noisome, a tatty charlatan' Bradshaw 2005).
So, the film is well worth watching, in all its harrowing grotesqueness but do make sure that you also view at least one of the many parodies that continue to circulate and will no doubt appear for some time to come. I'm waiting for the version that depicts Hitler's reaction to the fact that England are out of the World Cup...
