Tuesday 1 January 2013

Articulating Adolf

This article is an apology to Neville Tranter. Just before Christmas, he sent me answers to an interview about his Schicklgruber alias Adolf Hitler. I have spent the last fortnight sitting on them, unable to work out how to approach an article on a puppet version of Hitler's last days. I have found the limits of my philosophy.

The easy starting point would appear to be a comparison with Downfall, a film that starred Bruno Ganz in a stunningly virtuoso performance as the dictator: unfortunately, my concerns about its representation of Hitler led me down a pathway so entangled by questions of good and evil that I could not pass. Any attempt to critique the film slipped into difficult questions of morality. That article is sitting on my computer, waiting to be  posted at a time when few people are likely to read my meditations on the difference between Christ and Antichrist.

The scale of Nazi atrocity seems inevitably to encourage my theological tendencies

Tranter acknowledges that taking on a subject like Hitler is "delicate." His research, which included collecting 300 hours of songs and auditioning five writers before finding Jan Veldman, took three years to complete. While the YouTube video shows a performance that echoes the irreverent satire of Weimar cabaret, complete with comedy number about joining the Luftwaffe, the juxtaposition of larger than life puppets and the icon of twentieth century evil is a struggle to discuss. Like Giselle Vienne's Jerk (manipulate 2011), the mixture of object manipulation and difficult content combine to create an impact that is made more potent by the apparent mismatch. 

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