Sonata dlya Gitlera AKA Sonata for Hitler (1979-1989)
By Alexander Sokurov
This short movie from Sokurov uses archival footage of Adolf Hitler composed in a new manner with sometimes classical, sometimes unsettling music in the background. I'm not sure about the date of the production, as the final cut was made in 1989 but the preliminary version was ready in 1979 with so many early films by Sokurov, this film has two dates: the first is the date of its creation (the film was then banned), the second is the date of the final edition and legal public screening. The film consists of German and Soviet archive footage of the World War II - to be exact, from the end of the war. An attempt to make a large-scale documentary on this subject had been undertaken in the Soviet cinema of the 1960s: the film - "Ordinary Fascism" - by the outstanding Soviet film-maker Mikhail Romm had become a classic retrospective investigation of fascism. But Sokurov uses the expressive power of the documentary image in an absolutely different way. He does not amass materials for a large-scale picture of Nazi crimes. As a lyrical film-maker, in the space of this short film, he manages to present an entire overview of the historical landscape after the catastrophe. He chooses only…
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