Venice Film Festival premiere: Did cinema predict Hitler's rise to power?
It was a small sensation that the premiere of a documentary film - "From Caligari to Hitler" - took place at one of the world's most significant film festivals. The film was screened as part of the Venice Classics series, alongside restored historical cinematic masterpieces like "Mouchette" by Robert Bresson and "Stolen Kisses" by Francois Truffauts.
"From Caligari to Hitler" is film critic Rdiger Suchsland's directorial debut. The title is a reference to the 1920 silent film, "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," largely regarded as the first horror film. Suchsland's documentary focuses on the 1920s and 30s - the heyday of German cinema - and examines journalist and film theorist Sigfried Kracauer's famous thesis that German filmmakers supposedly predicted the rise of National Socialism in their works.
DW: Mr. Suchsland, were you surprised to receive an invitation to the Venice Film Festival?
'From Caligari to Hitler" is film critic Rdiger Suchsland's directing debut
Rdiger Suchsland: Yes, I was very surprised. It's my first film. It's hard to say how it's going to turn out when a film critic who wasn't trained as a filmmaker makes a film. I think my invitation to Venice can be attributed to the wonderful historical footage by camera professionals like Karl Freund. Excerpts from well known films like "Metropolis" (1927) and "Nosferatu" (1922) are included. It didn't have a whole lot to do with my directing.
The film was screened as part of the Venice Classics series, which mainly presented restored masterpieces and rediscoveries.
There are many documentary films about cinema. The historical consciousness in cinema is not as strong as, let's say, in literature, where a new edition of a book by Fontane or Schiller would be covered by the newspapers and compared with previous editions. In cinema, television, and motion pictures, we don't have this kind of tradition of dealing with the history of the medium. That's of course because it's the newest medium.
There should be a lot more [attention paid to film history] because all of the new films are based on the classics. Today, many people's knowledge of film, even at film schools, begins with Quentin Tarantino.
What does the title "From Caligari to Hitler" mean?
That was the title of a book by Sigfried Kracauer. He was the leading film critic during the Weimar Republic. To some extent, he invented the field of film criticism in post-war Germany. Kracauer wrote for the daily newspaper "Frankfurter Zeitung," the most important newspaper of the time, and wrote about this period.
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Venice Film Festival premiere: Did cinema predict Hitler's rise to power?