Downfall

I feel like I should link the two smaller discussions about this incredible film into the one thread so I shall also link to this and try and bring the discussions together.

Finally caught this at last the other night.

My god the epically fine line this film walks and yet manages to do it so successfully. The balance it seems able to strike to give the viewer the ability to see the fall of Berlin from the view of those experiencing it first hand yet never tipping over into outright sympathy or condemnation of its characters. We are able to empathise, but never sympathise.

This film is an incredible achievement and Ganz in particular is quite jaw-droppingly good. The film zipped by as I found myself utterly riveted from start to finish.

Even knowing a lot of the history already actually made some moments more chilling (jesus, the first time Goebbels six children turn up in the bunker I had a real shiver of revulsion go up my spine) rather than took away from the experience.

Some characters are truly abhorrent, some like Eva Braun I just wanted to shake some god-damned sense into, others like the young boy trying to first hold his little outpost and then get back to his father I actually did just feel terribly sorry for. The poor deluded children were almost the hardest to watch.

Still, besides the obvious (yet kind of understandable) whitewashing of the Russian troops in the city, this film felt almost like watching a documentary - a terrifying, chilling, utterly brilliant historical document.

Goebbels looks like a fucking alien insect in the film. Almost distractingly so.

The film is a real achievement. I always find myself thinking about it in terms of a country producing a work of art on its most shameful, abhorrent period, and how the German film community stepped up to the plate and knocked it the hell out of the park. Comparatively, the US has, what? Roots?

Ganz is indeed godly in this. He's a bit prolific in European cinema and I was therefore quite familiar with him going in and the transformation he achieved with his performance threw me off for a while.

It's a shame that Hirschbiegel couldn't escape the star studded thriller as his Hollywood follow up to this. Considering how successful he was with a premise as difficult as this I'd wish he could have got much more stimulating stuff.

God yeah I noticed that too - he was just so... beady. Made him even creepier than usual. Christ tho the way he'd leap to Hitlers defence in front of the other officers regardless of the nonsense that was being sprouted, then you realise that between him and his wife, they weren't covering for Hitler, they completely believes his rantings. Jesus I just wanted to punch them both repeatedly in the face.

The sense of apocalyptic nihilism that permeated the last third of the film was palpable, it almost became desensitising watching people happily killing themselves in the face of the destruction of their beloved national socialist worldview. By the end I was just left shaking my head at the utter waste of it all, of the refusal by so many of the German people to stare down the barrel of exactly what they had gone through at the end of the Great War all over again. The way so many of them referenced the shame of that first defeat kept hammering home to me how the winners of that earlier conflict really did create the atmosphere that let the Nazis madness thrive with their seeming need to humiliate Germany with such vehemence.

It was weird, at first I was kind of horrified, even tho I had foreknowledge of what was to happen. Midway through the act tho, I kind of realised that if Goebbels and his wife were the horrible wastes of humanity that they obviously were, that there was every probability their children would grow up as fucking awful as their parents.

I didn't feel quite as horrified when I made that realisation. The world could have happily done without all six of them.

There's a theory among historians that although the Second World War is the biggest historical event of the 20th century, the First World War is actually more important. That almost every major event that occurred in the 20th century is pretty much a straight line from the way the Great Powers mishandled the aftermath.

It would be an oversight from them not to mention it.

To be fairer to us and more realistic about Germany, we should point out that the nature of the film made it impossibly hard to make for the people behind the film because it--gasp!--dared to show Hitler as a human being who wasn't 100% evil 24/7/52. Americans aren't the only people who dislike looking in the mirror on our "off days" and that is precisely the project of Downfall: to show that Hitler wasn't an aberration, he was a product of a specific mood and moment in Germany and the world at large.

Personally I think--and I think the resulting film really underlines this--"humanizing" Hitler makes the story much, much more disturbing and engaging. Prior to this film, we're shown Hitler from what is essentially the take the Allies war propaganda shaped, i.e. Hitler as an inhuman, nefarious force that had to be stopped at all costs. The idea that he was just a guy with really nutty and fucked up views on what "the good" consists in and just happened to live in the right time and place to come to power is kind of horrifying. It's an important project if you really do want to make sure it's a "never again" scenario.

As for why a mainstream American film has never really gone where this goes, I think it goes along with the general narrative American has always constructed for itself, i.e. that history is on a progressive arc and America and her allies are always at the head of the charge toward a brighter morning. It's why all the slavery films you've ever watched are from an abolitionist perspective. (Amazing Grace is pretty much the only film I've ever watched that shows what a fucking nightmare taking up that cause was and it's about the UK's abolition movement.) We never like to think that we were--or ever could be--the bad guys. It's why the country was so desperate to eat up the lies of the Bush administration, we just couldn't bear to think that we were the kind of people who would elect a group of torturous monsters like that to office and the torturous monsters would seem like good guys with whom to hang out at a bar.

Ideally, the similarities the TEA Party movement bears to the Nazi Party in Weimar Germany and the rank and file members obliviousness to the similarities--while they themselves are using that moment in history as an example of where they think the country is headed--would change that. But, yeah... that's not happening.

I saw this a few years back, and really loved it. Great movie that never really got its due (outside of that stupid meme), and I'm glad to see so much interesting discussion surrounding it. Building off of something that Cuch said, I remember the film took a lot of flack for humanizing Hitler, and I really thought it was an unfair criticism. In my mind (and as Cuch said so eloquently), the film made Hitler human, but it didn't make him sympathetic. It just sort of presents him as this character, and he still does these awful things, but we aren't ever really told why. It just puts him out there and says, "This is what is was like in the bunker," and simply lets the viewer judge for him or herself. It helps that Bruno Ganz delivers a masterful performance, making the character totally compelling without ever really becoming likable. Anyway, that's just my take on it.

Just finished watching this. Say what you will about the meme, but had I not seen that, I would have never known this existed. The end was astonishing, but damn, the character work was amazing. I knew only the major characters (Goebbel, Himmler, etc.), but every character felt like they had stories and lives. Even Hitler's manservant, who is really only in the last twenty minutes felt developed. Ganz's changing portrayal as the film nears its end is magnificent. That last look we get of Hitler, as he walks into his room for the last time, beaten and broken and aged... damn fine work for the makeup and Ganz. You can't say sympathetic, but you felt the despair and feelings of the man. Powerful stuff here.

Thanks CHUD. This is why I read you.

Hello,,,,,,,,,,I think Some characters are truly abhorrent, some like Eva Braun I just wanted to shake some god-damned sense into, others like the young boy trying to first hold his little outpost and then get back to his father I actually did just feel terribly sorry for. The poor deluded children were almost the hardest to watch. So i like it............. Thanks,

Stalin's daughter turned out OK.

Hitler's sister moved to NYC after the war I believe. Obviously the family keeps a low profile, but I'm sure they turned out OK in the end

Anyway, this is a favorite of mine. I've posted at length about it before in other threads, but wanted to offer up my thoughts again here for the official DOWNFALL discussion. I was a huge fan long before the meme, and payed AMAZON nearly 50 dollars to have the movie rushed to me the day of release on DVD. I also saw it in NYC during it's limited engagement. It's a gripping film and one of my favorites of the Aughts. For my money, Ganz gave the definitive portrayal of Hitler.

Also worth checking out: BLINDSPOT: HITLER'S SECRETARY a documentary on which the film is largely based

This is probably in my top thirty films of all-time. Bruno Ganz performance is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen in cinema. Up there with DeNiro's LaMotta and Day-Lewis' Plainview for me as one of the most seamlessly believable performances of a "big" character - and it's just on of the best performances in general.