[back] [print]

HITLER'S HIT PARADE is a composition of archival footage from movies, amateur-, animated-, and educational films, commercials and propaganda - accompanied by dance and popular music from the Third Reich.

The film is structured along thematic chapters, each accompanied by a song and introduced by a headline in the style of the period. In the form of an artistic collage, the film uses a musical thread, to lead the audience through experiences and ideas of the Nazi era.

In contrast to still images - from painter Otto Dix to the Bauhaus - this collage is composed of living pictures. From a wealth of situations in the original material, a portrait of a modern civilization slowly emerges, in which beauty and evil flourish side by side. The lyrics and melodies of the songs serve both as a complement and contrast to the footage.

By foregoing didactic narration, HITLER'S HIT PARADE addresses audiences, who are well versed in the historical facts of the time, on an emotional level. Open-minded viewers are thus offered a broad perspective on the problems inherent in passing judgment on the Nazi
era.

Rather than adopting a typical distanced approach, the film invites viewers to shed their usual safe distance looking back in time from the outside - and to allow a view from the inside on this journey through the Third Reich.

In witnessing numerous situations and examples of human behavior, the viewer is tempted to identify with the figures on screen, and is forced to ask himself what roles he could, would, or should have taken on during this period.

In a subtle manner, HITLER'S HIT PARADE analyses the enticing components of highly progressive, extremely modern Nazi Germany, and how at the same time a cultivated people could be reduced to a moral and physical heap of rubble as a result of the Nazi madness.

Original title	HITLERS HITPARADE
Subtitle