Rainer von Artenfels
Documentary film that examines the rise and fall of the Third Reich, incorporating puppetry, rear-screen projection, and a Wagnerian score into a singular epic vision. The director, who grew up under Nazi tyranny, ruminates on good and evil and the rest of humanity's complicity in the horrors of the holocaust.
Elisabeth, a forty year old woman, visits her old father in the outskirts of Klagenfurt. There, she reflects about her childhood and her romantic life.
This ethereal, three-hour biopic is the middle film in Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s “German Trilogy” on the mythological foundations of the Third Reich. By fusing theater, music, and cinema, Syberberg conjures up Karl May (1842-1912), the immensely popular German author, who set many of his adventure novels in an idealized version of the American Wild West. His tales of the cowboy and the Ubermensch alike were beloved by many, including (Our) Hitler, who supposedly ordered his generals to read May works after defeats in the Russian campaign.
