The Architecture of Doom (1989)
Featuring never-before-seen film footage of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime, The Architecture of Doom captures the inner workings of the Third Reich and illuminates the Nazi aesthetic in art, architecture and popular culture. From Nazi party rallies to the final days inside Hitler's bunker, this sensational film shows how Adolf Hitler rose from being a failed artist to creating a world of ponderous kitsch and horrifying terror. Hitler worshipped ancient Rome and Greece, and dreamed of a new Golden Age of classical art and monumental architecture, populated by beautiful, patriotic Aryans. Degenerated artists and inferior races had no place in his lurid fantasy. As this riveting film shows, the Nazis went from banning the art of modernists like Picasso to forced euthanasia of the retarded and sick, and finally to the persecution of homosexuals and the extermination of the Jews.
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Best movie of this year hands down!
Good movie but grossly overrated
It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.
Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable
One of the best documentaries i have ever seen. The disecting of nazism and especially Hitlers various obsession of race, purity, strength, the german people and the ideas and architecture behind it all is nothing but brilliant.So many excellent photos and films and so well "framed" through the music and the narrator that i cant even begin to describe the feeling you will get from seeing this masterpiece!Just take my word for it - if you are historically interrested into nazism and its background you have to make time for this one here.
It's hard to examine the Nazi movement without seeming sensationalistic and lurid. "Architecture of Doom" achieves the difficult task of illustrating its thesis without sensationalizing it.I have seen and read many histories of the Nazi period, and because of the aesthetic impact implicit in Nazism, the overarching impression I had wasn't the monstrous brutality and inhumanity, but the the uniforms, the rallies, the Wagner. After this film, I was left with a new way of looking and thinking about the Nazis.That the narration is not to some tastes is, to me, a quibble. Actually, I like Sam Gray's narration. The phrasing is novel and very effective. In fact, the "inflectionless" style lends a kind of boldface to the words.This is powerful stuff. There are debatable points, but the general thesis - that Nazism is murder in pursuit of an aesthetic - is mighty compelling.
"The Architecture of Doom" is the best surgical picking apart of Hitler's brain I've seen. It thoroughly examines Hitler's aesthetic worldview and how it could have lead to an artistic obsession to recreate the world to fit that vision. Its thoroughness is something Hitler himself might have admired! However, the power of this film is regrettably blunted quite a bit by the poor English narration. Perhaps Bruno Ganz's original narration with subtitles would have been better--though I haven't seen the latter to say for sure. In any case, narration is crucial in films like these (For a great example, listen to Trevor Howard in "Memory of the Camps"), and this lifeless, inflectionless reader really hurts a film that deserves a lot better treatment.
An interesting idea (Nazism as an aesthetic movement) fairly convincingly presented, although sometimes it stretches to make a point (eg, the movie tries to make more of the use of Zyklon-B for pest as well as human extermination than the interesting coincidence it seems to be). The periodic sequences of similar looking Nazi art get boring after while, which is the point, but overmade. The narration is rather monotonous; it's possible that impression is the result of having to read it.