Moloch
(Molokh)
With Elena Rufanova, Leonid Mosgovoi.
Russia/Germany, 1999, 35mm, color, 102 min.
German with English subtitles.
Moloch is an absorbing reconstruction of the last days of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun that attempts to comprehend manifestations of evil and power. Set in the Fuhrer’s spectacular mountain retreat just before the German defeat at Stalingrad, the film focuses less on clichés of evil than on the vacuous boredom of absolute power: a naked Braun prances on the clammy battlements, Goebbels and Hitler dance to music together, and Nazi officials raid Hitler’s liquor cabinet like frat boys while somewhere, a country burns. Hallucinatory visuals and a sense of suspended time heighten the claustrophobic aura that surrounds the characters like a fugue.
PRECEDED BY
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Sonata for Hitler (Sonata diya Gitlera)
Directed by Alexander Sokurov.
USSR, 1979-89, 35mm, black & white, 11 min.
Banned for ten years, this provocatively titled short film constructs a lyrical montage of archival footage from the end of the war in Germany and Russia: Nazi generals and their victims, landscapes of catastrophe, Soviet victory won at a calamitous cost. The images are numbered with the dates of Hitler’s and Stalin’s deaths to forge an analogy between the two dictators, both of whom inflicted destruction on the bodies and souls of the Russian nation.