This blog entry is part of my “movie year countdown”. To read more about that check out my first Spout filmblog entry.
Im toten Winkel - Hitlers Sekretärin (Blind Spot. Hitler's Secretary)
I don't know if I want to say too much about this one. To describe the premise is simple. The entire film is one woman in front of a camera telling her story. This woman is 81-year-old Traudl Junge. When she was a teenager, she worked in close proximity with Adolf Hitler as one of his few personal secretaries. She ate lunch every day with him. She was there in his final hours and was one of the last to see him alive.
Apparently the filmmakers were able to convince her to tell her story on film, only a few months before she passed away. One wonders if this woman almost holding on, avoiding death until she was finally, seemingly with almost resistance at times to pouring out her true honest feelings at the time. Up until then she had apparently been mostly silent, although is credited and was probably the primary source for a Pabst film in the 50's titled Hitler: The Last Ten Days.
Again, I don't know if I want to say too much more about it. As a film, it is about as simple as possible. I almost wonder what someone like Errol Morris might have done with this. But as it stands you will be captivated by her story. Unless you are completely uninterested in Hitler and how a man who is seen by most as the most famous form of human evil was like up close. My thoughts have always been that people are not fundamentally evil, but twisted that way by any number of factors. In Junge's stories we can see Hitler's humanity and often twisted sense of what he was doing was for the best. Even while Junge recites these stories that indicate Hitler's humanity, she is aware of the horrible things that she later discovered he had been the cause of. You can see that she feels disgusted by her own impression of this man at the time when she was with him.
Although I said the premise is simple, there is one other somewhat unusual technique used in the filming of this movie. There are times when we are watching Junge speaking, and then it cuts to another image of her watching the footage of herself that we were just watching. We see her own often disturbed reaction to seeing her tell these stories. Occasionally in this second reel of footage she comments on what she said at an earlier time, changing her own opinion of things. It really reveals how tortured people were who were swept into Hitler's enticing regime.
Besides the Pabst film, her story was the inspiration for the recent film Downfall, which I have yet to see, but apparently has Bruno Ganz in a standout performance as Hitler.
The obligatory score: 8/10 stars