By Guest Contributor Helen Creighton
They say you should never, ever meet your heroes, whoever ‘they’ are. They are likely right, for a host of reasons – the risk of gushing and embarrassing yourself for life and the unpleasant shattering of a pleasantly-sustaining personal fantasy when said hero turns out to be a bit of a knob amongst them. But villains or those commonly considered so? We project our fantasies – of power, of repositories of near-supernatural evil, of guilt and blame – on them as well. Should we, conversely, meet our century’s villains as purely human subjects, hoping to gain if not sympathy, an understanding of their all too human pathology? This is an approach the Russian auteur Alexander Sokurov has taken in two films from his ‘tetrology of power’ – Adolf Hitler and the Emperor Hirohito of Japan.
Moloch – tellingly named for the ancient Semitic idol who demanded the sacrifice of his people’s children by fire – is Alexander Sokurov’s highly idiosyncratic vision of what might be called the lost weekend of Adolf Hitler. It concerns his retreat to the Bavarian mountains for some rest and relaxation with his inner circle (“Not a word of politics at the table! No Eastern Front!” commands Martin Boorman, neatly setting out the parameters of the film) sometime during 1942, just before the idea of assured German victory had began to permanently unravel. Highly unorthodox for films that deal biographically with recent historical figures, Sokurov prefers to imagine the action (or lack thereof) behind or beyond the obvious great historical moments. Historical documents, in this case Henry Picker’s transcripts of Hitler’s private conversations (indeed Picker is depicted in Moloch, constantly scribbling in a notepad) and Albert Speer’s prison diaries, simply serve as a jumping off point for a more impressionistic, difficult work than your average, straightforward biopic.
The film opens to the stirring, doom-laden strains of Wagner’s Siegfried’s Funeral March, ultimately fading in on the imposing, mist-drenched stone battlements of a reimagined Eagle’s Nest. Just as quickly as he invokes the aloof, grandiose aesthetic of National Socialism, Sokurov deconstructs it with depiction of human frivolities amid the Olympian splendour. A naked Eva Braun amuses herself by strolling atop the battlements. Fully aware she’s being observed by the guards below (she offers them a friendly wave), she begins a series of dancer’s stretches and poses, her inane laughter echoing across the landscape, mingling uneasily with the sounds of munitions. Soon after, she amuses herself by rifling through Hitler’s record collection and putting her feet up on a conference table strewn with remnants of Hitler’s failed artistic career, wiling away the minutes before her beloved ‘Adi’ arrives. So begins Moloch, a strange, unsettling, satirical, occasionally surrealistic and grimly humanizing portrayal of the central figure of the Third Reich.
Later, we are privy to more of the weekend distractions of Hitler, Eva, their companions the Goebbels and Hitler’s private secretary Martin Bormann. There is an excruciating dinner at which Hitler plays the dour, militant vegetarian (“Who wants some corpse tea?”), and the showing of a newsreel which leads to possibly the weirdest and most bleakly satirical moment of the film as a suddenly bemused Hitler wonders what is this ‘Auschwitz’ that everyone’s talking about and is assured that it’s nothing, just the gossip of women. Each guest competes to offer sycophantic attention to their host whilst bickering bitterly amongst themselves whenever his back is turned. Bormann especially draws ire (Magda Goebbels asserts that he smells bad), the petty rivalries and jealousies recalling not only the well-documented distaste of many of Hitler’s inner circle for each other, but also foreshadowing the Nuremberg hearings at which senior Reich members squabbled like schoolchildren over who should be forced to sit next to weird kid Rudolf Hess.
Then there is the mountaintop picnic which teeters into the surreal as Hitler excuses himself from the jollity to squat and shit in a corner while his immaculately-clad Schutzstaffel watch in amazement through gun sights, then ascending to the crags above to piss and pose heroically, as if in some grotesque perversion of German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich’s aloof figure in the painting ‘Wanderer Above The Sea of Fog’. German art and its relationship with Nazism is an ever-present, unspoken reference in Moloch – Eva’s dance at the roof of the world recalls Triumph of the Will director and then-actress Leni Riefenstahl’s erotic dance to the sea in Arnold Fanck’s 1926 German silent classic ‘The Holy Mountain’, while the the Eagle’s Nest, floating in a sea of mist, bears a certain similarity to Arnold Bocklin’s cemetery painting Isle of the Dead. The elevator entrance to the Eagle’s Nest in its symmetry resembles nothing so much as the glowing, gaping mouth of the ‘Moloch’ machine the workers sacrifice themselves to in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Misty, German romantic landscapes abound, juxtaposed with strange, sinister radio crackles and the distant sound of explosions and gunfire. Figures gather around Hitler in poses that suggest the work of Rembrandt, collected by senior Reich members and co-opted into their ideology when trying to get the Dutch on side post-occupation. Everything is shot though a kind of fog, a soft-focus combined with desaturated colour palette that lends a distinct, weird 40s patina to the frame.
Hitler himself, once deprived of an audience, reveals his pathology as a paranoid hypochondriac, huddling beneath a sheet and complaining dramatically about his fear of cancer to an increasingly impatient and contrarian Eva Braun, who in her vigorous health, vitality, appetite for fun and her need for intimacy seems to represent normalcy in this crowd of psychological grotesques. Hitler seemingly fears death but seems enlivened by the idea of dealing it – in one scene to a deserter, despite the pleas of an intervening priest. He eventually admits to wishing to defeat death itself, at which point a wraith-like Eva pitifully tries to convince him this isn’t possible, to no avail.
Moloch is a slow, complex and oddly uneasy film where nothing really happens apart from iconic figures who have long assumed godlike mantles in public acting like petty, stupid, weird and self-interested human beings in private (like some kind of 1940s celeb-infused reality TV) and I suspect that’s the point Alexander Sokurov – a disciple of Andrei Tarkovsky (Stalker, Solaris) and a director who complains of modern audiences ‘requiring everything to be explained to them’ is trying to make. Human urges and struggles entwined with the toxicity of politics and access to unrestrained power may result in the kind of overreaching that ultimately ends in greatness… or moral collapse. Moloch is ultimately philosopher Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann-trial coined phrase ‘the banality of evil’ as oblique, soft-focused art film.
Sokurov’s 2004 feature ‘The Sun’ is perhaps Moloch in reverse, dealing not with a man who has clawed his way to godhood, but rather one who has had godhood thrust upon him – the Emperor Hirohito, regarded by his people as a living god, descended from the Japanese sun goddess Ameratsu, here holed up in a beautifully appointed room in the otherwise brutalist concrete bunker beneath the Imperial Compound in Tokyo. The film takes as its starting point the historical fact of Hirohito’s capitulation to the American forces under General Douglas MacArthur in 1945 and his renunciation of his divinity to a shocked nation. There’s commonality aplenty with Moloch – the stark interiors, the slowness of pace, the desaturated palette, the strange grainy old-school patina that is apparently derived from transfer of digital footage to film stock, and the ominous, doom-laden rumblings of Wagner across the soundtrack, but it offers a much more directly emotionally affecting experience than that satire-infused work that holds its characters at arm’s length.
Hirohito the living god lives a highly circumscribed life, bound by a hierachy and etiquette so strict that even his wife must request an audience to speak with him and where his servants do so much for him that even opening a door on his own proves a difficult task. In stark opposition to Moloch’s central figure, he’s a quiet, sensitive and fairly affable figure, given to deep introspection and remorse and burdened with obvious physical frailties – he twitches and gurns, mouthing words long before he speaks them. He’s thoroughly Japanese and just as thoroughly royal, as sequestered from the modern world as it’s possible to be, yet keeps busts of Charles Darwin and Napoleon on his desk, along with a photo album of Hollywood movie idols and screen goddesses – Humphrey Bogart, Charlie Chaplin and Marlene Dietrich amongst them – the march of progress having penetrated even this old god’s inner sanctum.
While death is a constant reference throughout Moloch, the recurring motif in The Sun is evolution. Hirohito revels in his personal scientific study of marine life even as Japan burns. Even his fever dreams are tinged with this concern – the film’s sole surrealistic, perhaps Salvador Dali-esque moment is an extended sequence where fish, morphed into sinister flying machines, firebomb Tokyo. While the Emperor Napoleon is soon carefully retired to a drawer after the surrender, Darwin remains an inspiration and a reference point throughout the negotiation. There’s a scene where after his first uneasy meeting with a brusque General MacArthur, fraught with cultural misunderstandings and disagreements over the nature of war crimes, he pores frantically over this album, his family album and pictures of his former ally Adolf Hitler in turn, as if each photoset suggests a path – tradition, modernity… or death. He eventually appears at an American-arranged photo conference, with odd little Chaplin-esque mannerisms. He tips his hat and theatrically smells a rose, appalling the Japanese-American translator who believes in his divinity. He’s a smash hit with the foreign press. It’s a manipulation, a performance … but not entirely. He’s as vulnerable, deprived of his cloistered habitat with its deferential servants as the hermit crab he studies during his marine biology sessions is outside its protective shell. He is desperately trying to adapt himself and by default, his nation to their occupiers.
At a later meeting, MacArthur manufactures a reason to leave the room, leaving Hirohito alone. He spies on him, and discovers a man who dances giddily to Bach and takes delight in snuffing out an array candles like a child at a birthday party. From his hiding place, MacArthur smiles for the first time – humanity has won the day. All these moments are pure fiction – there are no transcripts of MacArthur’s meetings with the Emperor of Japan. However, the message is clear – in Sokurov’s historical imaginarium, rigidity is death. Hirohito’s delicate negotiation of power requires adapatation of both self and culture in order for his nation to survive and rise from the ashes.