The third film in Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Wagnerian trilogy—preceded by Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King (1972) and Karl May (1974), about the founding of modern Germany—Our Hitler uses a series of stylized tableaux before back projections, filled with references to German history and mythology. With one of the most varied and ambitious soundtracks ever made, we hear strains of Wagner, Beethoven, Mozart, Nazi marches, American radio shows, and Hitler’s broadcasts. Der Führer is identified with such figures from film history as Charlie Chaplin’s Great Dictator, Dr. Caligari, Napoleon, Wagner’s ghost, and Peter Lorre’s child murderer in Fritz Lang’s M. 

“Syberberg assumes importance both for his art (the art of the twentieth century: film) and for his subject (the subject of the twentieth century: Hitler). The assumptions are familiar, crude, plausible. But they hardly prepare us for the scale and virtuosity with which he conjures up the ultimate subjects: hell, paradise lost, the apocalypse, the last days of mankind. . . . Syberberg offers a spectacle about spectacle: evoking ‘the big show’ called history in a variety of dramatic modes—fairy tale, circus, morality play, allegorical pageant, magic ceremony, philosophical dialogue, Totentanz—with an imaginary cast of tens of millions, and, as protagonist, the Devil himself” (Susan Sontag, The New York Review of Books).