Swastika

Philippe Mora's study of Nazism (using documentary material, including 16mm colour footage shot by Eva Braun) works best as a testament to the lost hopes of a duped generation, charting the slow slide from apparent peaceful prosperity to the takeover of more sinister elements; by which time the process of seduction was well under way. You realise what an insidiously high standard of propaganda the Nazis developed. The portrait of Hitler, mainly through Eva Braun's home movies, although fascinating, is less successful. It attempts to give the man a human face, but the strange washed-out colours, the repetition of footage to a point where it assumes a hallucinatory quality, and the credit sequence of a huge gold swastika revolving in space, do little to make the myth more accessible. Rather, they reinforce it. A fascinating document, none the less, that spares us a commentary, letting the material speak for itself.