Berlin 1936

Berlin 1936

Your opinion of this film

Comments

[Arion van der Pols]

Loved watching it. I felt like a time traveller. Thank you! The soundtrack is excellent aswell.

[Bart]

I love the film, but the score keeps elbowing me in the ribs. I get it--the Nazis were in power. I don't need the musical stings to understand.

[Charles. M.O'Leary]

Good movie. It's a pity it isn't just a little longer!

[mi fen]

Seems like Jean Vivie (director) and his crew were sympathetic to the Nazi militarism and flag waving, as were many who wanted the Nazi games not to be boycotted, especially de Courbertin and Baillet-Latour of the International Olympic Committee. Who would argue today that those games should have been allowed to be such a great propaganda victory for Butcher Hitler and his Mob?

The images per se certainly leave a positive impression of Berlin as pretty, progressive and orderly with lots of military to keep it so (as in any fascist state).

It seems odd that there is no voice-over to this newsy-type footage? If so, and if that voice-over was critical of the images - seems highly unlikely - then perhaps I am unfairly accusing the director of being a Nazi sympathiser. But I doubt it. So many people get caught up in the fanaticism of sport, because it is so easy to do so, rather than think rationally.

Guy Walters (2006) has written a good history of how the Nazis totally bamboozled and hoodwinked the (willing-to-be tricked) Olympic Organising Committee to go along with the "Party" of the jingoism of the 1936 Olympic Games.

It's a sign of the continuing power of propaganda that the US was able to stitch up a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games because of their war in Afghanistan (while at the time providing weapons to Osama Bin Laden!), when yet Hitler was not boycotted, despite much understandable Jewish and Left-wing advocacy to boycott Hitler's Games in the lead-up to that Nazi propaganda victory.