A Mind-Bending 7-Hour Epic About Hitler Gets a Rare Screening

This weekend, the hottest ticket in New York is a seven-hour-plus movie about Adolf Hitler.

Showing just once at Film at Lincoln Center, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s rarely screened epic, “Hitler, a Film From Germany,” is, according to the programmers, sold out despite its behemoth running time (which includes a few breaks). It’s a curious sort of event movie.

Distributed by Francis Ford Coppola, it was first released in the United States in 1980, when it also played to sold-out houses. Presumably, these viewers were intrigued by the huge scope of its ambitions. Susan Sontag’s seal of approval was the cherry on top; she considered it a masterpiece. “There is Syberberg’s film — and then there are the other films one admires,” she wrote.

Some 442 minutes later, whether audiences stumble out of the theater agreeing with Sontag, one thing remains true: There is nothing like it.

Divided in four parts, the film is a Wagnerian opera on acid, composed of theatrical sketches inspired by the German dictator’s life. Images from classics of German cinema like “Nosferatu” and “M” are interspersed with archival footage from World War II, creating a surreal collage made extra disorienting by bursts of Beethoven and overlapping stream-of-consciousness narration. If this “primal scream therapy,” as one voice in the film puts it, sounds overwhelming, it’s only a taste of the film’s dizzying powers. Syberberg wasn’t without a sense of humor, either: In one scene, steam pours out of a sculpture of a rear end. The caption reads: “The biggest fart of the century.”

Based on these details, it should come as no surprise that the director wasn’t interested in portraying the actual Hitler. To him, realistic depictions of Nazi Germany indulge our morbid fascination and simplify a troubling and complicated reality.

For its American release, Coppola retitled the film “Our Hitler” because it explores the mythologies and images that we associate with the German dictator, meaning Hitler isn’t presented as a single man but as a projection of mankind’s darkest fantasies and desires throughout history. Multiple actors play him, as do puppets, cardboard cutouts and a dog. The film is “about the Hitler in all of us,” Syberbeg once said.