User reviews

Great performances of uniformed men (Nazi's?) in town, great musical arrangements on the side and a lot of cultural references and newspaper headlines here. Furthermore a pretty boring total spectacle, for next to some religious philosophy the film itself only offers us some nice images, mostly the faces of the Nazi men responsible for it remain on the back of your head after viewing this flick. What beautiful eyes those Nazi boys had! As if the direction was focused mainly upon pardoning one's own responsible activities in the Second World War. But why didn't the woman near the ending have no armpit hair where there definitely should have been knowing the Germans in those days the way I do??

I’ve somehow never been drawn towards pursuing the work of these art-house film-makers (even if a good many of them have turned up over the years on a specialized programme on late-night Italian TV); having now, at long last, stumbled upon one of them I can understand why! The premise of the 17-minute short, in itself, isn’t too bad – a number of former Nazi officials reconvene years later in order to bestow an honor upon a former colleague – but the treatment is so austere as to be alienating, resulting in a largely unappetizing film!

Intermittently, however, there’s an agreeable irreverence at work here: to begin with, all the Nazis have two surnames (and always starting with the same letter, such as the titular figure); a dream sequence in which the protagonist enters a museum and uncovers a statue atop a balcony of himself; the illusion that military men can do no wrong because at no point in the Bible does Christ judge them!; the recipient of the tribute – a Major who had suffered dishonor, and subsequently died in exile, because his company suffered losses in combat amounting to a mere 8,500 men – has his reputation restored in the wake of an investigation which has firmly established that the death toll was actually in excess of 14,500!!