The Architecture of Doom
The Architecture of Doom
| 13 October 1989 (USA)
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Featuring never-before-seen film footage of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime, The Architecture of Doom captures the inner workings of the Third Reich and illuminates the Nazi aesthetic in art, architecture and popular culture. From Nazi party rallies to the final days inside Hitler's bunker, this sensational film shows how Adolf Hitler rose from being a failed artist to creating a world of ponderous kitsch and horrifying terror. Hitler worshipped ancient Rome and Greece, and dreamed of a new Golden Age of classical art and monumental architecture, populated by beautiful, patriotic Aryans. Degenerated artists and inferior races had no place in his lurid fantasy. As this riveting film shows, the Nazis went from banning the art of modernists like Picasso to forced euthanasia of the retarded and sick, and finally to the persecution of homosexuals and the extermination of the Jews.

Reviews
Inclubabu Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.
Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful
Teddie Blake The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.
Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.
amsvegas This is an excellent documentary and exposé into the psychology and ideals that, in great part, were responsible for Hitler's passion and vision that would drive the dynamics of Germany's politics. As absurd and surreal his ambitions may have been... there was a part of his dream that oddly seems honest and noble but character flawed. By no means should anyone admire the reality of his vision but be fascinated by how fast and furious Hitler and the Nazi doctrine brought a crushed post WWI Germany and its people to the brink of world domination in less then a decade. Indeed Hitler was an example of extreme self anointed indulgence and a deluded fantasy that millions paid the price by being murdered and exterminated as human vermin. A tragedy and a mind that I hope will never see the light of day ever again.Highly recommended 9/10
dbborroughs This fast moving film postulates that the ideas that the Nazi hierarchy held about art influenced the drive to cleanse the race and make it pure. The Nazi's loved the classical ideal and hated anything that was impressionistic or modern and used it as proof of genetic impurity. The film recreates a lecture that toured Germany which showed how modern or degenerate art was based on deformed people. We see the images from the degenerate art and how they are compared to the mental and physically handicapped. This, the film argues, allowed the Nazis to then begin to sculpt the German people into the perfect physical being through murder (after all they are less then human).Its an interesting idea but I don't think it was as big a deal as the film makes it out to be. Certainly there was the drive to create the perfect little Nazi, but I don't think it was as formalized as the movie says. I think the nice ideas of art and race were less intertwined as this film thinks. That said this movie is kick in the pants and in the head. The ideas it puts forward were probably at the very least operating on a subconscious level as a form of positive re-enforcement. Its all very plausible, which is scary.Definitely worth seeing for anyone wanting to further color their understanding of Nazi ideas. You may not wholly agree with whats presented, but it will make you think, which isn't a bad thing.
OneSentence One of the best documentaries i have ever seen. The disecting of nazism and especially Hitlers various obsession of race, purity, strength, the german people and the ideas and architecture behind it all is nothing but brilliant.So many excellent photos and films and so well "framed" through the music and the narrator that i cant even begin to describe the feeling you will get from seeing this masterpiece!Just take my word for it - if you are historically interrested into nazism and its background you have to make time for this one here.
jacksflicks It's hard to examine the Nazi movement without seeming sensationalistic and lurid. "Architecture of Doom" achieves the difficult task of illustrating its thesis without sensationalizing it.I have seen and read many histories of the Nazi period, and because of the aesthetic impact implicit in Nazism, the overarching impression I had wasn't the monstrous brutality and inhumanity, but the the uniforms, the rallies, the Wagner. After this film, I was left with a new way of looking and thinking about the Nazis.That the narration is not to some tastes is, to me, a quibble. Actually, I like Sam Gray's narration. The phrasing is novel and very effective. In fact, the "inflectionless" style lends a kind of boldface to the words.This is powerful stuff. There are debatable points, but the general thesis - that Nazism is murder in pursuit of an aesthetic - is mighty compelling.
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