← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Dan Dare
Thread ID: 17449 | Posts: 7 | Started: 2005-03-21
2005-03-21 23:45 | User Profile
The director is the same guy who produced the recent Hitler movie [I]Der Untergang[/I] ââ¬ÅThe Downfallââ¬Â
**Berlin audience boos Wagner opera **
A new production of Wagner's opera Parsifal was booed on its opening night in Berlin on Saturday.
Some audience members walked out while others shouted "provincial theatre" at the Staatsoper opera house's stage.
Parsifal is director Bernd Eichinger's first attempt at opera.
He moved some action to New York and dressed knights of the Holy Grail as rockers and punks. ... [url]http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/entertainment/arts/4367783.stm[/url]
2005-03-21 23:54 | User Profile
When I clicked on this thread, I assumed it was going to be a depressing one. Apparently, however, it is was the reverse....
2005-03-22 16:23 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Kevin_O'Keeffe]When I clicked on this thread, I assumed it was going to be a depressing one. Apparently, however, it is was the reverse....[/QUOTE]
Same here. Is this Bernd Eichinger one of The Chosen, or just another trendily self-hating German worm?
2005-03-22 20:58 | User Profile
Crap like this is usually produced by no talent ideolgues who, lacking the ability to compose their own operas, take the work of the the masters and defecate upon it. This, they proclaim to their fellow troglodytes, is ART!
Yeah, OK, it's right up there with Snoop Doggy Dog!
2005-03-22 21:07 | User Profile
Glad to see some German still have some good taste.
2005-03-23 01:25 | User Profile
Some will know of Eichinger and Barenboim.
There is no need to attend - even at the Berliner Staatsoper.
Eichinger is influenced by the terrible liar, communist and self-promoting fraud that calls itself Joachim Fest. They belong together. Both queers and falsifiers.
They debase Wagner - and are allowed to do so.
However, they attract little audience.
Mentzer
2005-03-29 20:04 | User Profile
I saw Downfall this weekend. Excellent film of Hitler's last days in his bunker as seen through the eyes of his young secretary, Trudi Junge.
My enthusiastic review didn't go over well on another forum because the German high command wasn't portrayed as some single-minded beast without redeeming, much less human qualities. Instead they were shown to be proud, loyal, accomplished warriors who stayed with Hitler to the end despite the fact that many saw that he was unable to lead and most of his edicts went unserved. All went to Russian prisons, some were executed. Put in different uniforms they could have been mistaken for Americans or Brits. This will anger many, especially the Jews who would like to see Germans and Germany continue to be villified to the end of time in one-dimensional portrayals. It keeps things simple and manageable.
But it was the study of Hitler that broke most molds. He was portrayed as a man who was both sympathetic and despicable, complex and single-minded, forgiving and tyrannical, who, in the end, was betrayed by his closest and most loyal friends, key among them, Himmler who brokered his own private surrender with the Allies. But more than anything, Hitler fantasized about Germany returning to its Teutonic roots. As a result of the betrayals both real and imagined, Hitler began to mentally unravel resulting in an atmospere of confused loyalties and bitter disputes about a military coup.
This is one WWII picture where the Jews aren't afforded the perfunctory front and center stage, hogging it so that every other victim is relegated to the wings and oblivion. Hitler refers to them only twice. Once when he called them corruptors and second when he makes a passing reference to international Jewry being responsible for putting Germany in this war.
For once, American audiences got to see the German military as not just a mindless killing machine, but warriors who believed in the glory of a once proud and great Germany. WWI and the ignominy forced on them at Versailles were foremost in their minds as they each made a decision to live or die for "national socialism" as the Russians got closer to the bunker.
The one disingenous touch in the whole film was at the end, when the real Trudi Junge, now a senior citizen, does a mea culpa about not "knowing what was going on", meaning, with the Jews. She blames herself for not trying to find out, and as the IRS says, ignorance of the law is no defense, she takes the same position, although she was only a girl of 22 and stayed in the bunker with Hitler and his entourage for some time. She's too hard on herself. Under those conditions, who would have expected her to know or even care. I felt that little intrusion was very out of place. But the rest of the movie was riveting.