Writer-director Hans Jurgen Syberberg's 7-hour film, "Our Hitler," will have its Salt Lake premiere on Thursday and Friday, April 26 and 27, at 8 p.m. in the auditorium of the Salt Lake Art Center, 20 S. West Temple.
Tickets for this program are $10 for both evenings. Admission includes a light buffet, which will be served each evening during intermission.The first two segments of the four-part film will be shown Thursday and the final two parts Friday evening.
Reservations are recommended. The Utah Media Center told the Deseret News Tuesday that initially just a handful of diehard film buffs were expected to be interested in the rarely shown production, but judging from the number of phone calls the center had received, it was suggested that interested patrons make advance reservations by calling 534-1158. Seating is limited.
"Our Hitler" includes actual archival footage, narrative sections shot on sound stages, slide projections and music by Beethoven, Mozart and Wagner.
The British Film Institute voted "Our Hitler" as "the most innovative film of 1977," and while the production was not popular in Germany, it has received critical acclaim in other parts of the world, including comments by Susan Sontag, who has referred to the film as "one of the greatest works of art of the 20th century."
The four elements of the film are "The Grail," "A German Dream," "The End of Winter's Tale" and "We Children of Hell."
"Our Hitler" is not a straightforward historical narrative depicting the rise and fall of Adolph Hitler. Rather, according to Lawrence Van Gelder of The New York Times (Jan. 13, 1980), it shows the German dictator in many aspects.
Syberberg's "Our Hitler" is actually the final portion of a trilogy covering 100 years of German history, beginning with a film he made in 1972 about mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria and continued with a film about 19th-century pulp-fantasy writer Karl May.
"Our Hitler" ran for six months in a commercial theater in Paris but has been screened underground in museums and universities in Germany. It has also been shown at Lincoln Center in Washington, D.C. (where tickets sold out almost immediately) and at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco.
David Denby of New York Magazine, describes the epic film as "a cranky, often preposterous art behemoth . . . neither a fictional narrative nor a documentary but a vast meditation on Hitler, on Germany past and present, and on the cinema itself."