Event

MOLOCH

(aka MOLOKH)
Dir. Alexander Sokurov, 1998.
108 min. Russia/Germany.
In German with English subtitles.

The Third Reich is the first target in Sokurovs tetralogy of power. Set in 1942, MOLOCH follows a weekend retreat at Berghof in the Bavarian alps (here constructed as a surreal and surveilled castle that could exist in the same universe as Michael Mann's THE KEEP) by Hitler and his inner circle a few weeks before eating it at the Battle of Stalingrad. Closer to Rules of the Game than Downfall, with a hint of Salo, Sokurovs portrait of the Fuhrer is a comedy of manners that opts out of the rarefied monstrosities and historical anomalies of prestige Nazi dramas for a more explicable, albeit curiously staged, critique of upper class values. One that, productively, creates a collapsible continuum between civilization and the regime which nearly destroyed it.

MOLOCH reconciles the contradictions between Hitlers fascism with his ostensibly liberal vegetarianism and interest in art by making the latter a fanatical extension of bourgeois predilections lorded over his underlings with tyrannically petty condescension. When, at one point, he feigns ignorance at the existence of Auschwitz, it points less to Sokurovs historical irresponsibility than a larger statement on the cohabitation of industrialized death and capitalist self-regard. It also points to the films title, the name for a Canaanite god associated with child sacrifice. Whether it's for the young men he sends to the front or those he sends to the ovens, its root - a portmanteau of the Hebrew word for king (melech), as combined with the one for shame, (Boshet) - is more than appropriate.