The Fredösphere

I saw a documentary on Nazi art called Architecture of Doom at Blockbuster and brought it home.  Last night I watched the first half.

We're promised a view of the Nazi aesthetic and the importance Hitler et al. placed on art as part of an attempt to reinvent German culture.  We get some of that, but they spend a lot of time talking about doctors and euthanasia.  And, as others have already complained, the naration and production values are uninspired.

Hey, if you don't want to talk about architecture much, then I suggest maybe you don't want to put words like, you know, architecture in the title.  And don't merely assert that Hitler's own designs were tasteless and then show a couple of still photos; give us some analysis.

Oh well.  I complain too much, and I don't claim this post has the dicipline of a real movie review; here's the real thing.  We see enough from the annual Nazi art exhibitions (particularly in the heroic statuary) to get confirmation of a certain creepy fact about conflicted Nazi attitudes about ... well, just read this article that Arts & Letters Daily featured a few weeks ago.  And I should give the filmmakers credit for something else:  if not for them, and the "research" (3 minutes worth of Googling) I did for this post, I would have never learned the unrelated fact that architect Antonio Ricci designs his buildings in certain ways so he can travel to the Deep Umbra and attain full Nephandi mage status.  Good for him!