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BLIND
SPOT – HITLER’S SECRETARY
7/10
Im
toten winkel – Hitlers sekretarin : Germany 2002
: Andre HELLER & Othmar SCHMIDERER : 90 mins (original version 95
mins)
In theory,
ninety or so minutes of a single talking head sounds like a recipe for
cinematic tedium. And there are a couple of moments in Blind
Spot, a series of extended interviews with 82-year-old Traudl Junge
– who served as Hitler’s last secretary, from 1942 to 1944 – when even
the most attentive viewer’s interest may wander for a moment. But this
is such a remarkable story that directors Heller and Schmiderer were wise
to avoid dressing it up with distracting bells and whistles – there’s
no background music, no illustration (photos or film), and very little
in the way of audible questioning.
 It’s
very different from the approach taken in Errol Morris’s 2003 contribution
to the ‘testimony cinema’ sub-genre, The
Fog of War – interviews with a former US Defense Secretary subtitled
Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S McNamara. There are certainly
no attempts to draw explicit ‘lessons’ from Junge’s story – an interviewer
is occasionally heard, but in no way does he try anything remotely approaching
interrogation, and he makes no attempt to guide or divert Junge’s flow
of recollections.
There are
also no rival voices to confirm or deny her statements - one presumes
that Junge (who died on the day after Blind Spot premiered at the
2002 Berlin Film Festival) was the final survivor from Hitler’s desperate
last days in his Berlin bunker. Some baldly informative intertitles appear
at the beginning and end, but otherwise the only addition to Junge’s to-camera
address are brief interpolated sequences, filmed after the main body of
evidence, in which Junge silently watches herself on the screen, at one
point commenting on what she sees and providing further clarification.
In terms of
film criticism, there isn’t much that can be said Blind Spot: this
isn’t a piece of work that can or should be profitably compared with anything
else that’s being released in cinemas at the moment - even Fog of War
is doing something rather different. Heller and Schmiderer succeed
in their austere aims to stand as an invaluable, informative historical
record of Hitler and his times: a touch monotonous, perhaps, but mostly
bracing in its rigorous austerity.
8th February,
2004
(seen 7th February : PictureHouse at FACT, Liverpool)
by Neil
Young
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