Hitler's Hit Parade

Amidst the endless (but necessary) tilling of the subject of Nazi Germany, a sense of German normalcy during the period has been lost. Overwhelmed by notions of the Reich as a place ruled by endless night, one wonders: How did ordinary Germans spend their time? How did they entertain themselves?

The latter question is answered in part by the documentary Hitler's Hit Parade, directed by Oliver Axer and Suzanne Benze, which opens this week at Film Forum. Stringing together clips from German films, archival footage and home movies, Hitler's Hit Parade is an x-ray of Nazi Germany's collective unconscious. Eschewing narration, the filmmakers make their points through juxtaposition. A filmmaker fiddling with his camera is rapidly replaced onscreen by a scientist cracking open a canister of gas-a suitable symbol for the film's take on German popular culture. Film, as the rest of the modern arts, was merely another expression of the German impulse toward destruction and death.

German films during the Third Reich sought to inculcate Nazi values into its citizens. Here is the Nazi soft sell, using Disney-cute ducks and majestic oak trees as symbols for uglier truths like the notion of Aryan racial superiority and the need for lebensraum. A smiling bandleader talks of extricating "foreign influences" from his group's sound and the need to send certain members to "concert camp" for retraining. Here, too, is a seemingly endless parade of tuxedoed smoothies and their paramours, in a nightmarish parody of the American musical of the 1930s, dancing and romancing as their doubles murdered their way across Europe.

Some of the found footage is equally disturbing for its everydayness: Germans out for a stroll in a Berlin festooned with swastika buntings, men and women clad in burlap sacks, surrounded by a jovial crowd, as they are forcibly given concentration-camp haircuts. An animated film depicts a hook-nosed, bearded Jew sneaking up to the Golden Tree and stealing its riches, followed by a map of Germany on which Jews fly and dive into books, factories, churches and the like, emerging with bags of treasure.

With all the remarkable oddities discovered here by the filmmakers, a bit in the way of clarification and explanation would have been useful. Who made the studio films on display here? Where did the found footage come from? Still, too much explanation would have dimmed the sense of having untrammeled access to the catalog of images and symbols that helped craft the Nazi mind.

Film Forum, 209 W. Houston St. (betw. Varick St. & 6th Ave.), 212-727-8110; call for times, $10.