Günther 1939 (Heil Hitler)

The film Günther 1939 (Heil Hitler) consists of “found footage” derived from an amateur film from 1939. The re-working of the material by Johannes Rosenberger is a protest: sheer indignation, and unsubtle, with good reason. The original film, made by a husband and father consists of three “stories”: 1. “My beautiful wife has given birth to a beautiful child. Look how they are looking at me.” 2. “Down on the street a parade is going past, look at all the uniforms and all the people. And there goes Hitler!” 3. “And that’s where we went on holiday - sailing and in the woods.” Rosenberger repeats these three pieces in their original sequence by re-photographing them on the optical printer. His intervention lies in the fact that he emphasises the borders of the picture by photographing not only the image, but also the edge of the film and the framelines; he slows the rhythm enabling a search of the “historical moment” (Hitler driving past) and overlays the whole with a soundtrack - a rhythmically scratchy beat, a shrill, jarring sinus tone and Robert Schumann’s song “May, lovely May, you will soon be here again”. The protest implied by his intervention is directed against the objectifying position of the amateur filmmaker. In the process of documenting “important” moments in a life, everything is reduced to a sameness, everything “special” to the indifferent. The passive and positivist bourgeois peeps out from behind this point of view.

Amateur film describes, in an invisible handwriting, a million miles of day-to-day reality. Rosenberger’s film is less a protest about the content of that invisible handwriting than against its syntax; a grammar which is an ideology - heartless, but at the same time sentimental. (Alexander Horwath)