Münchhausen

The deathless Baron Münchhausen entertains a woman who has fallen for him with an account of his own adventures: riding a cannonball, travelling to the Moon, turning invisible, moving from one court to the next. Whether any of it is true never matters to the telling. What matters is the telling itself, and the fact that nobody can withstand him. The film was made in 1943 on Goebbels's orders for UFA's twenty-fifth anniversary: colour, expensive, and pure escapism. The screenplay was written under a pseudonym by Erich Kästner, whose books had been banned and burned. The result is a magnificent fairy tale produced in the darkest year of the war, a technical achievement that is also a film worth remembering the funding of.