The Architecture of Doom

The documentary looks at the Nazi regime from the side of aesthetics: architecture, painting, sculpture, the ordering of ceremony, the mass rallies. Hitler's start as a rejected painter, his admiration for ancient Rome and Greece, his dreams of monumental building and his fixation on the healthy, beautiful body are treated together. It is assembled from archive material, official films of the period and less familiar footage. Peter Cohen's argument is that the regime's idea of beauty and its practice of sorting people were two faces of one thought. The line running from the banning of modern art to the killing of disabled and sick people, the persecution of homosexuals and the extermination of the Jews is set out inside that frame. The telling does not aestheticise the crime; on the contrary it shows how an aesthetic turned into one. This Swedish production is one of the reference works of its kind.