Sonata for Hitler

As with so many early films by Sokurov this film has two dates the first is the date of its creation the film was then banned the second is the date of the final edition and legal public screening The film consists of German and Soviet archive footage of the World War II to be exact from the end of the war An attempt to make a largescale documentary on this subject had been undertaken in the Soviet cinema of the 1960s the film Ordinary Fascism by the outstanding Soviet filmmaker Mikhail Romm had become a classic retrospective investigation of fascism But Sokurov uses the expressive power of the documentary image in an absolutely different way He does not amass materials for a largescale picture of Nazi crimes