February 26 2003

GET RICH OR die tryin' on a "reality" show. American television fiddles in Neverland as oil warfare burns. So busy misunderstanding the present, mass media can scarcely be bothered to learn from history. But that's the exact aim of the new movie Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary, which makes a claim for stark visual simplicity as truth. For 90 minutes, directors André Heller and Othmar Schmiderer fix their camera's unblinking eye on Traudl Junge, the titular secretary, as she recounts her years working for Adolf Hitler and feebly tries to capture the personal toll of her role in history.

In Blind Spot's press kit, Heller states that he and Schmiderer scrupulously avoided "the distraction of any documentary material or the fast-cut style used in political documentaries these days to make them seem more entertaining." Instead, they interviewed Junge for 10 hours and condensed the footage. The 80-year-old Junge's testimony might have resembled interrogation footage if the questions lobbed her way weren't so broad and infrequent, and if she weren't interviewed in the relative comfort of her home. In fact, the books and bronze statuettes behind her suggest a more apt comparison: an analyst's office.

Blind Spot claims Junge is breaking a five-decade silence; certainly the inference is that in telling her story, she's unburdening herself of at least some of the guilt she's amassed. In fact, she was interviewed at length for the '70s-era BBC show The World at War, and she has provided material for published accounts of Hitler's final years. This somewhat bogus aspect of the movie's conceit shows that no matter how puritan its visual aesthetic, it does possess sensationalist elements. They Saved Hitler's Brain, an infamous exploitation-film title, isn't too far removed from the subtitle these filmmakers have chosen.

Naïveté is one of Junge's principal excuses for having fallen under the spell of Hitler, a reason that is hardly novel, even in the realm of full-length documentary portraits. In Ray Müller's The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, the director of Triumph of the Will is similarly smitten with a führer father figure, though she's far more defiant in defending her own alleged innocence. Junge asserts that Hitler almost never used the word "Jew" in her presence, yet her account of his final testament – the last of many speeches she took down in shorthand – offers evidence to the contrary.

Essentially, Blind Spot is a double portrait – one of Hitler and of Junge (in the latter sense, perhaps it does indeed break a five-decade silence). Junge's descriptions of Hitler call Jay Rosenblatt's short film "Human Remains" to mind in their attention to banal detail: we learn he disliked warm rooms, hated being touched, and forbade having flowers in rooms because he didn't want "dead things" around. While Rosenblatt's movie widens its scope to include other dictators and investigate the fault lines in their minds, Blind Spot bluntly presents the result of one man's murderous megalomania. Paranoid toward his closest followers, Hitler tested cyanide capsules on his most beloved companion, a dog named Blondie, to make certain they worked.

Her hair handsomely swept back and dressed in a series of sweaters and scarves, Junge is a bizarrely stoic character – her fixed expression leaves one wondering whether Rosa von Praunheim (fresh from completing the similarly housebound doc Fassbinder's Women) might have penetrated the façade. Chronologically and contextually vague at the outset, her account grows vivid and time locked as she reaches the last days in Hitler's bunker. When she suddenly casts her eyes downward and expresses anger at the betrayal inherent in his suicide, one can't help thinking of a lover's fixation on the final moments of a relationship.

Heller and Schmiderer's documentary takes its title from one of Junge's assertions: "I thought I was at the source of information, and in fact I was the blind spot." In the years after World War II, it took a statue of Sophie Scholl – an anti-Nazi campaigner the same age as Junge who was executed the year Junge took her fateful job with Hitler – to fully reveal Junge's lack of vision to herself. Her own final testament, captured on video rather than by shorthand, remains a blinkered one. It's a frustrating document. These days, blindness wears more entertaining disguises.