A Potentiality (Dana Berman Duff, 2020)

I wanted to take a quick break from NYFF-mania, and so I thought I'd check in with an experimental film that wasn't programmed by the team, from a maker who has shown at TIFF, Rotterdam, Crossroads, and a number of other prominent showcases. I myself have run hot and cold with Duff's films, particularly her Catalog series, a conceptual project for which I have not really found an "in" as a viewer. But her latest film combines formalist rigor and emotional directness in a very uncommon manner.

Duff very openly based her film on the work of another artist, Susan Silton, who collected images from five front pages of the New York Times between 1933 and 1934. As presented by Silton, these collections of raw textual data -- facts from the news of the world at that time -- seem to suggest that had the global readership of the Times simply been more attentive, indications of the rise of Adolf Hitler and all he represented were plain to see. Duff spends the film's first eight minutes silently presenting close-up fragments of the pages, allowing pieces of the stories to come through. Point being, even without the complete story, we are gradually able to piece together what we're looking at.

The second half of A Potentiality consists of clear leader, interrupted only by subtitles. This is because on the soundtrack, we hear "Der Krieg is Aus," one of the concluding arias of Der Kaiser von Atlantis, the 1944 opera created by composer Viktor Ullmann and librettist Peter Kien, while both men were interred at Thereseinstadt concentration camp. (They were both eventually killed in Auschwitz.) The opera was rehearsed but never performed in the camp, because Nazi officials believed that the main character, Kaiser Overall, was a satirical representation of Hitler.

The Emperor of Atlantis is the story of a Kaiser whose glorious dream is to inflict total war upon the world, to fight until every last man and woman is dead. Death, resenting both this taxing overwork and the fact that the spiritual gravity of his existence has been forgotten, goes on strike. People are stranded in an agonizing limbo between life and death, until the Kaiser agrees to die himself, ceding his role back to Death.

Every once in awhile, some bottom-feeding would-be moral philosopher takes to the Internet to pose the 20th century's version of the Trolley Problem. "Would you kill Baby Hitler?" As Duff shows, nobody killed Adult Hitler, or even moved to depose him, when his intentions were patently clear. (Mein Kampf was published in 1925. Everyone knew what Hitler planned to do.) Today, we face a similar challenge. But it will all be okay. Mitt Romney has issued a stern warning to Hitler. Marco Rubio insists that it is vital that our cherished democratic institutions be respected. Chuck Schumer has waved an angry finger. Nancy Pelosi made fun of Hitler's mustache. And we heave a sigh of relief, because Justice John Roberts doesn't side with Hitler nearly as much as we thought he would.

It's fine. Everything will be fine. The New York Times told me so.