Münchhausen Post

In doing the readings for this week, I was struck by how differently Schulte-Sasse and Rentschler interpreted this film. To make a very broad generalization, Schulte-Sasse reads Münchhausen as a subversive, anti-Nazi movie and reads the main character as Jewish, while Rentschler reads Münchhausen as a clever scheme of Goebbel's "to control all sectors of experience includ[ing] alternative perspectives" (Rentschler 203) and the liar baron as a strong representation of the Fascist ideal- a man unaffected by the passage of time who is master of his own destiny and "those forces that... might hinder his unencumbered movement" (Rentschler 207). To have come to such radically different conclusions, one might think that the authors had read each scene completely differently, but surprisingly, they didn't. They both look at the winking picture and the baron's ride on the cannonball as indications of self-reference, and both interpret this gesture as showing the illusion that is film-making. Schulte-Sasse even references some of Rentschler's own conclusions, but then recognizes that hers are generally much different.

I have a feeling that if I tried to figure out at exactly which point in their logic the two authors began to disagree, I'd be writing an essay, not a blog, so I'm only going to talk about one particular scene in which they took different opinions.

At the end of the film, the butler turns off the electric light, signaling the end of the film. But the painting of the baron comes to life once more to blow out the candles, and the smoke from the candles signals the real ending of the film by spelling out "Ende." According to Schulte-Sasse, this double ending has two functions. First, it highlights our ambivalence to the ending of the film (and our recognition that it is a film!) in much the same way that Münchhausen prefers Christian's death on the moon where he fades into smoke rather than the rot of earthly death. Second, it also shows more generally Nazi cinema as an apparatus of propaganda; Münchhausen sits in his portrait and is subject to his place in time, but there is some other element which makes him not content to stay there, so he reaches out of his portrait into a new time.

Rentschler, on the other hand, sees this as a final demonstration of the ultimate Fascist power. Baron Münchhausen has such control over his destiny that he even "stages his final act and thus determines how he will enter history" (Rentschler 210). This reminds me of how Hitler asked for drawings of his grandiose buildings hundreds of years in the future, as they lay in ruins. Rentschler also suggests that this ending in smoke, when viewed with the death of Kuchenreutter, represents the Nazis desire to make mortality more poetic and intimate. This was especially important to the Nazi propaganda machine after the disaster of Stalingrad.