Our nazi

Our Nazi (1984) is a video documentary made during the shooting of Thomas Harlan’s movie, Wundkanal. It doubles up Harlan’s device (Filbert, a real-life former Gestapo officer, plays an ex-Nazi kidnapped by a terrorist organisation) by studying Harlan and the members of his crew. Our Nazi, first subtitled Feed Back by Harlan and Kramer, is one of the video films that Kramer linked directly to other films to give a distanced or critical view of them – in fact, one of the closest films to Our Nazi is probably Dear Doc. Berlin 10/90 may also be considered as the ultimate critical return to Wundkanal‘s device of isolation. Our Nazi is above all an exercise in confronting an image-body, Filbert: an unbreakable and opaque block of history, at the centre of the dark space of the shoot and everyone’s attention. The video manages to slide into the interstices of Harlan’s shooting and come within a hair’s breadth of Filbert’s body and face: “I wanted to taste that man”, Kramer said somewhere. It is the cadaveric clash of a historical body against the blueness of the video: “in-between bodies”, Filbert the living-dead man says nothing, stumbles, while the close-ups transform him into a stone monster around which people talk, launch attacks, make projections and tear each other apart.

Cyril Béghin, Catalogue FID Marseille, 2008