ABSTRACT
Shirer compiled these notes for “a picture of Hitler at work during war-time,” to be broadcast on CBS radio. That picture is worked up through Shirer’s rather wry humor, which traces a kind of fault-line on one side of which is Hitler-the-man (he “stays up late”), on the other, Hitler-the-political-leader (“the world’s misfortune”). Film, however, runs directly down, or, at least, on both sides of that line. On the one side there is the man who loves the latest movies, on the other the Chancellor watching film from the army archives. Of course, this imaginary line was untenable and Shirer knew it. Capra seems to have known it as well and it irked him. Untenable and irksome because film here realizes the Führer as both contemplator and creator of images. Hence the repeated trajectories of Shirer’s “portrait”: from watching the news to making the news, from watching the girl to taking tea with the girl, from gazing to “fingering,” etc.
