Alfred Kaiser: Decomposing Nazi Phraseology (INDEX 050)

When Alfred Kaiser first unveiled Ein drittes Reich (A Third Reich, 1975) and Ein drittes Reich aus seinem Abfall (A Third Reich from Its Refuse, 1977) near the close of the 1970s, his name carried none of the institutional weight that often cushions difficult art. Yet these films announced themselves with startling authority, assembling from the wreckage of Nazi image culture a pair of works so rigorous, so corrosively lucid, that they seemed less edited than excavated. Kaiser worked exclusively with material produced during the Third Reich itself, fashioning a cinema of diseased memory from propaganda reels, industrial films, amateur footage, educational shorts, and features. The achievement recalls the dialectical brilliance of Jean-Luc Godard at his most severe, especially in its use of sound and its archaeological chill. Every splice is a brush uncovering bone. Each cut reveals another layer of ideological sediment hardened into spectacle. What emerges across both films is a…