"A Masterpiece." - Variety
Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler's chief architect, preserved a quotation of Goethe's in his files: "Beauty arose regardless of its utility and of the damage which it could cause." Peter Cohen's film The Architecture of Doom is a brilliant two-hour documentation of the direct if paradoxical connection between "beauty" and evil in Hitler's Third Reich. The evil, of course, far surpassed mere damage.
Cohen, an award-winning filmmaker born in Sweden of parents who fled from Nazi Germany and Austria, believes that the National Socialist horror can be comprehended as a pervasive manifestation of a perverse aesthetic doctrine: to make the world beautiful by doing violence to it. This provocative thesis, systematically explored, gives compelling pace to the film...read on
