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WWhen Pablo Álvarez-Hornia stood up to show Blondi – a new film about the dying days of the Third Reich – at its first screening at a cinema in Brixton earlier this month, he got a lot of attention. Imagine the scene, he told the audience: it’s 1924 and FW Murnau has just attached a video camera to a bicycle and created a video camera. The result was The Last Laugh which captured the seriousness of life Germany After the first world war this clearly shaped the image of the next decade – and changed the movies.
For Blondi, who was shot after 102 years, the camera was tied to a dog. Lexie, a seven-month-old German shepherd, is both responsible – Hitler’s last dog, perhaps the most famous dog in geopolitics – and is also a director of photography, or a cinematographer if you prefer, as Álvarez-Hornia (the film’s producer) and Jack Salvadori (its director) really do. It makes for a new video experience. Sometimes you feel a little sick because of the sudden changes in direction and strange angles. Álvarez-Hornia said: “Some things had to be unpleasant, and in a way they had to be very dirty and dirty to work.”
The whole picture is made up of Lexie’s two ears, since the camera is behind her. Salvadori likes a lot of unexpected things, “vibration, for example, is something I never thought about. That’s why I wanted to rely on a dog to do this work, because I wanted to see, you know, different poses.” Originally from Italy, Salvadori, 29, met Álvarez-Hornia, 27 and from Spain, in Cannes six years ago; both had studied leadership in London.
Salvadori has always loved dogs; Álvarez-Hornia is not sick but “I was happy to sacrifice my health a little to make the movie.” The first screening of this little film was accompanied by a very short behind-the-scenes documentary, the latter of which was interesting, part caper, part chaos, since although the canine element is very experimental, there is no production of this film that you can call familiar. They didn’t get permission to shoot, for one thing, so behind every scene is a group of guys trying to set up a hotel room or the Senate House in London as a government office in the 1940s, without being caught by the security forces. But the film itself is not funny.
From 1941, when he was given to Hitler by the Nazi secretary Martin Bormann, Blondi was a propaganda tool to show the Führer’s love for animals. He was a show animal and a force from the days before “psychological aid”, when German citizens showed their loyalty to the Nazis by keeping a dog that looked like Blondi, and traded them to the Gestapo if they were not interested in knowing about the alsatian. One day before Hitler’s death in April 1945, Blondi did his last act, taking cyanide pills to test his strength. Although “performed” is probably the wrong word because, as Álvarez-Hornia says, “Blondi in this film is an innocent person, he has no conscience, he has no thoughts, he has no ability to calculate morals.” The film describes the end of the Third Reich, when the generals give bad news, trembling, to Hitler, their disgust cannot change the war and in the end, a group of skeletons, in a bunker.
The script was written by Peter Greenaway, “always one of my cinematographers”, Salvadori says, “and while working at Blondi, I realized that Greenaway had written a short story about him. Greenaway agreed to put it back as a script from this simple method from a fan. Another movie giant, cinematographer Roger Deakins, also helped, advising Salvadori not to work with trained dogs: “just find a real dog that acts like a real dog.” Said Salvadori, “100% correct.”
Casting human roles, the two were always well understood by actors who did not know who would end up in the film, because it would depend on who Lexie looked at. Salvadori said: “They didn’t have to think about the camera anymore, so it just became a stage. This warning – no promise of screen time – limited the actors, but it also changed the look of the piece, in a way. Álvarez-Horcnia says: “All these Hitler officials were chasing the dog to get attention, because they knew that anyone who caught the dog’s attention had Hitler’s attention. It also evokes the humiliation of being the last man standing in a fascist cult: removing oneself to humble oneself in front of animals, including a scene in which a soldier secretly and secretly fights Blondi for a piece of meat.
Salvadori said: “I wanted to be surprised. “Before, I wanted to be a viewer, not just a filmmaker.” Casting the Führer was another challenge, although he says, “surprisingly, in the UK, everyone wants to play Hitler. But he and his producer wanted someone who could speak German, but “German actors don’t want to play the Führer. We had a hard time finding someone who could not only deliver the lines, but shake like a dog.” Finally they found Nicola Pedrozzi – who doesn’t look like Hitler but is catching that rare cold – in the middle of a Swiss mountain.
“Shaking with a dog” is not a way to throw things away. The entire film hinges on a creature that is highly sensitive to oxygen. “There are no jokes or pranks,” says Salvadori. “The idea that you’re looking at something so awful is the joke we were expecting.” But there is nothing funny, they are in the basement, and no one is having fun, not even the dog. Dogs to take power.” The fact that the crew had not yet obtained permission to shoot in this bedroom added to the anxiety and claustrophobia. Pity the dog who was able to bear the grim ennui and anticimax of the Nazi defeat, without knowing on earth what it meant.
The duo’s next film is a short story set in a colonial house in South America, about “a young Nazi who lives alone, with only maids and dogs. The film, says Salvadori, will be shot normally – and without anxiety. “I couldn’t give up control any more than I did when I gave the camera to the dog.”
