A new film, Blondi, takes audiences inside the Führer’s bunker in the final days of the Third Reich, from the point of view of his beloved Alsatian
When Pablo Álvarez-Hornia stood up to present Blondi – a new film about the dying days of the Third Reich – at its premiere at a cinema in Brixton earlier this month, he went in big. Picture the scene, he told the audience: it’s 1924 and FW Murnau has just strapped a movie camera to a bicycle and invented subjective cinematic perspective. The result was The Last Laugh which captured the precariousness of life in Germany after the first world war with such poignant precision it foreshadowed the following decade – and revolutionised cinema.
For Blondi, shot 102 years later, the camera was strapped to a dog. Lexie, a seven-month-old German shepherd, is both the title character – Hitler’s last dog, possibly the most famous hound in geopolitics – but is also the director of photography, or cinemadographer if you prefer, as both Álvarez-Hornia (the film’s producer) and Jack Salvadori (its director) certainly do. It makes for a novel cinematic experience. Sometimes you feel a bit sick at the sudden changes of pace and freaky angles. “Some things need to be made uncomfortable,” says Álvarez-Hornia, “and, in a way, it needed to be dirtier and grittier and uglier for it to work.”
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A new film, Blondi, takes audiences inside the Führer’s bunker in the final days of the Third Reich, from the point of view of his beloved AlsatianWhen Pablo Álvarez-Hornia stood up to present Blondi – a new film abou...
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