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Synopsis
Universal Hotel combines objective and subjective elements. In it, Thompson chronicles his research into experiments by Dr. Sigmund Rascher at Dachau in 1942, in which he nearly froze a Polish prisoner and then got a German prostitute to warm him up; Thompson uses photographs from archives in six countries and recounts a subjective dream set in what he calls the Universal Hotel.
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Theatrical
31 Dec 1986
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USA
USA
More
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How do you reconstruct a reality that been shattered beyond comprehension? In UNIVERSAL HOTEL, director Peter Thompson attempts to grapple with the Holocaust by meticulously reconstructing the final minutes of a Holocaust victim's life as a human Guinea pig for the Nazis. Legitimately one of the most macabre and morbid things I've seen, and yet there's a grim necessity to it. This is something that must be witnessed lest we forget.
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For me, the most interesting thing about this movie is what happened off screen. My mother walked in during the final compilation of shots, depicting the man's face, no words through the audio channels or on screen. She asked me what the hell I was watching, and instinctively I said “a horror movie”. I immediately corrected myself, saying it was a documentary, then once again went back on that statement. A true Freudian Slip, I realized that I was horrified by this cinematic essay. The eerie feeling of the stills, grainy, black and white, low level detail, were unsettling. Something I often feel during documentaries, especially ones about the Holacaust, but something I never consider, is that these are the same feelings one should express during a traditional narrative horror film. The dreams he was having, overlaid over footage of his trip to Dachau, the experiments edited into his research were terrifying. One more obviously terrifying than the other.
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i feel like if i were to research and document this event, I would genuinely lose my mind and dedicate my whole life in understanding what happened to this man. his identity, his life, completely faded away, vanished in time. his story only fringing on niche evidence, a couple of photographs and two sketches of the experiments. our understanding of what happened fringes on such vague knowledge of the facts, the filmmaker even includes a dream he had talking with the prisoner. the ending, with an unknown name mysteriously showing up on the walls, the film almost turns into a ghost story. what does it mean? did the filmmaker draw the names himself as a metaphor for how these crimes…
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thompson was doing really impt. work (RIP) need to get my grubby hands on rest of his stuff!
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A striking cinematic essay attempting to understand just one of the horrors of the 20th century, the evidence of which consists on only a few grainy black and white photos.