The Rape of Europa tells the epic story of the systematic theft, deliberate destruction and miraculous survival of Europe’s art treasures during the Third Reich and World War II.
In a journey through seven countries, the film takes the audience into the violent whirlwind of fanaticism, greed, and warfare that threatened to wipe out the artistic heritage of Europe. For twelve long years, the Nazis looted and destroyed art on a scale unprecedented in history. But heroic young art historians and curators from America and across Europe fought back with an extraordinary campaign to rescue and return the millions of lost, hidden and stolen treasures.
The Rape of Europa begins and ends with the story of artist Gustav Klimt’s famed Gold Portrait, stolen from Viennese Jews in 1938 and now the most expensive painting ever sold.
Today, more than sixty years later, the legacy of this tragic history continues to play out as families of looted collectors recover major works of art, conservators repair battle damage, and nations fight over the fate of ill-gotten spoils of war.
Joan Allen narrates this breathtaking chronicle about the battle over the very survival of centuries of western culture.
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According to U.S. estimates, the Nazis stole one-fifth of all the known artworks in Europe. While the Allies returned most of the displaced art in the decade following the war, much of the loot is still missing. Tragically, unique masterpieces were destroyed and lost to posterity forever. Other works of art—the last, forgotten victims of the war—survived but remain unidentified, traceable only with costly and difficult investigation.
By the mid-fifties the initial, massive restitution effort by the Allies had lost its priority and momentum to the pressures of the Cold War. Hundreds of works of art, their owners unidentified, still lay in government storerooms across Europe, or remained in the hands of unscrupulous dealers who waited for years before disguising their origins and feeding them slowly into the market.
But this long quiet period is over. The end of the Cold War and the opening of the archives of Eastern Europe revealed that many works believed lost had survived. The commemorations marking the end of World War II and the development of Holocaust scholarship also led to the re-examination and declassification of forgotten records, inspiring those who had long since despaired of finding their lost possessions to search again. Instrumental in bringing worldwide attention to this long-neglected story was the 1995 publication of The Rape of Europa, Lynn H. Nicholas's landmark book on which the film is based.
The documentary film by Actual Films builds on her scholarship by incorporating the latest historical research, examining the legal and political problems presented by contemporary restitution claims, and assessing the lingering effects of this massive cultural displacement, an aspect of the war that still haunts us today.
The revival of interest in the subject of looting and restitution has had dramatic results. American museums from Seattle, Washington to Raleigh, North Carolina have had to explain how stolen paintings ended up in their collections after the war. In France, a catalogue of unclaimed art held by the national museums and ignored for years is now available online. Other nations, feeling the pressure, have also revisited the often unjust decisions made by their governments after the war concerning ownership of looted art. Perhaps most notable is the case of the five paintings by Gustav Klimt, long held by the Belvedere Gallery in Vienna, that were awarded in 2006 by a panel of Austrian judges to Maria Altmann, the 90-year-old Los Angeles niece of a Viennese Jew from whom the paintings were stolen in 1938. She subsequently sold the pictures, one of them—the famed Gold Portrait of her aunt Adele Bloch-Bauer—to Ronald Lauder for a record 5 million.
Pillage and looting during warfare are not, of course, activities that originated with World War II. Even before the epics of Homer, human history recorded the time-honored tradition of victors seizing plunder from the vanquished. But the massive scale, the unprecedented bureaucratic organization and the legalistic rationalizations
offered by the Nazis set their accomplishments apart. Not hundreds or thousands, but millions of visual objects were bought and sold, confiscated and transported around the continent of Europe.
Just as the Nazis sought to impose their race-based morality onto the diverse population of Europe, they also sought to redraw the cultural face of Europe by rearranging or destroying its great artworks. Even in the upheavals of war the Nazi leaders devoted precious time and energy to the gathering of works of art. They carried out multiple operations with cross purposes. While Alfred Rosenberg’s propaganda unit (ERR) appropriated artworks that would buttress the Party’s racist ideology and pilfered the great Jewish collections of Europe, Hitler employed distinguished art historians and corrupt dealers to steal masterpieces that would confer prestige and symbolic legitimacy on the German nation.
However diverse, these operations were all linked by an underlying, racist effort by the Nazis to use the expropriation and destruction of cultural property as a means to dehumanize their victims. The Holocaust has become a symbol of the dark side of humanity, and we have spent decades trying to understand what it means to live knowing that average people are capable of complicity in such a horror. The history of what happened to Europe's great art during and after the Second World War provides an important new lens through which to examine these seemingly imponderable themes.
In contrast to the wholesale looting of Hitler and the Nazis, the western Allies worked to mitigate the tragic, inevitable toll exacted on art and historic cities during their invasion of Italy, France and Germany. Central to this history is the unprecedented mission of the Monuments Men, mostly American art historians and museum curators who, drafted into military service, mounted a miraculous effort to protect monuments and recover millions of pieces of displaced art.
Moving back and forth in time, the film links investigations into looted art back to their wartime origins, tracing the remarkable journeys of individual masterpieces from wartime confiscation to present-day recovery by the families of the original owners. The Rape of Europa offers a privileged entry into the exclusive circles of the contemporary art trade and explores the little-known legacy of World War II that lured many post-war collectors and dealers into a Faustian bargain that continues to present day.
We live at a time when the common cultural heritage of humanity continues to be vulnerable to the threats of ideologues and the assaults of armed conflict, from the wanton destruction by Serbs of centuries-old mosques in Bosnia and Kosovo to the televised demolition by the Taliban of the ancient Bamian Buddhas of Afghanistan and the rampant looting that accompanied the American invasion of Iraq. The Rape of Europa is an emotional witness to the destruction wrought on culture and art by fanaticism, greed, and warfare. But it is also a hopeful film that demonstrates how it is possible for humanity to protect the integrity of cultural property in armed conflicts.

Catalog Number: MC-909	Type: Feature	Genre: Documentary
Copyright: 2006	Length: 117 minutes	Format:  DVD  Region: All regions
TV System: NTSC	ISBN:	UPC: 718122355419
Label: Passion River

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Films In Compilation

2008-09-04  Variety By Ronnie Scheib Bringing a radically new perspective to World War II and the Holocaust, this fast-paced docu, based on Lynn Nicholas' bestseller about the fate of European art both under the Nazis and afterward, casts the Third Reich in a wholly different light. Curiously, by narrowing focus, filmmakers widen the absurdity and horror of a war waged, at least in part, for a mon-strously inflated private agenda. This mesmerizing morality play, rich in rare archival footage and complete with heroic Allied saviors, merits a full-fledged arthouse run before reaching larger PBS and cable auds. Like Menno Meyjes' semi-conjectural biopic "Max," docu perceives Hitler's failure as an artist as central to the Fuhrer's gestalt. Relying on actual documents rather than fictionalized epiphanies, film-makers Richard Berge, Nicole Newn-ham and Bonni Cohen make a com-pelling case for the theory, reframing WWII in terms of objets d'art "selected" for Nazi acquisi-tion or extinction. Under Hitler's reign, art-collecting measured personal worth. Extensive footage of Hermann Goering's swag-gering aesthetic oneupmanship, culminating in before-and-after shots of the hunting lodge he converted into a palatial art gallery provides a bleakly comic mirror to Hitler's blueprint for a colossal Greco-German Fuhrermuseum. Hitler, it seems, set about conquer-ing the world armed with a cultural wishlist, his obsession with art often dictating his military itinerary. His "final solution" for so-called inferior or degenerate artwork was nearly as far-ranging as his program for human genocide (the shadow of the death camps implicitly looming large throughout the film). In this context, real or projected atrocities that other docus highlight are here enumerated by narrator Joan Allen with a wry matter-of-factness that renders them more shocking. German newsreel clips recount Hitler's confiscation of various masterpieces (including Da Vinci's "Lady With an Ermine") from Kra-kow museums and simultaneous blitzing of "inferior" indigenous art and massive shelling of monuments. His plan to exterminate the entire Polish people and colonize their land, on the other hand, is presented almost parenthetically. Similarly, shots of vast warehouses of Jewish possessions seem a mere extension of the wholesale pillaging -- until men carrying worn mattresses and dented teapots remind viewers that Hitler not only collected the valuables of Jews he slaughtered, but sought to wipe out the slightest vestiges of their existence. To the German campaign of arro-gance, greed and bloodlust, the filmmakers counterpose the Allies' dedicated art preservers. Extraordi-nary footage details the evacuation of the Louvre (a crated Winged Victory descending the great staircase miracu-lously unharmed), the artwork spir-ited away in carts just ahead of exploding bombs. The Hermitage is likewise emptied out, its curators hiding in freezing underground passages below while, above, remain-ing Russian artwork is tossed into the snow in disdain for all things Slavic. Pic pays particular homage to the Allies' Monuments Men (several of whom appear on camera), whose job was to minimize the damage done by advancing armies and track down stolen works of art. Moving seamlessly from past to present, Cohen, Berge and Newnham document the aftershocks some 50 years later, tracing stolen art pieces still in litigation, foremost among them Klimt's gold-flecked portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. The painting's eventual sale for 5 million adds yet another layer to film's myriad disconnects between the fates of millions and the whims of a few.

2008-09-04  Los Angeles Times By Kenneth Turan When people think about World War II, wondering what it meant for the fate of museum-quality art is probably not the first thing that comes to mind. Yet as the documentary "The Rape of Europa" demonstrates, this is a surprisingly vast and involving topic. Written, produced and directed by Richard Berge, Bonni Cohen and Nicole Newnham and based on the authoritative book of the same name by Lynn H. Nicholas, "Europa" covers a lot of territory and is packed with information. It also tells a series of wonderful stories, many of which are fascinating enough to inspire movies of their own. That art was on the World War II agenda at all is because of the unexpected makeup of German leader Adolf Hitler. As a young man he was eager to be an artist, but being turned down by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna left him with a fierce hatred of modern art. That led, once he took power, to an "unrelenting war of purification" against what he considered degenerate art, a wholesale removal of 16,000 works from museum walls. But Hitler didn't just purge all he hated, he also stole what he coveted, which was a lot. And his passion for art mandated a parallel passion in his subordinates; Hermann Goering, for instance, had 1,700 paintings, more than most museums, at his country estate. This led to industrial-strength looting of occupied countries, a plundering so systematic that German bureaucrats made up lists of desired artworks as part of their invasion plans. Some of the most interesting stories in "Europa" have to do with how Paris' Louvre reacted to the impending invasion of France. Almost everything that could be moved, including the large and fragile Winged Victory of Samothrace, was carted up and sent out of town in a convoy of some 300 trucks. Specific curators were assigned specific works of art to look after, and the daughter of the couple assigned the Mona Lisa tells of how it was transported in a specially sealed ambulance. Once the Germans occupied Paris, things got more complex. Rather than go after what the French had hid, the Germans looted art from Jewish apartments. Before being shipped back to Germany, the paintings were stored in the Jeu de Paume, where a woman named Rose Valland kept clandestine records of each painting, records that were essential in recovering the art after the war. Aside from art, the Germans also confiscated furniture, and the story is told of a prisoner in Auschwitz, detailed to help ship the furniture to Germany, who was shocked to come across his own family's household goods, including personal photographs, among the prizes of war. For the invading American troops, how to treat historically and artistically significant buildings during attacks became such a major issue that a presidential commission was appointed to look into it and ruled that these structures should be saved whenever possible. A famous test case where this was not done was the 1944 battle around Italy's Monte Cassino monastery, an ancient site destroyed by American bombers because of fears that Germans were dug in inside. After the deed was done, German newsreels showed footage of the damage and accused the Americans of being "desecraters of European culture." "The Rape of Europa" details all these absorbing stories and more, even going into the postwar fights about who owns what painting that culminated in the sale of Gustav Klimt's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I for a record 5 million. The picture painted by this film is not pretty, but it is a difficult one to turn away from.

	Metropolitan Museum of Art, The MC-489, 2004 Shot in High-Definition video technology, this captivating program will take you on a tour through the entire Metropolitan Museum of Art in 52 minutes of programming. You will hear fascinating stories about the history of the Museum and its... more >	$US 24.95 home   $US 17.47 $US 18.71 educ   what's this Wholesale pricing available Available now! Format: DVD, NTSC

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