Review: The Rape of Europa

RECOMMENDED
This thorough, thoughtful documentary takes its title from a 1994 book with the subtitle “The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War.” Author Lynn H. Nicholas, who appears in the film, ended her book by noting: “Never had works of art been so important to a political movement and never had they been moved about on such a vast scale, pawns in the cynical and desperate games of ideology, greed and survival.” Directors Richard Berge and Bonni Cohen illustrate Nicholas’ point with the judicious use of archival footage and a tendentious score by Marco d’Ambrosio that Berge lauds as “almost Wagnerian.” The keen-eyed line of inquiry threads pre-war, wartime and post-war art. In the 1930’s the Nazis used art to differentiate themselves from “degenerate” non-Aryan “races.” Some art owned by Jews was stolen; other works were stigmatized as symptoms of morbid modernity. Then Hitler targeted for desecration the national and cultural treasures of Poland and Russia, and looted art from France and Italy. After the war, the Allies attempted to return the loot to its owners. The Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section of the Allied Military Government played a key role. The best interviews let the so-called “Monuments Men” tell their war stories about saving Italian art and architecture from bombing. As detailed in Peter Cohen’s 1989 documentary “Architecture of Doom” (and dramatized in Menno Meyjes’s 2002 film “Max”) Adolph Hitler was a failed artist. What he could not create, he’d capture. Culture was a battlefront. “The Rape of Europa” imagines that the Mona Lisa—secreted between five French estates via ambulance—and thousands of kindred paintings, sculptures, frescos, fountains and monuments were all prisoners and refugees. Many are MIA or still awaiting liberation. 117m. (Bill Stamets)