"The Rape of Europa" is a documentary about Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring and the Nazi's large-scale theft of European art--and the Allies effort to preserve and return it. In a journey through seven countries, the chronicle 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 young art professionals, as well as
ordinary heroes, from truck drivers to department store clerks, fought back with an extraordinary effort to safeguard, rescue and return the millions of lost, hidden and stolen treasures.
The Rape of Europa, an engrossing film based on Lynn Nicholas' 1995 book of the same name, offers a fascinating new perspective on an era that sometimes seems as if it has no more secrets.
The directors might have benefited by going smaller %u2014 for instance, focusing on two or three pieces of lost artwork and tracing their history. This art documentary simply isn't artful enough.
The Rape of Europa presents iconic images that viewers who aren't schooled in European art will recognize. That's a good way to connect with the film and understand the enormity of the pillage by Hitler and his cronies.
The movie's three directors sap the drama out of the story with slow pacing, a dispassionate accumulation of facts and a too-dry narration by Joan Allen.
This is a vast subject, ideally suited to a series of films. It's at its most moving when focusing on the small stories of individual artworks taken from their owners and restored to the families decades later.
(T)his dense, dynamic documentary... takes on the high drama and difficult moral quandaries of Adolf Hitler's campaign to plunder the great artworks of Europe...
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