Introduction
The Creation section of the website explores aspects of the artistic process in the making of The Empty Mirror. The Synopsis below briefly describes the film. The Creation Narrative provides an overview of the development of the film. In the Ideas and Sources section, the Script Idea Notes provide a sampling of the original ideas that led to the script. The Syllabi for the courses that influenced the script are also included, as is a Bibliography of texts which were used for film research. In the Special Production Elements section, two aspects of the film's design are described by their creators.
Synopsis
The Empty Mirror, by writer/director Barry J. Hershey, is a phantasmagoric journey through the looking glass of history into the darkest recesses of the mind of Adolf Hitler. In a dreamlike subterranean environment removed from historical time, Adolf Hitler confronts the demons of his own psyche. As he dictates his memoirs, Hitler encounters apparitions of his fiendish confidant, Joseph Goebbels; his enigmatic mistress, Eva Braun; the mastermind of his military campaigns, Hermann Göring; Jewish psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud; and the mysterious Woman In Black.
Through haunting images, Hitler's stream-of-consciousness soliloquies and exchanges with his phantom guests, The Empty Mirror presents a terrifying primer on genius and psychosis, domination and destruction. The action unfolds amidst a streaming flow of archival film footage intercut with images from Leni Riefenstahl's masterpiece of Nazi propaganda, Triumph Of The Will, and private home movies shot by Hitler's lover, Eva Braun.
