Touristic Intents (First Run Features, NR)

Between Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (my second-favorite film of 2024 — it’s now in limited release in St. Louis and expands to more theaters this weekend) and Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis (one of my least favorite films of 2024 — definitely skip it), there seems to be a lot of interest in architecture within the world of cinema recently. More specifically, there’s high interest in how architecture can speak to history and culture in the past, present, and future. Enter Chicago’s Mat Rappaport with Touristic Intents, a considerably shorter film than the two I mentioned previously, but by no means less profound (certainly much more profound than Megalopolis). 

Intents is a documentary about Prora, the never-completed Nazi resort on the beaches of the Baltic Sea. It was built by forced labor (prisoners of war) and primarily used as a propaganda tool for the Nazi regime to appeal to the working class with promises of leisure time for the masses. It was yet another tool to get the entire country to buy what Hitler and his cronies were selling. After the war, the East German government continued construction on this 4-mile-long behemoth. It was used to house conscientious objectors who became forced laborers for the German Democratic Republic, as well as for military training. It sat in ruins for many years until quite recently, as it is now being redeveloped as a youth hostel, along with condominiums, apartments, and hotels.

The film asks both its audience and its own talking heads whether or not Prora and the surrounding area should be redeveloped in this way. There are strong constituencies on both sides of the debate, but the fact of the matter is that the company which now owns the site owns it for good. Of course, there is no denying an uneasy feeling in the pit of your stomach looking at the building and thinking about its history, especially in shots where the renovations are complete up to a very defined point, and an immediately adjoining section still stands as a ruin. There is simply no way to put this historical genie back in the bottle. There is also no point in denying the modern-day German population of a resort and/or a nice place to live, in my opinion. However, as one activist points out, the prices they are asking for these units are far above what today’s average working-class German today could likely pay. Like Germany’s history in general, it is a fascinating conundrum, and sometimes morally irreconcilable.

Rappaport does a wonderful job presenting all sides of this debate. Some of the film gets a little disjointed from a pacing perspective when he ties in Hitler’s admiration of Henry Ford and the social engineering of Fordism in general. The point being made is totally clear, but some of the basics of why one would bring up Henry Ford as his ideological influence relates to Prora are not seated early enough for some of the meatier material which arrives around the midpoint of the film. Regardless of this organizational hiccup, Touristic Intents fits very neatly into the canon of thoughtful films about architecture. What does the future hold for Prora? Only time will tell, like never-ending waves against the sand. | George Napper

Touristic Intents is now available on video-on-demand platforms such as Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV.

Primarily in German with English subtitles

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