The Art Of Hubris, in a Terrifying Form

The great actors have possession of their own shape of hubris; a unique combination of facial expression; the voice, and how it projects the actor's entity and how it inexorably fuses with the actor; the way the actor moves, and how the movements add to the total image of the actor's identity, and so on.
One of the most compelling examples of the total actor is one that may surprise you, as he is not from Hollywood, or out of J. Arthur Rank productions of England, or any movie or play cast.
The man is Adolf Hitler.
I am sure that many of you have seen pictures of a young Hitler, resplendent in a black suit or tuxedo, along with black tie and white shirt, in various poses representing the making of a speech, with that unsettling intensity blazing from his piercing eyes.
These photographs were taken by a brilliant photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, who becomes the court photographer, and these photographs seem to connote the nature of a form of propaganda designed to enhance the Hitler image.
But they were more than that.
Few of us know what was on the other side of the subject, actually adjacent to Hoffmann's camera. That item was a full-length mirror, which Hitler constantly worked in front of in order to polish, to burnish the technique of what eventually becomes one of the twentieth century's most powerful and gifted speakers.
Like any artist, he practiced incessantly using the mirror and camera as his instruments, and not much later in time was able to enrapture about sixty million people at the apex of his power in much the same way a Cary Grant or a Katharine Hepburn or a John Barry more was able to take possession of their audiences.
The next time you see a Hitler speech, watch carefully for the total expenditure of sight and sound, and then consider how closely he brought civilization to a new Dark Age.