magnificent" Hitler ("the German Napoleon") in ad-speech and show-biz jargon, while also outlining that the purpose of the film is not only being "the Big Hitler Show" but also a film on Germany and German mentality in general, about "the Hitler within us all" and "Auschwitz as an ideological battle of racial warfare." A similar role as the circus announcer is later introduced when a freak show compère (also played by Rainer von Artenfels) enters the film within a prop set of a cabinet of curiosities, demonstrating various oddities and Nazi relics, such as the Spear of Destiny ("as owned by Thomas the Apostle, Saint Maurice, Constantine the Great, Charlemagne, Otto I, Henry IV, Frederick I Barbarossa, the Habsburg dynasty...and then Hitler!") and the philosopher's stone, both found by Himmler's SS, Himmler's Germanic Urpferd (purported evolutionary ancestor to the modern horse), and Hitler's semen in a phial. The compère then also introduces the various supporting characters, each introducing themselves in third person after he has announced them. Among them is also Ellerkamp (played by Harry Baer), a fictional SS-member, later a post-war projectionist and film producer, and the Cosmologist (played by Peter Lühr). The Cosmologist is partly based on Hanns Hörbiger, creator of the Welteislehre, but he is portrayed as still being alive during Hitler's reign and after World War II, and looks more like Leonardo da Vinci or Socrates than Hörbiger. Props, set design, and visual style The film's surreal visual style was developed by Henri Langlois, using props and set designs from the Cinémathèque Française that had originally been used for a film called Der Film - Die Musik der Zukunft ("Film: Music of the future"). It has also been noted that the film's visual style and set design are strongly inspired by Richard Wagner's opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, musical excerpts from which are frequently used in the film's soundtrack. Release The film was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival. Influence The film was a considerable influence on, among others, the critic Susan Sontag and the philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe; Sontag called it "one of the 20th century’s greatest works of art". It provided the underlying metaphor for James Chapman's 1993 novel about AIDS, Our Plague: A Film from New York. Sequences from Hitler: A Film from Germany are featured in the film The Ister (2004), which includes extensive interview