Charlie Chaplin hone his craft as he moved to the Essanay, Mutual, and First National corporations. By 1918, he was one of the best-known figures in the world. In 1919, Chaplin co-founded the distribution company United Artists which gave him complete control over his films. His first feature-length film was "The Kid" (1921), followed by "A Woman of Paris" (1923), "The Gold Rush" (1925), and "The Circus" (1928). He refused to move to sound films in the 1930s, instead producing "City Lights" (1931) and "Modern Times" (1936) without dialogue. He became increasingly political, and his next film "The Great Dictator" (1940) satirized
Hitler: A Film from Germany is given to the film by Syberberg's narration and fictitious characters. Syberberg's offstage narration partly philosophizes on pre-war and post-war German fascination with Hitler and Nazism, while in the beginning he tells a mythologized tale about the shortcomings of the Weimar Republic and its downfall giving rise to the Third Reich. Later, the narration focuses on comparing Nazism to basically "inhumane" pornography, Stalinism and socialist East Germany. In order to draw parallels between Nazism and pornography, Syberberg also arranges quite graphic scenes, involving a realistic, life-sized reproduction of Joseph Goebbels's carbonized, dead body covered in his burned and melted flesh