Leni Riefenstahl is dead

[chequita guevara]

I saw her work when I was a kid and I thought her work was very stirring. Then I saw it again as a teenager, and I thought, what a peice of crap. Who fell for this crap. The difference, quite a few years of Madison Ave messing with my brain and showing me what real propaganda was.

She was a rank ameteur.

[gunkulator]

Re: Lehrer

Originally posted by pchang
Nazi, Schmazi, says Werner Von Braun

Just partial lyrics to a very funny song

"Once the rockets go up who cares where they come down?
That's not my department, says Werner Von Braun"

Ah yes, Tom Lehrer. Still, without von Braun the US space program would have been a decade or more behind the Soviets. You sure do find a lot of German names when you look at great "American" scientists.

[GePap]

Originally posted by DanS


You've seen her propaganda films, right?

Yes, and since she had a trial after the war that cleared her of many of the allegations made here, well.

That she never deal adequately with her role in Nazi germany, fine. That she was a Nazi or will "go to hell" for making Triumph des Willens, no.

[molly bloom]

I think she was a consummate film maker, and that 'Triumph des Willens' and 'Olympia' are very seductive: the latter could almost make me want to take up competitive sport, she makes athetics seem so glorious and godlike. Not quite enough black athletes for my liking (Jesse Ownes, cough, cough, Jesse Owens), and the former is politics as great spectacle- even if it were 'only' a historical record, it would still be a great achievement.
Her photographs of the Nuba wrestlers are also well worth looking at.

I do think she was similar to those writers and artists and intellectuals from the West who were seduced by Stalin's Soviet Union- they saw what they wanted to see, and what they were intended to see, and blanked out the rest.

http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/26/riefenstahl.html

[Boris Godunov]

Re: Lehrer

Originally posted by pchang
Nazi, Schmazi, says Werner Von Braun

Just partial lyrics to a very funny song

"Ze rockets go up. Who cares where zey come down?
Zat's not my department!" says Werner von Braun...

EDIT: Bah, curse you, gunkulator!

She released a film, Impressions Under Water, in 2002, compiled from over 200 dives. It was widely acclaimed.

This is indeed a superb film. Say what you will about her actions in regards to the Nazis, she was a pioneering artist who accomplished some amazing things. Several of the techniques she used in TotW which today we take for granted were her inventions. For a woman in the 1930s, that was no small feat.

Not everyone who was artistically linked to the Third Reich deserves to be labeled a Nazi and defamed. While I'm not well-versed on Riefenstahl, I'm reminded of the unjust witch hunt against Wilhelm Furtwangler. That's a travesty that only recently has begun to be corrected in the historical record.

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
I saw her work when I was a kid and I thought her work was very stirring. Then I saw it again as a teenager, and I thought, what a peice of crap. Who fell for this crap. The difference, quite a few years of Madison Ave messing with my brain and showing me what real propaganda was.

She was a rank ameteur.

Hindsight. Put her work in persective. She invented a lot of the techniques that are used every day by film makers. While her older work might not hold up today, in the context of its time it was powerful, brilliant stuff. Even if it was utilized by evil forces.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov


Hindsight. Put her work in persective. She invented a lot of the techniques that are used every day by film makers.

Yeah. That damned Sophocles just can't compare with the people who write 'Passions' or 'Days of Our Lives'- now there's family dramas....

No you're absolutely right and I have to disagree with chegitz in this instance. It is a great shame, and strangely ironic, that two of cinema's greatest innovators and stylists were indissolubly linked to two of the 20th century's dictators- Riefenstahl and Eisenstein, forever twinned with Hitler and Stalin.

[GePap]

It's no strange irony: those guys understood the importance of mass politics, and the media (at that time radio and film) are powerful tools in shaping the opinions of those masses. So they manipulated those mediums.

[Alexander's Horse]

Originally posted by Lazarus and the Gimp
Whatever the motivation, her films were works of genius.

I agree with Laz. What are artists to do? Eisenstein in the Soviet Union? Are we going to demonise him too?

I think her main crime was being ambitious and careerist to the exclusion of other considerations. That wasn't uncommon in Germany at the time.

[Uncle Sparky]

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

I think TotW should be manditory in all high school history classes... and should be seen by all American voters before the 2004 election commercials start.


as an innovator, she will be missed.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

The real tragedy is that this thing is on page 2, while my "Warren Zevon is Dead" thread managed only three posts, two of them my own. What's the hell wrong with you people?! Where are your priorities?!

[Alexander's Horse]

MY GOD - Warren is dead? What happened?

werewolves of London, Roland the headless thomson gunner...............

[Rufus T. Firefly]

He was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer some months ago. He held on long enough to release his final album, The Wind, on which he apparently faces his own death with grace and good humor (to borrow a phrase from one review I've read; the album hasn't hit Turkey yet).

[Alexander's Horse]

Thanks. I retrieved the thread from obscurity, as a fellow fan should.

God we're getting old

[Ecthy]

and there was oedo or Spiffor or someone thinking this thread would be posted next year by Spink as

"In Memoriam: Leni Riefenstahl"

so what about her?