10-09-2003 00:44									#31
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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.

	10-09-2003 01:54									#32
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quote: 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.

	10-09-2003 04:08									#33
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quote: 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.

	10-09-2003 06:24									#34
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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

	10-09-2003 06:45									#35
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quote: 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!

quote: 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.

	10-09-2003 06:49									#36
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quote: 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.

	10-09-2003 07:09									#37
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quote: 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.

	10-09-2003 07:16									#38
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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.

	10-09-2003 07:28									#39
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quote: 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.

	10-09-2003 08:08									#40
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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.

	10-09-2003 09:54									#41
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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?!

	10-09-2003 11:31									#42
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MY GOD - Warren is dead? What happened?

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

	10-09-2003 11:36									#43
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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).

	10-09-2003 11:39									#44
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Thanks. I retrieved the thread from obscurity, as a fellow fan should.

God we're getting old

	10-09-2003 14:45									#45
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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?

	10-09-2003 16:38									#46
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she's dead

	10-09-2003 16:40									#47
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yeah, but many people die. horses die, too.

	10-09-2003 16:46									#48
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quote: Originally posted by Ecthelion yeah, but many people die.

I think it is safe to say that all die -- sooner or later

/smartass

	10-09-2003 17:00									#49
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well she probably doesn't smell very nice right now

	10-09-2003 17:03									#50
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would a horse care?

	10-09-2003 17:10									#51
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only if I was downwind

	10-09-2003 18:40									#52
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quote: Originally posted by gunkulator "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.

I agree. Von Braun was critical to the US space program, headed NASA and retired with honors and respect. Did Leni do any more for NAZI Germany than Von Braun?

She should be honored for her achievements, IMHO.

Strictly from an interview of her I saw a few years ago, she definitely seem to be in love with Adolf. He seem to have that effect on a lot of German women.

	10-09-2003 18:44									#53
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quote: Originally posted by Ned Did Leni do any more for NAZI Germany than Von Braun?

Did Von Braun also claim that people who were sent into death camps were alive and well after the war?

	10-09-2003 22:30									#54
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quote: Originally posted by molly bloom Riefenstahl and Eisenstein, forever twinned with Hitler and Stalin.

The difference is Eisenstein's movies are still good. Even W.D. Griffith's movie is still good. Triumph of the Will is drek.

	11-09-2003 03:21									#55
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not true. when Stalin came to power Eisenstein's movies went down the toilet.

	11-09-2003 06:12									#56
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quote: Originally posted by chegitz guevara The difference is Eisenstein's movies are still good. Even W.D. Griffith's movie is still good. Triumph of the Will is drek.

Sorry old bean, but dreck just won't do. Yours might be a valid, visceral reaction, but your previous post indicates it isn't. I'm sure many of the Right tendency posters here would have the same reaction to 'Strike', 'Storm Over Asia' or 'The End of St. Petersburg', simply because they were early Soviet era films, and not because of inherent technical or artistic failings.

I despise Nazism and Fascism, but Riefenstahl captured the seductive power of those ideologies- and did so in a technically and artistically accomplished way. That's what makes 'Triumph des Willens' dangerous as well as impressive. I look back at archive footage of Hitler's speeches (and to a lesser extent, Mussolini's speeches) and wonder what were people thinking? The rhetoric, posturing, declamatory tirades, are all unconvincing. Then I watch 'Triumph des Willens' and it clicks.

One of my former headmasters was a British spy in pre-war Germany and told me of how at the Nuremberg rallies otherwise respectable women would work themselves into a sexual frenzy during Hitler's speeches-they would strike their thighs with their fists, or the flat of their hands, and as the saying goes, there wasn't a dry seat in the house...

To me that's what 'Triumph des Willens' captures. Fascinating fascism, as Susan Sontag called it. To criticise Riefenstahl for not being Saatchi and Saatchi or Madison Avenue is like criticising Daniel Defoe for not using the stream of consciousness technique, or the builders of Stonehenge for not using Romanesque style.

	11-09-2003 06:52									#57
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That's true. Hitler was an electrifying speaker but this is not conveyed by recordings of his voice. He had a heavy Austrian accent and is quite difficult to understand sometimes. The atmospherics and stage setting of the speeches were all important.

Another interesting thing about Leni was she broke all the rules about what the nazis thought a woman should be. She was independent, successful and public, quite an oddity in nazi Germany where women were expected to stay at home and have babies. It was her talent and usefulness to Hitler and Goebbels which made it possible for her to have a career.

Her movies were just about the only work done in Nazi Germany of any lasting artistic merit.

	11-09-2003 15:26									#58
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Riefenstahl movies

Communism