Tiefland

Her last film is an amazing testimony to her amazing mastership as not only a director but innovator of photography and filming. In every way it is a unique film for its picture composition, for its performances (with herself as the dancing gypsy) and above all for its virtuoso camera work. The highlights are of course the introducing fight with the wolf and its sequel, the other fight in the finale. The dramatic tension is extreme in all the scenes out of the village, while the village as a contrast appears as a den of evil and intrigue.

The story is simple. A marquess has money problems and therefore wants to marry a rich heiress, the daughter of the mayor, and there is nothing wrong with that, they actually get married, but the marquess also falls in love with the dancing gypsy girl. In order to have both he makes a double marriage, the other one being a fake, as he marries the gypsy to a naïve but very honest shepherd. As a powerful patron he thinks he can use the shepherd's marriage as a cover for keeping his mistress, but of course it doesn't quite work out as he had thought.

Leni Riefenstahl was 52 when she completed the film, which she had worked on for many years during the war difficulties, and her performance is perhaps the most amazing of the three main characters - she was also a dancer as a young woman, but when you see her dancing here it's impossible to guess that she is more than 35 at most.

The music also adds to the extreme romanticism and drama of the film. Eugene d'Albert was the composer, and it's the Vienna Philharmonics. It couldn't be better.

Many have tried to interpret the film politically, turning it to her settlement with Nazism (the theme of the fight with the wolf), but that is doing the film an injustice. She was never actually interested in politics and knew nothing about it, she was merely interested in art, especially pictures and aestheticism, and the film is nothing but a dramatic-romantic work of art driven to extremes. Is is as unique and outstanding as the best works of Orson Welles and Hitchcock but of a totally different and even more unique kind.

The troubles that beset this final feature of Leni Riefenstahl, from its conception in 1934 to its eventual release twenty years later have been well-documented and one critic has suggested that reading about it is far more interesting that watching it. The film's reputation has been overshadowed of course by the knowledge that the Romany gypsies she cast as extras were destined to perish in Auschwitz. Despite her lifelong assertions that she knew nothing of their fate the stigma remained, which is hardly surprising as she was renowned for her 'selective' memory and for being economic with the actualité.

Thanks to her documentaries 'Triumph of the Will' and 'Olympia' she is the director with the highest profile of her contemporaries and consequently the biggest target. In fact the average film-goer would probably struggle to name any other German director of the same period.

'Tiefland' was shown out of competition at Cannes in 1954 and the critical response was mainly negative, especially in relation to her being too old to play Martha the Spanish dancer who fills with fire the veins of Don Sebastian and captivates the heart of a considerably younger Pedro the shepherd. Riefenstahl herself admitted that she was miscast but claimed that she could find no actress suitable for the role. Franz Eichberger as Pedro is rather one-dimensional but then most 'goodies' are. 'The baddies' are invariably more interesting and Bernhard Minetti is wonderfully wicked as Don Sebastian. By far the most interesting performance is that Maria Koppenhoefer as Dona Amelia. An absolutely fascinating artiste who was fated to die six years before the film came out.

Even her staunchest critic could not deny the visual magnificence of this piece. After all Riefenstahl had learnt her craft from Arnold Fanck and G. W. Pabst. By all accounts both of these as well as Veit Harlan 'assisted' with the direction. Just what this assistance amounted to over the film's protracted shooting schedule is impossible to determine. As well as her sense of the visual and of composition and lighting, evident here is Riefenstahl's mastery of editing which was second to none. The piece is aided immeasurably by the score of her preferred composer Herbert Windt and in its use of themes from Eugen d'Albert's original opera. Whatever its weaknesses the film remains both intriguing and mesmerising.

Although Time is a great healer it is unlikely that the controversy surrounding this director will ever go away. Indeed why should it? She may not have been a jackpot of admirable character traits but as her obituaries in 2003 pointed out, her position as a great film technician is beyond dispute.

I'll get my ass kicked for saying this (so what else is new), but this is a great movie. The composition of the visuals makes it utterly compelling. The Spanish setting comes totally to life, and I speak as someone who has visited the country. The cruelty of the aristocrats, the desperation of the peasants, the sensuality of the señoritas…it's all typical of the place, and you can see it in Spanish movies like Los Santos Inocentes (1984). That this should have been achieved by a bunch of foreigners shooting in 1940 is a tribute to the genius of director-star Leni Riefenstahl.

LR was originally a dancer, and it shows in her superb command of flamenco dancing here. Having seen the real thing, I can swear that she is as good as any of the Spanish dancers who have grown up doing mudanzas and seguidillas. Being the director, she has the advantage of getting the camera to ogle her every sensuous gyration at close range.

The story concerns a gypsy beggar-dancer who wanders into a Spanish village, where a shepherd falls in love with her…and a Marquis falls in lust with her. It must be said that the more romantic scenes are cliché, almost like Valentino, but the more carnal scenes really give off sparks.

Riefenstahl's main concern is with nature and the mountains. The constant theme of the story is the contrast between the purity of the high mountain pastures (moisture and fresh air) and the corruption of the Tiefland (lowland) with its cruel aristocracy and downtrodden peasants - "the men are bad and the women are sick". The scenes of nature photography are first-rate, and anyone who hasn't seen Tiefland is missing out on a major part of the development of cinema. Especially of note are the fast motion scenes of clouds rolling in and lightning striking, also the opening scene with the shepherd wrestling a (very real) wolf. Many of the scenes seem to be directly taken from Goya's paintings of peasant life.

It is interesting to consider that LR's "mountain-films" may have been the ancestors of the spaghetti-western. Tiefland and The Blue Light have many of the features of a western, and could easily be re-made as such (although they would lack the animal magnetism of LR). Try comparing Tiefland to A Fistful of Dollars, you'll see what I mean.

Tiefland was mostly shot in 1940, though for various reasons it wasn't released until 1953. It seems that the extras in the film are gypsies recruited from concentration camps, so the bitterness they exude may be more than just acting. That peasant woman who snarls "you rat" probably really means it. In this sense, Tiefland is a movie about itself and a fascinating social document that takes us back through time and space. (One way we can sympathise with these people is to appreciate their performance for us here). There are even some who maintain that the love-hate relationship between the dancer and the Marquis is a comment on LR's own relationship with Hitler, although I must leave this to others more knowledgeable about European history.

I would like to thank the Imdb-ist who sent me a decent copy of this film, which I never would have thought to watch. You should see it too, dear reader.

Original title: Tiefland Tiefland was mostly shot in 1940

This is the last full feature film of Leni Riefenstahl is based on "Marta of the Lowlands (Terra Baixa); A Play in Three Acts by Owen Wallace Gilpatrick (1915). The evil Don Sebastian, Marquès von Roccabruna wants it all including a Spanish Bettel dancer on the side.

It is not quite as popular as many of the other Leni Riefenstahl films such as "The Blue Light" (1932). But it can hold its own. You will get intrigued by the story. Of course, you may feel a little embarrassed for Leni playing an exotic dancer and the knife fight scene.

The English subtitles do not exactly match, so be sure to listen to the soundtrack.

Riefenstahl was not altogether a pleasant woman but one needs to be a little careful in identifying the "crime" she committed that caused the adverse reaction to this film when it appeared in 1954. No guilt attaches to the fact that she used extras from a concentration-camp. In fact this should have been a blessing since they were promised their freedom. Her crime was that of indifference. She evidently took no care to see that the promise was fulfilled and the gypsies concerned nearly all seem to have perished in the camp. She also very foolishly lied about the whole affair when questioned.

Whether this - ugly as it was in the context - was a good reason for ending the career of the finest woman film-maker that has ever lived, I rather doubt. Riefenstahl was really being punished for her earlier pre-war propaganda films, the making of which did not in any way constitute a war-crime or indeed a crime of any sort.

The Triumph of the Will is a remarkable film which has fixed forever the image of Nazi Germany, quite as much for those who hate it as for those who admire it. Olympia (the first part at any rate) is a masterpiece. Strangely neglected is her 1935 Tag der Freiheit –unsere Wehrmacht, a film not at all appreciated by the Nazi party that commissioned it. It is an extraordinary premonitory vision of modern warfare (no country had yet engaged in such strategic bombing when it was made) where the perpetrators, the Nazi leadership isolated and bemused on their platform and swathed in encircling smoke, seem to have lost all control of the terror that they have unleashed. As a film intended to be a simple account of a military exercise, it is breath-taking in its scope.

Her fiction films are not her finest work. The photography is excellent. Riefenstahl learnt enormously from her work with the father of the "mountain film", Arnold Fanck and his expert team of cinematographers and Albert Benitz, who films this, had worked with Fanck in 1926-1927 and with mountaineer Luis Trenker in 1931 (Bergen in Flammen)and would work on Lang's final "Dr Mabuse" film in 1962 (although it is true that this is far inferior to the two silent films). It must have seemed old-fashioned in 1954 but is a wonderful reminder of a high cinematographic art fallen into neglect. The reviewer who describes it as a mix of "silent" and "talkie' is not wrong - this was precisely the intended effect of many of the great European films of the thirties and produced some of the greatest classics of the cinema.

The fantasy/allegory legendfilm style of both Der Blaue Licht and Tiefland can be a bit bit trying but really works not to badly here. The two parallel struggles with wolves, if one can put that way, are excellently realised. But the pastoral romance is difficult to take and one misses the cold, detached glare of the great documentaries.

To her credit, Riefenstahl never really attempted to trade on this film to exonerate herself politically. It is not in the last a film of political protest as some modern revisionist critics have attempted to claim (the story is a very traditional romantic melodrama) but it is true, for what it is worth, that its general tendency is quite clearly anti-totalitarian.

It remains a worthy film - and alas the last - by one of the great directors.