Die Macht der Bilder: Leni Riefenstahl

This is an excellent biography of one of the most influential filmmakers in history. It not only gives a comprehensive overview of her body of work but reveals many of innovative techniques she pioneered. Her accomplishments are all the more impressive when one considers the role of women in her heyday.

However, the most interesting aspect of this film for me is how this intelligent woman (still lucid in her 90's) deals with queries about her political involvement during the National Socialist period in Germany.

Interesting. This is a good documentary about a great documentarian.

I guess the normal form for commenting on this is to take a side on the art/politics controversy. Or perhaps to note film as propaganda tool today.

I think I would rather simply remark that you just cannot watch movies as a lucid viewer without understanding something about who you are in the things. And that means wondering about who the filmmaker thinks you are. And that in turn means considering what it means when a camera is placed or moves in a certain way.

If you do, you will find yourself wondering about the camera of Hitchcock and Welles. Surely that is at least as fundamental as you need to go. But you can go a half step further back and you will find yourself here, with this woman and her dancing eye.

Yes, her personality at 90 is still German, which means she is a romantic idealist and an apologist for her generation. Annoying, but typical. And does it matter? Does it matter if, say, van Gogh was an anti-Semite? You decide. For me, I assume the artist is often the dumbest person involved in the process and the last person to ask. So the art is the thing.

There are three great things she did, and these are apart from the idealization of the body, a constant theme.

She advanced the art of filters to create abstract frames. In this, she was merely one in a line of talents. She was an innovator in creating a new philosophy of the camera. In this, she was a genius. But that wouldn't have mattered if she wasn't also a genius innovator in the art of editing.

She understood that in addition to the story, the images themselves have a rhythm and song apart from the thing depicted. I think she really means it when she says her great propaganda film could have been of any choreographed event. She was a master of exploiting the movement of the eye as well as the movement of the subject, even the rhythm of the greyscales and depths. You need to watch "Triumph" and "Olympia" ignoring the subject, perhaps upside down as I did to see the music.

Having said that, the effect of these two films undeniably altered life. The Nazi film was the single greatest influence in convincing the rural German public to support Hitler. That's huge. But perhaps a larger impact was on sports. Until that point, sports were something you did or read about. You might go to a contest purely for the association of the thing.

What her art did, incidentally, was she made sports cinematic. And we may all be the worse for it.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

This film explores the boundaries between the artistic and the political (or, when does fiction have to pay for the reality it may help to create?).

Why is Leni Riefenstahl, who created propaganda for the murderous Hitler ("Olympia" -- which pioneered many of the techniques now cliche in sports camerawork and editing, and the notorious "Triumph of the Will"), despised and reviled while the work of Eisenstein and others who created propaganda for the murderous Stalin is lovingly taught in film schools? Well, maybe it was because Stalin was on the winning side of the war, according to Ms. Riefenstahl, a tough old broad who was apparently ecstatic about being interviewed. Up to a point.

This is a top-notch documentary. The cinematography is gorgeous. The probing questions are important. Riefenstahl is alternately combative, charming, evasive . . . and a whole lot of other things.

I give it a 9 of 10.

This documentary was apparently one of the first to examine Leni's life with her actually being interviewed at great depth. The film is broken up into two parts, her films as an actress and her relations with the Nazi party, and then her later films and the rest of her life. The film is fascinating, showing many lengthy clips from all her films. There is no questions that she was a very, very talented filmmaker, and very innovative for her time. Many of the camera angles and shots that she used were invented by her, and are still in wide use today.

It is very clear that at the time the film was made, that Leni was still used to being in control. She is apparently difficult as an interview subject, and is seen in many shots refusing to do what the cameraman tells her. She is also very highly defensive of our association with the Nazi party. At one point, the interviewer asks her about her relationship with Goebels. She replies that she knew him only casually and then had a falling out, after which they never spoke again. However, when she is confronted with the diaries of Goebels, and according to them, they both saw each other at numerous social and political functions, Leni becomes mad and walks out.

My own personal belief is that she has tried to whitewash her association with the Nazi party in her later years.

>>>> "Why is Leni Riefenstahl, who created propaganda for the murderous Hitler ("Olympia" -- which pioneered many of the techniques now cliché in sports camera-work and editing, and the notorious "Triumph of the Will"), despised and reviled while the work of Eisenstein and others who created propaganda for the murderous Stalin is lovingly taught in film schools?"

Riefenstahl was a brilliant technical innovator, whose status among the top film-makers of the century has never been challenged. I would be very surprised if film schools ignore her work.

On the other hand, she has lied and lied again about her relationship with the Nazis. For example, she has claimed that she met after the war all the Roma and Sinti prisoners whom she used as extras. They were sent to Auschwitz after she had finished with them. She has tried to persuade us that she was a naive ingenue who knew nothing about Nazism and who was horrified that her films were used as propaganda.

Eisenstein was an unapologetic believer in communism, although of a very different kind from that of Stalin. His relations with the regime were extremely difficult after Stalin took power, because of his politics, his artistic techniques and the amount of time he spent abroad. He was forced to write self-denunciations for his deviations from party orthodoxy. Of the five films he made in Russia during the last 20 years of his life, two were banned and two were destroyed.

His films are marred at points by traces of immediate political concerns, as when he hints in "The Battleship Potemkin" (1925), set in 1905, at the "petty-bourgeois individualism" of some Kronstadt sailors, to justify the slaughter of the Kronstadt soviet in 1921. Nevertheless, several of his films are clearly great achievements, despite all the censorship he had to endure.

As for other film-makers who were propagandists for the Soviet Union, as opposed to Russians who made films, such as Mikhail Romm and his pupils, the obvious examples are the documentarists Karmen and Vertov. Karmen is hardly known in the English-speaking world. Vertov is much better known, as a technical innovator and theoretician of film, but his career was destroyed by the rise of "socialist realism".

Eisenstein was never a propagandist for Stalin in the way that Riefenstahl was for Hitler, and the visibility of other Stalinists is decidedly limited. Of course, one could decide that every unpurged Russian director was a Stalinist, or every unpurged American director was a McCarthyite.