Leni Riefenstahl - Le Pouvoir des images

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.

"The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl" is a documentary film about the german filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Known for 'Olympia' and the notorious but no less brilliant 'Triumph of the Will', this woman was persecuted for her work commissioned by the Nazi party and was never allowed to make another film.

'Olympia' is a stunning documentary of the 1936 Olympics and has nothing to do with Hitler or the Nazi party. While making the film, Riefenstahl was a pioneer of angles and camera and filmmaking techniques which forever changed both documentary and feature filmmaking. It should be studied by every film student and lover of photography, both still and moving.

'Triumph of the Will' is an astonishing documentary of the 1934 Party Congress. Of 'Triumph of the Will' she says, "To me the film wasn't about politics. It was an event. I'd have made exactly the same film in Moscow, if the need arose, though I'd prefer not. Or in America, if something similar had taken place there. I shot the subject matter as well as I could and shaped it into a film." She then goes on to deny any participation in the political party and talks about turning down all offers to make any other political movies.

She admits openly that she got swept up in the passion of the early movement, when all the talk was of work (when so many were unemployed), freedom and peace. She was not in the minority: Hitler had the support of 90% of the people at that point. She also says that she did not want to make 'Triumph of the Will', resisting Goebbels' advances and offers, accepting only when Hitler himself asked her to film the event. Hitler's wish was his command and he told her, "I want this film to be made by an artist and not a Party film director." The filmmaker posits, "I feel people are expecting an admission of guilt from you." She replies:

"Well, what do you mean by that? What am I guilty of? I can and do regret making the film of the 1934 Party Congress, 'Triumph of the Will.' I regret...no, I can't regret that I was alive in that period. But no words of anti-semitism ever passed my lips. Nor did I write any. I was never anti-semitic and I never joined the Nazi party. So what am I guilty of? Tell me that. I didn't drop any atom bombs. I didn't denounce anyone. So where does my guilt lie?"

In the end, we see that Riefenstahl was a brilliant filmmaker of the highest order and an extraordinary woman. Her alleged association with the Nazi party completely destroyed her career for the rest of her life and robbed the world of 50 years of potentially brilliant, innovative filmmaking. Whether your interest lies in photography, filmmaking or political or European history, this documentary is not to be missed.

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.

She was first and foremost a visual artist. What comes across here is her being duped, along with so many Germans, by the aim of the Nazi party.

Her two most famous documentaries were made under the delusion that the prevailing party had a worth mission. This documentary helps to explain this perspective from Riefenstahl's eyes.

Her true awakening came toward the end of the war, when she saw Hitler not visiting bombed out cities to witness the devastation. The final blow was her visiting the concentration camps and seeing the horror there.

This documentary shows many shots of Leni sharing things from her perspective, and denouncing the Nazi regime.

It goes on to show her film work during the war, followed first by her African trip to Nubian tribes, then to her fascinating under water film work. In all cases, her interest comes across as artistic and apolitical.

This is a most informative documentary on one of cinema's most controversial figures.

>>>> "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.