jürgen fauth’s muckworld

Walther Ruttmann’s non-narrative rhythmic portrait of Berlin, usually connected to the “kino-eye” of Dziga Vertov, also had a clear influence on Godfrey Reggio. Much more upbeat than Koyaanisqatsi, Symphony covers a “regular day” in the metropolis circa 1927, celebrating modern life before the speed and exploitation turned sour. No dire Hopi prophecies here, even though a dire future was right around the corner. There’s a new score by Seattle psych rock band Kinski which I’d love to hear. Ruttmann went on to make Nazi propaganda: Blut und Boden, Metall des Himmels, Deutsche Waffenschmieden, Deutsche Panzer, and so forth. According to Steven Bach, Ruttmann worked on Triumph of the Will as Leni Riefenstahl’s co-director but was later excised from the credits.

Berlin: Die Symphonie der Großstadt. Walter Ruttmann, 1927. ****

• Cinecine: “holds up as one of the most striking non-fiction films ever made.”
• Channel 4
• Dave Kehr
• No love from TimeOut
• Allan James Thomas in Senses of Cinema
• Klaus Kreimer for Filmzentrale (in German)
• Speaking of Vertov: The Man With the Movie Camera on Google Video
• Watch Ruttman’s short Opus I on YouTube
• And now… Berlin, Symphony of a Great City in its entirety:

The last word on Leni Riefenstahl seems always just out of reach. After her Memoirs, Steve Bach’s new biography provides a desperately needed corrective to Leni’s own lies, evasions, and half-truths. Anybody who has seen The Wonderful, Horrible Life knows what an extraordinarily maddening, talented, obsessive, domineering, and flirtatious creature Leni was even in her nineties–and she lived to 101. For artists anywhere–but especially Germans–Leni remains endlessly perplexing. The questions raised by her life go straight to the core of history, morality, ambition, power, and cinema. The dry statement issued after her death by the German government barely scratches the surface:

Leni Riefenstahl symbolizes a German artist’s fate in the 20th Century both in her revolutionary artistic vision and in her political blindness and infatuation. No one would deny that with her talent she developed cinematic methods that have since become part of an aesthetic canon. Her career also shows that one cannot lead an honest life in service of the false, and that art is never apolitical. (297)

Steven Bach. Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl. 2006. ****

• Reviews: New York Review of Books, Guardian, Washington Post, New York Times, New Yorker
• Susan Sontag’s 1975 essay “Fascinating Fascism.”
• At GreenCine: Leni, Obits.
• Jodie Foster’s Riefenstahl project
• Previously on Muckworld

For once, a life worthy of a memoir. Leni Riefenstahl tells the gripping story of her rise from dancer and star of silent mountain films during the Weimar Republic to Triumph of the Will, Olympia, and “Hitler’s filmmaker,” followed by her long fall after the war, the Nuba, scuba. Riddled with contradictions, dubious statements and suspicious omissions, the book is also a thorny tangle that raises complicated questions about moral responsibility, political culpability, aesthetics, and ambition. Leni’s extreme unreliability (I had the uncanny sense that she started lying around page 5, about a playground incident) adds a layer of uncertainty that makes the book even more intriguing, down to the heartbreaking (or calculated?) last sentence.

After the war, when landmark achievements and intimate meetings with the Nazi elite–Goebbels, Göring, Hitler, Speer–give way to frustration and a string of canceled projects, the book slows down considerably. As Riefenstahl faces increasing hardship, it becomes difficult not to admire her dogged vitality and feel a certain degree of empathy for her. Regardless of your opinion on her life, work, and guilt, this book is bound to muddy some certainties. I’ll have to look at the two new biographies to see how some of her assertions hold up (not well, apparently), and I’m rewatching The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl for yet another take, but I don’t hope to come to terms with the confounding implications of the case Riefenstahl any time soon. Riefenstahl died in 2003, at the age of 101.

Leni Riefenstahl, A Memoir. 1987. ****

Previously on Muckworld:

• The Blue Light
• The White Hell of Pitz Palü
• Triumph of the Will

Leni

• Leni Riefenstahl - Official Site
• Leni Riefenstahl’s Photography at Fahey/Klein Gallery
• Leni Riefenstahl on Wikipedia

The New Biographies

• Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl by Steven Bach
• Leni Riefenstahl: A Life by Jurgen Trimborn
• Sleeping with ‘Hitler’s filmmaker’
• Clive James’ dismissive review in the Sunday Times
• Michikio Kakutani’s review

The diving sequence from Olympia:

It takes guts to make a black and white film and call it The Blue Light, but whatever else you might want to say about Leni Riefenstahl, she had guts. She started her career as a celebrated dancer, became an actress in Dr. Fanck’s mountain films (The White Hell of Pitz Palü), and in 1932, she wrote, directed, and starred in this, her first movie– and all of that was before Hitler, Goebbels, Triumph of the Will, Olympia, Tiefland and the Nuba.

In Das Blaue Licht, Riefenstahl plays mountain-climbing outcast Junta, a wild woman of the Dolomites who is hated by the villagers because she is the only one who can make it up to the highest peak, where a crystal grotto shines blue on full moon nights. An intrepid outsider falls in love with her, discovers her secret, and ruins the ragged woman’s connection to unspoilt nature. The tragic-romantic story, framed as a legend, could be digestible if it wasn’t for Leni’s overripe mugging. Das Blaue Licht is worth seeing for her direction, though. The cinematography is suitably dramatic, and when you compare the dynamic editing to The Golem, it’s amazing how far the movies have come over the course of the decade.

Das Blaue Licht. Leni Riefenstahl and Bela Balazs, 1932. ***

• Das Blaue Licht at Riefenstahl.org
• Leni Riefenstahl - Official Site
• Photos at the Official Site
• dasblauelicht.net
• Leni Riefenstahl’s Photography at Fahey/Klein Gallery
• Essay by Luc Deneulin

YouTube has an excerpt from The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl in which she talks about editing Das Blaue Licht:

Dulce et decorum est, the movie. A bunch of Spartans swear they’d rather die than surrender or retreat, and then they do just that. Like Sin City, the images of 300 have been heavily post-processed to closer resemble Frank Miller’s comic book, and when there isn’t a slow-motion battle going on, the camera lingers over tableaux of warriors on a mountainside, trees hung with corpses, a fleet tossed about in inclement weather, and sweaty nymphs doing double-duty as corrupt oracles.

It’s all about as exciting as a half hour of the Battle of Helm’s Deep, without the rest of The Lord of the Rings to support, y’know, the characters. Instead, there are lots of speeches, about how freedom isn’t free, about how the only glorious death for a soldier is on the battlefield, and about how, yes, Spartans never surrender. Which is too bad, because Sparta is under attack by the Persians, led by debauched and sexually ambiguous Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro.) In waves resembling nothing so much as the levels of a video game, the good Spartan king Leonidas (Gerard Butler) has to fight the turban-wearing villains while he is being stabbed in the back by treacherous politicians who refuse to support the troops and send reinforcements.

I saw 300 on an IMAX screen, and I’m still wobbly from the intense overdose of machismo and stupidity. The best thing I can say for the movie is that it steals liberally from John Boorman’s Excalibur. It looks interesting enough, but so does Triumph of the Will. In the world of 300, there is no room for art, negotiation, or weakness; there is only room for the strong. At the screening, outright murder brought great applause, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to find an Army recruiting station outside the theater. Huah!

300. Zack Snyder, 2006. *

• Here’s a battle scene [via]
• And here’s the trailer
• 300 on RottenTomatoes
• The Battle of Thermopylae on Wikipedia
• 300 at GreenCine Daily
• THIS… IS… METAAAAFILTAAAAA
• Fuck you and die, 300 - ReverseShot
• Digg this

Sweet lord have mercy. I’ve tried to watch this thing before and just couldn’t deal. This time, with the finger on the fast forward/rewind button, I saw most of it. Somebody on the web called it “the most frightening movie ever made,” and it’s entirely possible that this is true. Leni Riefenstahl’s “Gestaltung” (the usual German word for direction, Regie, had too much French influence to be used in ‘35) is so effective and influential that clips from Triumph of the Will are showing up on YouTube along with music by Fischerspooner, Elliot Smith, even the Village People. Peter Jackson cops to using it as an inspiration in The Two Towers, but most of Leni’s disciples clearly would rather not reveal their influences. (Who are these BattleCry people anyway?)

In the 70s and 80s, my teachers covered the Third Reich ad nauseam–in history class, in German class, in social studies class, probably even in math, over and over and over again. But we never saw much of the actual iconography, just a few assorted photos here and there. I suspect that the imagery–Die Macht der Bilder–was still considered too powerful, and after facing the full-on blast of Triumph of the Will, it’s hard to argue with that. Watching this film won’t turn you into a Nazi, but it is difficult to deny that these images have pull and power. Just see the kind of tizzy it throws American critics into: “As sickening as it might be to watch, it’s this alternate point of view that is important in helping us learn from the past.” Say what? There’s something to be learned here, but it has little to do with the Nazi’s point of view, and it’s propabably more about the present than the past. And then there’s the beginning of a sentence that I never want to hear the rest of: “Even if she is a nazi…”

The film gets high ratings at Rotten Tomatoes and on the IMDb, and it’s obviously a tough nut for any critic. Is there any other work where the divide between artistic achievement and moral implications is this monumental? Triumph of the Will is undeniably accomplished–you look in vain for cracks in the facade, for one of the standard bearers to roll his eyes or a marching Mädel to trip–but there has to be more to a critic’s job than judging pretty pictures without worrying about the implications. As somebody who has attacked Hollywood fare for its subtext, I can’t give this film a rating that ignores its message. Thus: one star–despicable.

Triumph des Willens, Leni Riefenstahl, 1935. *

• Triumph of the Will at Wikipedia
• The entire movie at Google Video

Like “Snakes on a Plane,” “the white hell of Piz Palü” has become a bit of a stock phrase around here, indicating the dangers of letting me administer the Netflix queue all by myself. Directed in 1929 by Dr. Arnold Franck, the father of the mountain film, and G.W. Pabst, this Alpine adventure stars Leni Riefenstahl as one of the many people who climb up the mountain and get into trouble. Some awesome avalanche footage, a lot of ice, majestic peaks, etc. Somebody’s wife falls into a glacier and freezes over.