jürgen fauth’s muckworld

Neither the first nor the best film telling the story of the doomed ocean liner, the 1943 German version is nonetheless fascinating– mainly because of the ways the story and imagery compares to John Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster, and as a study in overt propaganda. There’s the obligatory love story, poor immigrants dance below deck, and the band keeps playing “Nearer My God to Thee,” but the real thrust of this version is an accusation of the ruthless capitalists who caused the catastrophe.

Usually, the tale of the RMS Titanic serves as an object lesson in hubris, but in the Nazi-version, the sin that causes the death of over 1,500 passengers is greed: Sir Ismay, the owner of the White Star line played by Ernst Fritz Fürbinger, wants to break all records to drive stock prices up while John Jacob Astor (Karl Schönböck) is trying to thwart him so he can take over the company. The epilogue makes clear that there is no justice for the death caused by the speculating Englishman and his American nemesis. The sympathetic characters display more “German” virtues that must have seemed useful to the Nazis in 1943: honor, duty, obedience.

Nonetheless, Goebbels wasn’t happy with the film. From Wikipedia:

Titanic was the most expensive German production up until that time and endured many production difficulties, including a clash of egos, massive creative differences and general war-time frustrations. All of this resulted in Joseph Goebbels arresting the film’s director, Herbert Selpin, for treason and ordering him to be hanged in his cell the very next day. The unfinished film, the production of which spiraled wildly out control, was in the end completed by Werner Klingler.

The premiere was supposed to be in early 1943, but the theatre that housed the answer print was bombed the night before the big event. The film went on to have a lacklustre premiere in Paris around Christmas of that same year, but in the end, Goebbels banned it altogether, stating that the German people, at that point going through almost nightly Allied bombing raids, were less than enthusiastic about seeing a film that portrayed mass death and panic.

Titanic. Herbert Selpin and Werner Klingler, 1943. ***

• J. Hoberman on Titanic
• Wikipedia
• Jared Poley: Analysis of a Nazi Titanic
• Titanic at TCM

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:

A punchy B-picture, high on testosterone and a Hollywood megabudget, featuring pleasantly absurd giant robots that turn into cars. The boy-hero’s teenage crush is an improbable babe (Megan Fox) sprung from the pages of a glossy magazine, and because this is a Michael Bay movie, the fights are ridiculously overblown.

Now, I have nothing against popcorn flicks aimed at the thirteen-year-old in all of us, but I can’t stand propaganda. Transformers wallows in the questionable rhetoric of heroism and sacrifice, and the shots of fighter jets taking off at dawn and military helicopters swooping over downtown L.A. just need the superimposed tagline “Army of One” to be turned into recruiting ads. When Shia LaBeouf gets his orders and is told “You are a soldier now,” the fun is all but ruined for this pacifist. With John Turturro as anti-alien G-Man.

Transformers. Michael Bay, 2007. **

• David Byrne agrees
• Rotten Tomatoes

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:

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

Siegfried Kracauer’s study of 1920s German film, published in 1947, is a classic in its own right, even though some of the cultural criticism seems a little off now. As the preface points out, you can’t have it both ways–insist that the films of Weimar Germany anticipated the Nazis and at the same time argue how the Nazis used, for instance, Lang’s crowd sculptures for their own ends. But as an overview of a very fertile decade in film, and an attempt at classification, it’s still quite useful. There’s also an interesting post script about the techniques used in Nazi propaganda, especially the “campaign films” that were the Fox News of their day.