I cant say I am sorry she’s dead. And I suspect she has a toasty corner of hell BUT I have to agree with Cervaise. I havent seen Triumph of the Will but I have seen her work on the African Nuba. It is beautiful. Its her stuff that inspired me to pick up a camera and try my hand at photography.
Yeah, well, she was a genius.
There’s an old ski movie called White Ecstasy (The Ski Chase) that I’ve wanted for years, but have been unable to get myself to purchase because Leni Riefenstahl co-stars in it. Maybe someday I’ll get a copy, but not yet.
My personal opinion - sure Riefenstahl made some great movies but all the movies in the world don’t trump being a Nazi. Some things are unforgivable.
She was never a member of the Nazi party.
Aside from the quibble between actually being a member of the Nazi party and merely (if the word even applies) doing things that advanced its aims, I don’t understand the word “trump.” As I said in my post above, I’m perplexed about why people have to make this an either/or thing. She was a filmmaker of prodigious creativity, skill, and lasting influence, and those skills were put to use in service of an evil agenda.
I’ll say it again: Nobody’s asking anybody to respect her as a person. Hate her all you want. Just don’t make the mistake of letting that get in the way of acknowledging — and acknowledging is all it is — her enormous impact on not just the vocabulary of film, but the whole visual grammar of political presentation. The stuff she came up with is used to the present day by everyone from Mugabe to Putin, from Bush to Dean, and will be as long as we continue relying on visual media to the extent we currently do. The tools, the actual techniques by which power is represented and propagandized imagistically, are morally neutral. To a large degree, she is the one who invented, or at least refined to modern perfection, those tools and techniques. And then, without question, she used them to do wrong — while others have gone on to use exactly the same tools and techniques for their own purposes, some similar, some different. The point is, the two things — the creation, and the employment of said creation — are, in my opinion, separate, and trying to claim the evils done under the rubric of the latter somehow cause her contributions re the former to be erased strikes me as being bizarre and insupportable.
If she was so damn great, why didn’t Chewbacca get a medal, huh? Huh?!
But I would say that it’s dangerous to go too far in that direction. We have this notion of the “brilliant, but flawed genius” that pervades biographies and history & pop culture in general. When you emphasize a person’s achievements without looking at the sum total of that person’s life, you run the risk of learning the wrong lessons or drawing the wrong conclusions. IMO, art is worthless unless it means something at some level; you simply can’t separate a work from its context. A gun, or even a 1920’s style “death ray,” could be a peerless example of masterful crafstmanship, but it’s still mean to kill people.
I’m not (I can’t, actually, since I’ve still never seen Riefenstahl’s two most influential works) saying that her being a Nazi sympathizer diminshes the value of her film work; I’m saying that it diminishes the value of her life as a whole. And I’m inferring that that’s what’s meant by saying “all the movies in the world don’t trump being a Nazi.”
And I like to think that it’s possible for humanity to discover the same (or similar) techniques that Riefenstahl pioneered, without using them for such a horrible purpose. In a sense it’s similar to Birth of a Nation; it’s typically described as “horribly racist, but a groundbreaking work of art, the first feature-length film” or some such. My reaction: so? Why can’t we as a culture place more value on the first feature-length film that wasn’t horribly racist? Why is being a pioneer somehow more valuable than being a good person?
I wonder what would have become of her, of her career, had she been American instead of German? Certainly a woman as talented and single-mindedly driven as she would have still been able to direct films–look at Dorothy Arzner and Lois Weber. But she never would have been given the scope, the money, the sheer empire under Roosevelt or the Hollywood studio system that she was by the Nazis.
Ironically, it was probably only under a fascist regime that her talents would have been given their full reign.
Well, I prefer an interpretation that makes her sound less like a victim of circumstance and more in control of the decisions she made. But then, I’m be getting into territory I’m unqualified for; as I said I know very little about her.
Yes, things were extremely difficult for artistic-minded women at that time, but there had to have been an option between “do nothing” and “create propaganda that supported genocide.” I realize that that’s a grossly simplistic interpretation of Eve’s post, but it’s not a big leap from what Riefenstahl herself claimed. “What do I have to apologize for? These are great movies.” The implication being that the art just had to be made, at any cost.
The real point of this was to correct a typo in my earlier post. While it is in fact mean to kill people, I’d intended to type “but it’s still meant to kill people,” which makes me sound slightly less simple-minded.
The Birth of a Nation was closer to the 500th feature-length film (seriously).
Because you’re judging art on standards of political correctness. Art isn’t about being nice. And because there isn’t another feature film from 1912-1915 that comes near the directoral achievement of The Birth of a Nation.
IIRC, the director of Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith) was none too happy about the resurgence of the KKK because of the movie and made a lesser known movie (Intolerance) about the damage hatred does, in response.
I’d say that Intolerance is almost as well-known as Birth of a Nation, myself.
I’d never heard of it until it was mentioned here on the Dope, and the poster who mentioned it (someone much more learned in filmography than myself) stated that few folks had seen it.
Riefenstahl may not have been a card carrying member of the NSDAP, but claiming she wasn’t a Nazi supporter is quibbling. The fact is she freely chose to support the Nazis and she lent her considerable talents to promoting the Nazi cause. And she did have choices - other German artists of the era went into exile or retirement or simply chose not to make political works.
So I used “trump” in this sense - Riefenstahl may have been a great filmmaker and photographer but let history remember her first for being a willing mouthpiece for the Nazi regime.
I just heard of it now and I’ve heard plenty about Birth of a Nation.
Bullshit. Being anti-Nazi and anti-KKK is not being “politically correct,” it’s being a decent human being. And what is “art isn’t about being nice” supposed to mean?!? So that what’s wrong with the Nazi party and the KKK, they “aren’t nice?” I don’t know what your argument there is supposed to be at all. At least, I hope I don’t.
I got my facts wrong, and I’ll readily admit that; I’ve never had a clear idea of what exactly was so pivotal about it. I was using it as an analogy; whenever the film is mentioned, people make note of its impact but are apologetic about its content. My point is that they shouldn’t be so easily separated. “Art isn’t about being nice?” Whatever. I’m not talking about being “nice;” I’m talking about basic levels of decency, being a good person. And art simply does not transcend that.
In 1952, the British Film Institute took a worldwide poll of films critics for the ten greatest films of all time. The results:
- The Bicycle Thief (De Sica)
- City Lights (Chaplin) (tie)
- The Gold Rush (Chaplin) (tie)
- Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein)
5. Intolerance (Griffith) (tie) - Louisiana Story (Flaherty) (tie)
- Greed (von Stroheim) (tie)
- Le Jour se lève (Carné) (tie)
- The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer) (tie)
- Brief Encounter (Lean) (tie)
- Le Million (Clair) (tie)
- The Rules of the Game (Renoir) (tie)
Hmmm, sounds like what Ayn Rand would say 
There is something to be said for innovative technique and style, but if the content of the art is the promotion of the National Socialist vision of collectivism, living life as a disposable unit in a machine working for the benefit of the state, and the exaltation of an authoritarian government that had no qualms about disposing of anyone and everyone who wasn’t working to benefit the state…well, that can’t really be considered good art. Wonderful technique could be used to promote a disgusting message, but the artwork as a whole is by no means a good piece.
Her art is bad because it embraces that vision. I doubt that Griffith really embraced a racist vision, I suspect it is merely that we associate the KKK with the last 90 years of thier activity. In 1914, there had only been one incarnation of the Klan, built almost solely upon ending Reconstruction and targeting mostly carpetbaggers and the like, and it had faded into obscurity after Reconstruction came to an end. The second wave, in the 20’s, brought the anti-Jewish rhetoric to the forefront of the Klan’s image (the age-old Jew/Communist idea, that you still see alot from white supremacists today.) The third wave, in the 50’s and 60’s developed as reaction to the civil rights movement, and it’s that wave of lynchings and other dastardly activities that the mass media delivered up to us every day that we now associate the Klan with to an extent Griffith probably couldn’t have forseen. Obviously none of this is to excuse any of the Klan’s violent activities during any phase of its existence, but to Griffith the Klan was a relic of an age 50 years past, and yet still 50 years before the commission of their most visible acts of violence (thanks to the advent of television.) The image of the Klan just can’t mean the same thing to us as it did to him.
Lynchings were at their height in the 1890s, not during the civil rights era in the 1950s. In 1892 alone there were 161 lynchings against African Americans. By contrast, in the entire decade of 1950-1959, there were 10 lynchings against African Americans.