But the thing is that her boast was true - The Triumph of the Will won the Grand Prix at the Paris Exposition Internationale of 1937.
Tuckerfan, Howie, I guess that I run in the wrong circles.
Roger Ebert:
Maybe if you did have a clear idea of what exactly is so pivotal about the work, it would be easier to discuss why the importance of the filmmaking techniques she invented and/or perfected (objective and morally neutral) should be considered separately from the disgusting message she was using them to communicate (subjective and wholly immoral).
Good Ebert quote, Walloon.
Sorry: That was supposed to be he/she, since we’ve sort of lumped Griffith in with Riefenstahl as the discussion has expanded.
I heard a Film Prof convincingly argue that Leni would have never had the opportunities Germany either, had not the Nazi’s drivien away, killed, or decided not to work with and then killed Jewish or gay directors. It wasn’t that Hitler necessarily understood her talent, or didn’t have his own sexist agenda, he just managed to limit his own choices. The center of the German arts community was decimated by the Nazis.
I don’t deny that Leni Riefenstahl was brillant nor do I assume that"… art should serve beauty and truth. "
However, the woman made a pact with the devil and then, at least to the best of my knowledge, never even admitted her culpability.
She truly believed that the ends (her films in this case) justified the means (collaboration with an evil regime).
That’s unacceptable by my standards.
Triumph of the Will/Birth of a Nation are brilliant films that are hard to sit through; I’ve never made it all the way through either without a little FFing. Intolerance, which I just watch last week, is a brilliant film, that I’d sit through as many times as you ask me to. I’m a little bothered by the fact that it was made in “atonement” for BoaN, because that seems insincere to me; like it’s just more propaganda, only he’s feeding the audience what he thought the wanted, not saying what he really wanted to say. Which, if you ask me, makes Intolerance a groundbreaker in an entirely different way.
Looking over Riefenstahl’s filmography, I see another distinction that ought to be made about what she did — and didn’t — do as a filmmaker.
Her filmography is not long. She directed only seven films in her life (counting both parts of Olympia together). Three of them were political propaganda films: Victory of the Faith (1933), a feature; Triumph of the Will (1934), a feature; and Day of Freedom (1935), a short film. These three films documented, often in elaborately staged scenes, the National Socialist Party Congresses of 1933, 1934, and 1935, respectively.
Had Riefenstahl continued to make propaganda films for the Third Reich after the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the *Kristallnacht * in 1938, the beginning of World War II in 1939, or the implementation of Hitler’s Final Solution starting in 1941, it would have taken her undeniable cupability to a considerably greater depth.
But she didn’t. Instead, while lesser hands cranked out wartime propaganda films for Goebbel’s Information Ministry, Riefenstahl spent World War II fitfully making Tiefland, a pastoral romance starring herself as a Spanish gypsy dancer caught between the attentions of two men. It was the type of glossy film Garbo made in the 1920s and Dietrich in the 1930s.
Well, I don’t know anything about her later career after the war started, but I tend to doubt that she refrained from making propaganda out of moral principle. Fritz Lang fled Germany so that he wouldn’t have to work with the Nazis. He left behind a huge personal fortune and a great collection of art. Apparently Goebbels had even offered him control of the entire German film industry. Now, * that’s * what I call a statement of principle. Couldn’t Riefenstahl have done the same?
On another note, Eisenstein, also an undeniably brilliant director, made propaganda films for a regime every bit as reprehensible as Hitler’s. Why is there so little condemnation of him? Isn’t cuddling up with Stalin just as bad as cuddling up with Adolph?
Would a different Nazi collaborator, whose work certainly had a far more deadly direct contribution to the Nazi cause in the war be as equally vilified?
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAbraun.htm
I know the differences between the two, but there are certainly some similarities.