The life and work of Leni Riefenstahl, who died on Monday at age 101, seems to lend itself to a mapping of a devolution, progressing toward a dark conclusion. It began with the early “mountain films” of the 1920s that she starred in and later began directing as well, which celebrated heroism and bodily effort in the extreme conditions of mountain… return to article
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Reader Comments (15)Page 1 of 1 pagesDid not Reifenstahl with her films give credence to Hitler and the Nazi movement ? Did not the systematic murder of innocent people grow out of her lockstep “reporting” cinematic devices that helped congeal mass hysteria? C’mon Zizek, get off your high horse of intellectual permutations and sit down- hard. Your nose is bloody.
Posted by Ned Bobkoff on Sep 11, 2003 at 2:28 AM Paraphrasing Brecht:
“I tip my hat off to you as an artist. Then I bust your fucking head.”
A tip of the hat to Leni, T.S., Ezra, and all the nazifascists whose idea of the human spirit led to the Holocaust, and all other holocausts to be.
Posted by Stephen Geller on Sep 11, 2003 at 1:59 PM I wonder if the motivations of Leni are so different from the typical modern Hollywood sellout. Both are oblivious to content. Who cares if exploitive sex, graphic violence and high crudity is the fare so long as movie makers can practise their visual art, make money and get famous in the process?
Posted by james h on Sep 12, 2003 at 4:50 AM Sure, Leni’s affiliations are unforgivable, but her genius is undeniable. I read the Zizek piece & felt liberated: pointing fingers is lazy & self-righteous. Recognizing the relationship between OUR ideas & OUR actions is how to preclude atrocity.
Posted by Aaron on Sep 12, 2003 at 5:03 PM It obviously has rubbed off that you now live in Germany….alles zu tiefgruendig.
Too much contorted thinking (very German), too many errors. Why do you not look at and judge the artistry of Riefenstahl, instead of chaining her to history.
Posted by Hank Truth on Sep 13, 2003 at 11:05 PM if not Leni Riefenstahl then would it not be someone else to point the finger at? the works of Riefenstahl continue to exist as films somewhat independent of nazi culture (we never therefore see her work in the original context and should not judge so easily). I would drop the simple accusations of “facism” from the debate surrounding her life. without a doubt much of her early work was inextricably linked to nazi culture and its ideals. yet I would consider the artistic ideals of the contemporary commercial media industry to be equally as dangerous (if not more so) and “facist” in tendency as a mechanism for promoting a culture aiming for global domination at all costs. so how far have we come and why do we strive to advance on “her” ideals rather than ignore them?
Posted by jcg on Sep 16, 2003 at 10:08 PM Hey JCG, you say that if riefenstahl had not made the nazi films, then someone else would have. But she DID make the nazi films and therefore should be condemned. You may say her other movies were great but it makes no difference to me. This type of thinking gave Roman Polanski and Oscar and makes R. Kelly a top pop draw in the country. Both men are sagitorry rapists and are the opposite of what we should strive towards. These people should not be honored
Posted by brad on Sep 20, 2003 at 5:57 PM after seeing some of Leni’s films I thought -oh great, thats what Gucci, Diesel, Revlon strive for. That gives me a sick feeling just as much as knowing what was going on at the time when Leni made her films. Should she have been tried? Maybe, but wouldnt that put other current big name media producers (as someone noted) on the firing line as well?
Posted by d pearson on Sep 21, 2003 at 8:18 AM History is written by the winners. Who are we, as a nation, to look down our noses at Leni while we are systematically bombing civilians in Iraq and using banned Napalm, cluster bombs, and depleted uranium. In comparison, what she did was very minor.
People who point the finger at her work are usually the first ones to deny that the USA is a brutal regime run by an unelected idiot.
Posted by Pk on Sep 23, 2003 at 10:36 AM She made Nazi propaganda films.
Read that sentence again. I could never ‘learn to love’ someone who made NAZI PROPAGANDA.
Posted by brad on Sep 24, 2003 at 4:24 AM ...even if i could forgive her the films she made (and i can’t) : she used prisoners from the KZs as cheap (which here means : not paid at all) workers… so she knew about the KZs pretty early and still went on doing propaganda for the regime…
if you ask me… this lady should have spend her last days in prison
just my 0,02 euros ;)
Posted by tomulus on Sep 27, 2003 at 3:34 PM firstly & tangentially, it seems profoundly offensive, not to mention disingenuous, to wag a finger @ polanski in the same breath as you rightfully condemn naszism. i don’t know anything a/b r. kelly. secondly, if all you see when you look @ ‘triumph of the will’ & ‘olympia’ is propaganda, that’s that. i myself see artistic genius at the service of a genocidal regime. neither one cancels out the other, & that’s the nub of leni’s fascination: these two facets of the truth, both undeniable, cannot be reconciled, & yet here they are, together in one figure (not a random figure, either—a specific, brilliant, repulsive individual). to say, ‘my moral disgust is of a higher level than my aesthetic admiration,’ even if we wish it were so, is a ludicrous oversimplification of real ethical issues—like it or not, leni shows us something of ourselves. it’s how we respond to that recognition that distinguishes us.
Posted by Aaron on Oct 23, 2003 at 3:10 AM Who the hell would care about the Blue Light and the Nuba tribe pictures, except a few specialists, if not for the spectacular success of the Nazi pictures? It is precisely because she “took advantage” of the huge stage that Hitler gave her that we remember her. Even if we concede Ziskek’s point that her pre-and post Nazi films were not part of a fascist aethestic—-this does not change the fact that she gave all her talent to propagandizing on behalf of the Nazis. She wasn’t a storm tossed waif who made apolitical films under Nazi rule that continued the aethestic of her pre-war films—-and was “forced” to insert a bit of propaganda into them. She made “The Triumph of the Will.”
And by this quasi-whitewashing of what SHE IS ACTUALLY REMEMBERED FOR—you lower the bar of condemnation and in rush in all the idiots who posted in this thread ahead of me. A world in which the praise of Adolf Hitler is the same thing as a Gucci or Revlon ad. “What Leni did is minor” compared to ‘anything’ the US does; or some Hollywood producer making some piece of crap like “Joe Millionaire” is the ‘same’ as someone who sold their soul to Hitler.
After all—a lowly paid Hollywood extra is the same as a concentration camp prisoner being used in a film——its all the same. (But comes the revolution all will be right). Meanwhile, poor Leni got a raw deal. And what she did was no worse than a Revlon ad—and we shouldn’t point fingers.
Of course, if the Nazis had won—we can easily envision her being honored at the Germania film festival on the occasion of her 100th birthday. Maybe the festival would have been next to the Museum of the Extinct Race (the Jews) that the Nazis had been putting together during the Holocaust. Maybe a retrospective of her films would have been shown, called “Learning to Love Leni Reifenstahl.”
Posted by Laslo on Feb 29, 2004 at 10:14 AM Page 1 of 1 pages -
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