The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni RiefenstahlRating:
Release Date: 02 September, 2003 Retail Price: $29.95 OUR Price: $26.99 You SAVE: $2.96! Cast: Complete Cast (5 total) |
The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl Reviews
The Judgment of History
The question of 'controversy' inevitably comes up in this film. As a film maker for the Nazi Party, wasn't Riefenstahl equally guilty for the crimes of that regime? So Ray Muller tentatively asks Riefenstahl, so too do contemporary viewers of the 21st century.
This is an ahistorical attitude, typically made by people with no understanding of history (and no interest in it) and who have a simple minded view of the function of art (that it makes people do things they wouldn't ordinarily do). We have all been educated to abhor the Nazis. But this condemnation of Riefenstahl is witch hunting and itself has fascist overtones.
What was it like at the time, the 1930s in Germany? Riefenstahl effectively answers the charge. She says, correctly, that at the time she worked for Hitler the Nazi Party was seen as the saviour of Germany. Hitler was widely popular, not just in Germany but in both England and America. The discovery that he was a 'monster' and a war criminal was revealed by the Nuremberg Trials in the late 40s, and it has been promulgated ever since as anti Nazi propaganda. Riefenstahl was tried and exonerated by the Nuremberg commission, but has nevertheless been punished all her life, her right to film denied, her reputation tarnished. Courts mught need them, but public opinion has no need of proofs.
Riefenstahl impressed me in this film as a great intelligence, wiser by far than those who criticised her. Atrocities in war have been committed by all countries, and as citizens we all have moral complicity in these outrages to humanity. Does anybody remember the story about the woman taken in adultery, about those without sin throwing the first stone? (this comment a good Zen koan by the way).
Riefenstahl, most importantly, is a great film maker, one of the greatest. Seeing her and her team reminisce about how their films were made is to see people who have had an enormous influence on the lives of all who watch films today. Riefenstahl's comments and responses showed her as someone who could see around the questions in which her critics were bogged down. The film is a valuable presentation of an individual who could be correctly described as a genius. There is no denying the impressiveness of the woman, just as an interviewee. The fact that she taught herself to act, and to direct, inventing many staple technologies and techniques of the industry as she went on, puts her on a level with someone like D W Griffiths (interestingly, Griffiths has been tarred and feathered as a white supremist because he concurred in the beliefs expressed in Birth of a Nation). Denied access to film making (to the world's great loss) it is almost not surprising that Riefenstahl went on to be one of the world's greatest photographers, active till her 90s. Muller's film is an immensely valuable record of an extraordinary person.
Lovely Lady
We'll probably never know if she was a nazi collaborator or just an artist who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. All that I know is she was quite a hotty in her silent films.
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