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Leni Reifensthal.... (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter nickw...
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cyanide
Member
- Joined
- May 3, 2004
- Messages
- 37
a bit of both = safe answer
she was just an artist because she was never a member of the nazi's, she showed jesse owens in her olympics documentary despite being told not to, she claimed not knowing about the holocaust, etc
she was a sympathiser because she agreed to film both the speech and the olympics when hitler asked her, she liked the mountain film genre, which agrees with the nazi ideology of [insert german word i've forgotten, but could be 'liebenstraum'] rural roots and the like, her documentaries can be analysed, and they often show hitler at a low angle, making him grander, or with god-like imagery, and lots of greek statues, which can be interpreted as the whole aryan thing.
she was just an artist because she was never a member of the nazi's, she showed jesse owens in her olympics documentary despite being told not to, she claimed not knowing about the holocaust, etc
she was a sympathiser because she agreed to film both the speech and the olympics when hitler asked her, she liked the mountain film genre, which agrees with the nazi ideology of [insert german word i've forgotten, but could be 'liebenstraum'] rural roots and the like, her documentaries can be analysed, and they often show hitler at a low angle, making him grander, or with god-like imagery, and lots of greek statues, which can be interpreted as the whole aryan thing.
Will_Sparky
Left BOS 8/7/2005...
Artist. although the debate isnt that simple, she simply saw her society and reflected it!
Artist. She may have agreed to do the Olympics for Hitler, but he was not impressed with the final result. Instead of filming the strong German race, she focused on the beauty of the body and even filmed Jesse Owens as he ran his gold-mela winning race.
She also stopped working for Hitler after she came across some of the horrors at concentration camps and after the war she was tried at least 3 to 4 times and found innocent at each.
She also stopped working for Hitler after she came across some of the horrors at concentration camps and after the war she was tried at least 3 to 4 times and found innocent at each.
braindrainedAsh
Journalist
Artist. Ditto to what Loz said.
Her films were beautifully artistic...
But unfortunately people are unwilling to see past her Nazi connections... but she is certainly a very interesting character.
A protestor's placard read "the greater the artist the greater the crime" for one of her photographic collections in 1970's. Do you think this is true?
Her films were beautifully artistic...
But unfortunately people are unwilling to see past her Nazi connections... but she is certainly a very interesting character.
A protestor's placard read "the greater the artist the greater the crime" for one of her photographic collections in 1970's. Do you think this is true?
imsooverskool
theres a fire in my pants
hmm...
i think a bit of both, but she was amazingly talented thats for sure!
the one thing that makes me skeptical about her motivations is the fact that she said in an interview that triupmh of the will was simply a film promoting peace, pffft yeah right!
i think a bit of both, but she was amazingly talented thats for sure!
the one thing that makes me skeptical about her motivations is the fact that she said in an interview that triupmh of the will was simply a film promoting peace, pffft yeah right!
Will_Sparky
Left BOS 8/7/2005...
Thats a really big thing in my class, we needed to submit an Art VS Propaganda essay for an assesment, and I was the only one in the class to argue art
braindrainedAsh
Journalist
Yeah for some reason most people in my class went Leni Riefenstahl=nazi bitch and were unwilling to think critically about her involvement, instead just dumping her in to the evil Nazi category, which I think is unjustified in some ways.
Cicciolina
Member
A bit of both (yeah the safe answer...) her films were made early enough to escape complete blame, and I think she was too politically.... *unaware* (or just dim) to really have truly been a Nazi sympathiser.
Will_Sparky
Left BOS 8/7/2005...
I think the Nazi argument comes from the fact that they were used for Propagandistic purposes. However, there is an argument that Gobles made that happen, and that wasn't her fault.
But as I have been saying, She is an artist!
But as I have been saying, She is an artist!
ChoppedLiver
Member
You should sheck out the Sunday Times Magazine (UK) from last weekend. Fantastic photographs from LR's private archive of the Olympics (1936) and the Nuremberg Rallies (1934). There is also an excellent commentary about her life, her work and an attempt to evaluate her contribution to the image of the Nazi State.
Some able techie will find these on the net but I will try and scan them.
CL
Some able techie will find these on the net but I will try and scan them.
CL
ChoppedLiver
Member
Found the text:
May 23, 2004
Lost chronicle of the master race
By Deirdre Fernand
Hitler called her his 'ideal woman' and gave her artistic freedom to document his Aryan vision. But Leni Riefenstahl was reviled for her collaboration with the Nazis, and spent decades as a pariah. Her private photo albums of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which lay forgotten until her death last year, remain a powerful social narrative
Leni Riefenstahl was in love with the human form. Nobody who looks at her film of the 1936 Berlin Olympics can be in any doubt about that. Under her artistic guidance, the athlete is transformed into a screen icon: flesh and muscle, sinew and brawn become things of beauty, taking on a sculptural quality.
What will forever remain in doubt, however, is her closeness to Hitler, her political allegiances and her championship of Aryan values. The documentary that Hitler begged her to make, Triumph of the Will, a pictorial record of the 1934 Nazi-party rally at Nuremberg, was seen as an instrument of propaganda. Beautiful, stark and powerful, certainly, but propaganda nonetheless. As a result of Triumph, which won the gold medal at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1937, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) commissioned her to make Olympia, the film that made her famous and notorious.
But while her film was seen around the world, the private photograph albums she compiled of the 1936 games disappeared into her own personal archive. And just like Leni Riefenstahl herself, they were unseen for decades.
But for the tenacity of one man, Christian Diener, a German designer, these pictures might have been lost when she died last year aged 101. An admirer of her work, Diener staged Riefenstahl's first one-woman shows in Berlin in the 1990s, which reminded the world that this redoubtable old lady was still working well into her ninth decade. After much persuasion, she handed over her Olympic scrapbooks, more than 400 pictures in total, all taken by her photographers under her direction. Only a handful have ever been seen before.
"She had forgotten about these albums," Diener says. "You have to remember that she was nothing after the war, and she was shunned. I think she felt that nobody was interested in these old prints."
Many of these pictures are to be sold by Diener next month at the Atlas Gallery in London, in the first British retrospective of her work since her death. The photographs reveal how highly she was valued by Hitler, who referred to her as his "ideal woman". As she recalled in her 1992 memoirs, he gave her complete artistic freedom. Whatever she wanted, she got.
It was Hitler who funded the Olympics project, furnishing her with 45 cameramen, and ample time to shoot the documentary. No expense was spared: at her behest, towers were built, walls erected and trenches dug. This relationship only served to make her enemies. Goebbels, who once tried to seduce her and was rejected, resented the access she had to the Fhrer and did his best to sabotage the film, moving her equipment, harassing her and ordering his henchmen to rough up her cameramen. The minister of propaganda further demanded that she must not show too many "niggers" (his term). She refused.
Her footage of Jesse Owens, the black American sprinter, depicts him as an athletic Adonis. No wonder that in many of the photographs she is surrounded by police it was as much for her own safety as for that of her staff. Hitler later removed her from Goebbels's aegis, putting her under the protection of Rudolf Hess.
If Riefenstahl was passionate about the body, she was also passionate about men. "I didn't make the athletes beautiful," she said later of the competitors, "it was God." One who caught her eye was the chisel-jawed Glenn Morris. Born in Denver, Colorado, in 1912, he was a 6ft 2in all-American golden boy. During the games they had a torrid affair. In her memoirs, Riefenstahl recalls that when he triumphed in the decathlon, he stepped down from the rostrum, tore her blouse open and kissed her breasts. But their affair didn't last and Morris went back home to star in a Tarzan film.
Riefenstahl, a former dancer and actress, came to the attention of Hitler as the star of German cinema and for The Blue Light, a film she directed in 1932. Born to middle-class parents in Berlin in 1902, she had originally trained as a dancer but soon graduated to acting, eventually becoming as popular in her homeland as Marlene Dietrich. The film director Josef von Sternberg championed her talents, but soon she had other, more powerful, admirers. After she wrote a fan letter to Hitler expressing her admiration for his oratory, she received a personal invitation to meet him.
"When I come to power, you will make my films," he told her. Many believed they were lovers, something she always denied. She went on to marry a German officer, Peter Jacob, but the union did not last.
It was for her association with the German leader that Riefenstahl spent decades in the wilderness her work for the Third Reich had been both the making and the ruin of her. The rest of her life was spent justifying this collaboration and dealing with accusations of anti-semitism. Indeed she fought, and won, several libel actions.
After the war, she was imprisoned and interrogated by the French but was later cleared by the denazification tribunals. "I was not a Communist, I was not a Nazi, I was an artist," she told one interviewer before her death. "I was nothing, no party."
That she ever won recognition again after the war was largely due to The Sunday Times Magazine and to its then art director, Michael Rand.
Inspired by the work of Ernest Hemingway, Riefenstahl undertook an arduous journey in her sixties to the Sudan to photograph a little-known tribe, the Nuba. The photographs of these magnificent warriors with their tribal markings and skin like polished mahogany appeared in the magazine in 1967 and won her instant plaudits.
Rand then came up with the idea of commissioning her to photograph the Munich Olympics in 1972. But there were obstacles. "We decided the name Leni Riefenstahl wouldn't be acceptable to the IOC for obvious reasons," says Rand, "so we got round it by using her married name."
The shoot was judged a success. "She liked photographing bodies and she worshipped the human form," adds Rand. He paid her DM25,000 for the job, the equivalent of 10,000 today. That was enough to lift her out of poverty, and she no longer had to take lodgers into her Munich home. Soon Rand became a trusted friend and she went on to shoot Mick and Bianca Jagger for the magazine. Mick, a fan of hers, reportedly found it "f***ing amazing" to be photographed by her.
The magazine came under fire for using her. More than once, Rand had to defend his decision. "I always thought she was politically naive, a dolt even," he recalls. "I think if she admired Hitler it was because he gave her total artistic control and dished out the dosh."
Riefenstahl was ripe for rejuvenation. She made a second trip to the Sudan and published two books, and at 72, took up diving (giving her age as 52) to make underwater films. Her last years were fulfilled and surrounded by people. She declared she was at her happiest after the Olympics in the cutting room, with reels of film garlanded around her shoulders. The result Olympia and these extraordinary scrapbooks represent not just her finest hour but also the finest years of her artistic life.
May 23, 2004
Lost chronicle of the master race
By Deirdre Fernand
Hitler called her his 'ideal woman' and gave her artistic freedom to document his Aryan vision. But Leni Riefenstahl was reviled for her collaboration with the Nazis, and spent decades as a pariah. Her private photo albums of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which lay forgotten until her death last year, remain a powerful social narrative
Leni Riefenstahl was in love with the human form. Nobody who looks at her film of the 1936 Berlin Olympics can be in any doubt about that. Under her artistic guidance, the athlete is transformed into a screen icon: flesh and muscle, sinew and brawn become things of beauty, taking on a sculptural quality.
What will forever remain in doubt, however, is her closeness to Hitler, her political allegiances and her championship of Aryan values. The documentary that Hitler begged her to make, Triumph of the Will, a pictorial record of the 1934 Nazi-party rally at Nuremberg, was seen as an instrument of propaganda. Beautiful, stark and powerful, certainly, but propaganda nonetheless. As a result of Triumph, which won the gold medal at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1937, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) commissioned her to make Olympia, the film that made her famous and notorious.
But while her film was seen around the world, the private photograph albums she compiled of the 1936 games disappeared into her own personal archive. And just like Leni Riefenstahl herself, they were unseen for decades.
But for the tenacity of one man, Christian Diener, a German designer, these pictures might have been lost when she died last year aged 101. An admirer of her work, Diener staged Riefenstahl's first one-woman shows in Berlin in the 1990s, which reminded the world that this redoubtable old lady was still working well into her ninth decade. After much persuasion, she handed over her Olympic scrapbooks, more than 400 pictures in total, all taken by her photographers under her direction. Only a handful have ever been seen before.
"She had forgotten about these albums," Diener says. "You have to remember that she was nothing after the war, and she was shunned. I think she felt that nobody was interested in these old prints."
Many of these pictures are to be sold by Diener next month at the Atlas Gallery in London, in the first British retrospective of her work since her death. The photographs reveal how highly she was valued by Hitler, who referred to her as his "ideal woman". As she recalled in her 1992 memoirs, he gave her complete artistic freedom. Whatever she wanted, she got.
It was Hitler who funded the Olympics project, furnishing her with 45 cameramen, and ample time to shoot the documentary. No expense was spared: at her behest, towers were built, walls erected and trenches dug. This relationship only served to make her enemies. Goebbels, who once tried to seduce her and was rejected, resented the access she had to the Fhrer and did his best to sabotage the film, moving her equipment, harassing her and ordering his henchmen to rough up her cameramen. The minister of propaganda further demanded that she must not show too many "niggers" (his term). She refused.
Her footage of Jesse Owens, the black American sprinter, depicts him as an athletic Adonis. No wonder that in many of the photographs she is surrounded by police it was as much for her own safety as for that of her staff. Hitler later removed her from Goebbels's aegis, putting her under the protection of Rudolf Hess.
If Riefenstahl was passionate about the body, she was also passionate about men. "I didn't make the athletes beautiful," she said later of the competitors, "it was God." One who caught her eye was the chisel-jawed Glenn Morris. Born in Denver, Colorado, in 1912, he was a 6ft 2in all-American golden boy. During the games they had a torrid affair. In her memoirs, Riefenstahl recalls that when he triumphed in the decathlon, he stepped down from the rostrum, tore her blouse open and kissed her breasts. But their affair didn't last and Morris went back home to star in a Tarzan film.
Riefenstahl, a former dancer and actress, came to the attention of Hitler as the star of German cinema and for The Blue Light, a film she directed in 1932. Born to middle-class parents in Berlin in 1902, she had originally trained as a dancer but soon graduated to acting, eventually becoming as popular in her homeland as Marlene Dietrich. The film director Josef von Sternberg championed her talents, but soon she had other, more powerful, admirers. After she wrote a fan letter to Hitler expressing her admiration for his oratory, she received a personal invitation to meet him.
"When I come to power, you will make my films," he told her. Many believed they were lovers, something she always denied. She went on to marry a German officer, Peter Jacob, but the union did not last.
It was for her association with the German leader that Riefenstahl spent decades in the wilderness her work for the Third Reich had been both the making and the ruin of her. The rest of her life was spent justifying this collaboration and dealing with accusations of anti-semitism. Indeed she fought, and won, several libel actions.
After the war, she was imprisoned and interrogated by the French but was later cleared by the denazification tribunals. "I was not a Communist, I was not a Nazi, I was an artist," she told one interviewer before her death. "I was nothing, no party."
That she ever won recognition again after the war was largely due to The Sunday Times Magazine and to its then art director, Michael Rand.
Inspired by the work of Ernest Hemingway, Riefenstahl undertook an arduous journey in her sixties to the Sudan to photograph a little-known tribe, the Nuba. The photographs of these magnificent warriors with their tribal markings and skin like polished mahogany appeared in the magazine in 1967 and won her instant plaudits.
Rand then came up with the idea of commissioning her to photograph the Munich Olympics in 1972. But there were obstacles. "We decided the name Leni Riefenstahl wouldn't be acceptable to the IOC for obvious reasons," says Rand, "so we got round it by using her married name."
The shoot was judged a success. "She liked photographing bodies and she worshipped the human form," adds Rand. He paid her DM25,000 for the job, the equivalent of 10,000 today. That was enough to lift her out of poverty, and she no longer had to take lodgers into her Munich home. Soon Rand became a trusted friend and she went on to shoot Mick and Bianca Jagger for the magazine. Mick, a fan of hers, reportedly found it "f***ing amazing" to be photographed by her.
The magazine came under fire for using her. More than once, Rand had to defend his decision. "I always thought she was politically naive, a dolt even," he recalls. "I think if she admired Hitler it was because he gave her total artistic control and dished out the dosh."
Riefenstahl was ripe for rejuvenation. She made a second trip to the Sudan and published two books, and at 72, took up diving (giving her age as 52) to make underwater films. Her last years were fulfilled and surrounded by people. She declared she was at her happiest after the Olympics in the cutting room, with reels of film garlanded around her shoulders. The result Olympia and these extraordinary scrapbooks represent not just her finest hour but also the finest years of her artistic life.
mod35tbabe
New Member
- Joined
- Sep 17, 2004
- Messages
- 13
I think Leni understood more about politics then she let on - if she hadnt she wouldnt have found Hitler so awe-inspiring, and also because at first she rejected and tried to get out of doing films for Hitler. However, she has often said she felt like she was in a corner and had to say yes. Shes also an artist, because if she in it purely for propaganda I doubt she wouldve bothered using the various previously undiscovered film techniques. She wouldnt have been unlike other German people, cos a lot of them denied knowing what Hitler had done, and even denied dobbing in the Jewish neighbours. I spose theres that attitude "if i ignore it, its not happening" Praps thats what Leni did, because she became successful thru Hitler and got the chance to work with new technology she wouldnt have been able to use ebfore.
sped_kid01
FindWhatIsYet2BeFound
If Rietenstahl did not know what was going on throughout he rtime working for Hitler, she must have been an idiot. It does not matter if she knew anyway, because her INTENTION to create propaganda, comes second to the fact, that she did indeed communicate Nazi ideals.
Opportunist
Leni was an opportunist... she turned down the Nazi's offer before Hitler introduced the Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. Suddenly the film industry she had waited to pounce on was harder to crack, especailly in a mole dominated industry.
the nazis stood in the way of riefenstahl's career, but conversly offered her an opportunity to generate acclaim through sort of a monopoly.
I also reckon the Reich Motion Picture law had something to do with leni's agreement with hitler.
she made films for hitler that promoted nazism, therefore she aided the reigime - more than most too.
Leni was an opportunist... she turned down the Nazi's offer before Hitler introduced the Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. Suddenly the film industry she had waited to pounce on was harder to crack, especailly in a mole dominated industry.
the nazis stood in the way of riefenstahl's career, but conversly offered her an opportunity to generate acclaim through sort of a monopoly.
I also reckon the Reich Motion Picture law had something to do with leni's agreement with hitler.
she made films for hitler that promoted nazism, therefore she aided the reigime - more than most too.