Leni Riefenstahl… finally

Sorry for getting this up so late guys, but I could not figure out how to do an attachment (only links) or I would have posted my powerpoint. Regardless here is a sketch of my presentation:


     Leni Riefenstahl is one of film makings most controversial figures. Love or hate her, however, her enormous talent in front of and behind the camera cannot be denied. Riefenstahl began her long career in film as an actor. She starred in a several German "mountain films" by famed director Arnold Fanck such as The Holy Mountain (1926), The White Hell of Pitz Palu (1930), Storm Over Mount Blanc (1932), and S.O.S Iceberg (1933) (IMBd http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0726166/filmoyear). It was during the making of these outdoor adventure films, Riefenstahl recalls in the The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (Muller, 2003), that would develop a love and fascination with nature that would affect so much of her later work . In fact Riefenstahl wrote, directed and starred in her own mountain film The Blue Light (1932) which she claimed Adolf Hitler greatly admired (Riefenstahl 102). 


Yet it was Riefenstahl's two documentaries that would elevate her to international and historical fame and controversy. The first of these films, The Triumph of the Will (1935) is considered by many to be the greatest propaganda film ever made (Bach 148). Riefenstahl had an unlimited budget for the film and was involved in the planning and staging of the Congress (Sontag 3). These factors led to the exquisitely orchestrated feel of the congress' proceeding and create the overall triumphant feel of the film. Triumph of the Will portrays the 6th Reich Party Congress of the National Socialist Party in Nuremberg, Germany. The film begins with a series of textual passages that recall Germany's fall from power after World War I and situate the Nuremberg Party Congress as the historical retrieval of German dignity. I analyzedTriumph of the Will using the four categories of meaning offered by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson in Film Art: An Introduction (Bordwell and Thompson 62-4): 


Referential Meaning:: Documentary film about the NSDAP's 6th Reich Party Congress in                     Nuremberg from September 4th until September 10th, 1934.
                 
Explicit Meaning: The Nazi Party had the support of the German people and are unified in their leader: Adolf Hitler.
                
 Implicit Meaning: Germany is a strong unified country that is capable of military action on a world scale. They have the best blood coursing through their veins and the best leaders commanding the greatest people. They can do anything they imagine, they are entitled to do anything they imagine… and they will.
                
 Symptomatic Meaning: what film scholar Bill Nichols terms a “problem/solution paradigm” (Nichols 22). Problem: national humiliation and economic collapse of Germany following Article 251 “the German Guilt Clause.”Solution: Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.


As film scholar Patricia Aufderheide notes, the film centers on a continual conflation of Hitler with the nation through his poignant speeches and masses of cheering Germans (Aufderheide 68). The typical fascist themes of strength, obedience, loyalty, courage, unity, struggle and sacrifice are woven throughout Hitlers speeches and repetitiously suggested by Riefenstahl's cinematography. When stressing obedience, courage, loyalty and struggle, the camera scans the faces of the crowds in attendance. When Hitler evokes notions of unity the camera pans out to frame the large crowds in their abstract unity. In addition to these themes an underlying suspicion of silence on matters of education and intellectual activities reinforces the anti-intellectualism typical of fascist regimes. Critic Susan Sontag recognizes these basic fascist themes would extend throughout her work, both photography and film (Sontag 5).


Her second documentary film Olympia (1938) documented the Berlin Olympic Games of 1936. In this work Riefenstahl focuses on the aesthetic dimensions of the human body, again returning to her fascination with strength, struggle, sacrifice and idealized beauty (Sontag 3-6).


After the de-nazification trials of 1946 Riefenstahl was ostracized from the world of cinema and turned her artistic eye to photographing indigenous peoples in Africa (Sontag 3-4). Though she move to a different medium and chose a different topic for her lens, Riefenstahl courted controversy and criticism to her death in 2003.


Links to Triumph of the Will: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHs2coAzLJ8


Bibliography


Aufderheide, Patricia. A Very Short Introduction: Documentary Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007


Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Indiana: Indiana University Press 2nd Ed. 2010


Bordwell, David and Kristen Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction 9th Ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008


Sontag, Susan. Fascinating Fascism. The New York Review of Books. Feb 6th, 1975


Riefenstahl, Leni. A Memoir. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992


Bach, Steven. Leni: The Life And Works Of Leni Riefenstahl. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007