Behading

[Rev. Rye]

Yup. His posts have all the laughs of a Leni Riefenstahl film festival and twice the whimsy.

Boru

Glad to know I am not the only one who knows who she is. And not because I love her, I hate her. But because history is important to remember even when it is harsh and ugly. 

Leni unfortunately was brilliant in playing upon imagery and emotion and that helped lead a desperate nation to follow a monster.

My opinion on Riefenstahl are... mixed, to say the least. On the one hand, she creates images striking enough that they resonate to this day (remember that final scene in A New Hope where Princess Leia is handing out the medals? That was a direct ripoff of a similar scene in Triumph of the Will, and surprisingly, it’s one George Lucas isn’t willing to fuck with, besides compositing some soldiers who were previously mattes). By virtually any metric, she was one of the first (if not the first) great female directors, and there still aren’t many women who’ve reached her heights.

On the other hand, she used her talents working with the fucking Nazis. Admittedly, from what I’ve been able to figure out, it was probably more out of a ruthless careerism than anything else (look at how she shoots Jesse Owens in Olympia), and when shit got real (specifically after she witnessed a war crime, specifically the massacre of Jewish civilians at Konskie on 12 September 1939,) she contented herself with working on Tiefland, a largely apolitical film that just happened to benefit from Nazi slave labour. And regardless of her true intentions when allying with the Nazis (I’m told that the earliest connection with her and, any political ideology, really, was her Bitterness about the failure of her directorial debut The Blue Light and her decision to blame it on the Jews for reasons I’m sure must have made sense to her), in the end, she made her greatest fame on the most evil politicians in history, and helped legitimize it in the eyes of millions. And even though she lived to be 100, she never really came to terms with that. She’s such an unreliable narrator that Juergen Trichborn’s biography of her (which I highly recommend) actually stated that he had to ignore as much of her writings as possible and not collaborate with her just to get a truthful picture of the woman (and she was still alive, bear in mind.)

And another factor that complicates this even further, not only as a cinephile and amateur German historian, but as a foot fetishist:



As you can imagine, seeing that she was evidently comfortable enough going barefoot that she could climb mountains barefoot without even flinching got me more than a little bit große sprung myself. A bit awkward when you consider this was part of a documentary trying (and ultimately failing) to get to the core of her issues. Stupid Sexy Nazi Collaborator!

Umm... apparently, according to the IMDB trivia page, she wasn’t hardcore enough to keep from bloodying her bare feet (and misfortunes to women’s feet are only sexy when they”re tough enough to handle it), so maybe that dulls the dick dissonance?