Re: Leicas on TV

[pgs@thillana.lcs.mit.edu (Patrick Sobalvarro)]

   From: Gerard Captijn <captyng@vtx.ch>
   Date: Thu, 17 Jul 1997 10:31:40 +0200

   >Just wondered if anyone else caught "A&E's biography" last night
   >of Leni Riefenstahl. There were a few shots of here with LTM's in
   >the thirties and an M3 in Africa in the fifties.

  The Riefenstahl subject continues to be highly controversial, 40
  million deaths and half a century after the events. I do not think
  however that one can judge this Nazi-bitch on her effective
  marketing of Herr Schickelgr=FCber (Adolf's real name) whom she was
  so much in love with. The issue is what is the real quality of her
  images?

I think that Leni Riefenstahl is and was a fool and a liar -- someone
with little intellect who contributed to the worst atrocities of her
time and continues to this day to lie about her role in them.  Her
lies and self-deception are so transparent that listening to them, one
gets the impression that she is not very intelligent; or how could she
believe that her ridiculous claims would be convincing?  Her vanity in
her autobigraphy, where she constantly compares herself as an actress
to Marlene Dietrich, is astounding, given that Riefenstahl was a
largely unaccomplished actress with no particular presence on screen.

However, she was also a genius.  Not with ideas -- the ideas in her
films are almost exclusively infantile fantasies -- but with light and
motion and composition of the heroic images that Susan Sontag has
properly called "fascist imagery."  "Triumph des Willens" and
"Olympia" were visually absolutely brilliant works, and it serves
little purpose to pretend otherwise.

I'm not much impressed by most of Leni Riefenstahl's still photography
- -- to me almost every one of her still photographs seem in some way an
incomplete expression, something she did because she was thinking like
a cinematographer rather than a still photographer.  But "Olympia,"
for example, is regularly re-discovered by fashion photographers.
Open any mid-1980's fashion magazine and you'll see plenty of slavish
copies of its style -- in fact, of many of its shots.  Bruce Weber
built his career on this.

- -Patrick