Re: Leicas on TV

[Gerard Captijn <captyng@vtx.ch>]

At 02:43 PM 18/07/1997 -0400, you wrote:
>   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
>

How right you are! I think that the incomplete expression of her
photographs also originates from the fact that the individual does not
count. The Nuerenberg pictures with tens of thousands of  human beings
lined up like machinery parts in a factory is basically empty, decorative
imaging without any elements able to generate emotions.

Gerard Captijn.