[Leica] Leica Sighting

[marcsmall at comcast.net (Marc James Small)]

At 01:55 PM 3/28/2007, Adam Bridge wrote:
 >Why sadly? Her politics. If you didn't know that how would it affect
 >your view of her images?
 >
 >I understand the revulsion but am also troubled by the political
 >requirement. Seems no different that what the far right often
 >practices.

I suspect that this posting will cause BD to again accuse me of 
anti-semitism.

Riefenstahl was a political lightweight and was 
always viewed as an opportunist with great 
abilities by Goebbels, who used her when he could 
and who then tossed her aside around 1937.  She 
had no ties with the Nazi Party or the Nazi ethos 
other than as a hired gun, and early on before 
its true nature was revealed.  (Reread your 
Tolkien to understand the subtle play this 
is:  evil does not appear openly as evil until it 
is dominant and, by the time the Nazi evil had 
become evident, Riefenstahl had been tossed into 
the wastebasket of history by the Nazis other 
than her long-standing affair with Speer:  I do 
not believe that Albrecht and Leni discussed 
Death Camps during their apres-ski assignations in, say, 1943.)

The Allies were really hot to nail her as a war 
criminal of some sort but could not do so as the 
evidence available then and available today 
simply showed her to be a political 
flibertigibbet who was a brilliant director and 
who had a great eye for the proper frame.  The 
same can be said of the Soviet movie director, 
Eisenstein:  he was loved by the Soviets early on 
and then, also, was cast aside.  (There is an odd 
bit of trivia:  Eisenstein spoke fluent Japanese 
and modeled his films on the Haiku, though I do 
not see this in POTEMKIN.)  Eisenstein's work 
ought to be condemned as evil work for an evil 
regime if a similar standard is applied to Riefenstahl.

I shook the hand of Willy Ley.  Ley shook the 
hand of Wehrner von Braun.  von Braun shook the 
hand of Hitler.  I am thus three generations of 
hand-shakes removed from Adolph Hitler.  Does 
this make me a Nazi?  Judging from an exchange on 
this topic in the late 1990's, BD would perhaps 
say, "yeah!  the guy's a Nazi!"  However, to 
restore my stature within this group, I am three 
handshakes away from Lenin and only two away from 
Stalin and also three away from Mao.  I might 
well be a bigot, but I am, i the end, an equal-opportunity bigot.  <he grins>

The Nazis and  Communists are both, of course, 
artifacts of the belief that the State ought to 
control everything and this is a product of the 
Left.  These are brother ideologies and there's 
really not a dime's bit of difference between 
them even in their side elements such as 
anti-semitism.  The true political line runs from 
the Right ("let do as thy wilt be the whole of 
thy law") to the Left ("that which is not 
forbidden is compulsory").  Note well that the US 
Christian fundamentalists are now shifting to 
support for the US leftish political parties.

Responses off-line, please.  And leave Leni 
alone:  she was a political putz and a 
photographic genius.  She and Eisenstein fit into 
identical categories with the only difference 
being that Leni spent five years in Allied 
confinement while Eisenstein was under house 
arrest for the final fifteen years of his life.

It's your turn at bat, BD, but please let us do this off-List.

Marc


msmall@aya.yale.edu
Cha robh b?s fir gun ghr?s fir!