JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Photos from http://www.dasblauelicht.net/

As a director Leni Riefenstahl was singularly focused and driven, a perfectionist who made other perfectionists look like casual practitioners. We see pages of her working scripts, heavily annotated with camera angles, apertures, filters indicated for each shot. Every shot is planned in advance: this is a professional who left nothing to chance.

For her documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics she started training her large crew of cameramen months ahead of the event. They trained as hard as the athletes. She took them to sporting events so they could practice filming athletes in motion and figure out the best angles. Her main concern, she tells Muller, was to make the documentary “interesting”.

To this end she employed the techniques of feature filmmaking—close-ups to heighten emotional intensity, play of light (In the fencing matches we see the competitors as giant shadows on the wall, crossing swords), perspective. She introduced now-commonplace techniques that were unheard of at the time. It was her idea to dig pits alongside the tracks so the camera could shoot the runners and jumpers from below (I thought Orson Welles invented that shot). She fought for permission to dig those pits, though the organizers rejected the idea of placing a camera on a catapult so it could run alongside the runners. The effect of the pole vaulter twisting his body over the beam then falling towards the viewer is breathtaking.

Riefenstahl and her crew shot 400 kilometers of film at the 1936 Olympics, and she spent the next two years editing the footage herself. The result of her labors, Olympia, was hailed as a masterpiece.

Throughout Muller’s film Riefenstahl stresses her obsession with detail and her need to get her films done exactly as she envisioned them. She is a filmmaking genius, and that is where the problem lies.

How could such a brilliant control freak be unaware, as she claims to be, of the atrocities that her employer Adolf Hitler was perpetrating?

Leni Riefenstahl in Emotional Weather Report, today in the Star.

P de K alerted me to the existence of Modern Toilet in Taipei.

“Modern Toilet is a Taipei restaurant. It accommodates 100 seats each made from toilet bowls. The specialties at the restaurant accompany sink faucets and gender-coded ‘WC’ signs that appear on the three-story structure.

“The food is served in mini plastic toilet bowls. The toilet rolls that serve for wiping hand and mouth are hung above the tables, which resemble glass-topped jumbo bathtubs.”

It’s that scene from Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty!

After I finished reading Wolf Hall last Friday—it’s excellent, worthy of the raves—I thought I’d clear my head with a “light entertainment” and started on The Separation by Christopher Priest. I’d never read Priest before; all I knew was that he wrote the novel upon which Christopher Nolan’s movie The Prestige is based.

The Separation jumped at me from the Science-Fiction section of NBS Shangrila—I liked the spare brown paper cover which didn’t have a title or author. It’s supposed to be an alternate history as seen through the eyes of identical twins (Hmm, doubles again) who compete at the 1936 Berlin Olympics (rowing, coxless pairs), fall in love with the same woman, then part ways at the start of World War II—one flies a bomber, the other becomes a conscientious objector. It’s much more than that. For one thing it is not an alternate history but many alternate histories happening at the same time and intersecting with each other at certain points—Winston Churchill, Rudolf Hess’s flight to Scotland allegedly with a peace plan, the woman both brothers love. The Separation is so intelligently-plotted and well-written that the reader always knows which “reality” she’s in, even if the characters don’t.

Cracked the book open at 6pm; did not stir from the spot for the next seven hours except to get something to eat—snacks that I could eat while reading. Why had I not read Christopher Priest before? Was my book radar off? (Although I’m happy that I don’t have a “proper” job that won’t interfere with my reading books or watching movies.)

The following morning I called National Bookstore Shangrila and reserved every copy they had. They had three. Then I went to Fully-Booked, which fortunately was having a sale, and bought another Priest novel I’d been eyeing called Inverted World. What I intend to do with three copies is not yet clear to me, but I have to make people read it. As many people as I can manage.

Koosi: I do not need fillers. During lulls in the conversation I simply give the humans this look and they spend the next few minutes trying to figure out what I mean. That is why cats are called “enigmatic”.

Christopher Hitchens examines the unstoppable onslaught of “like”.

Many parents and teachers have become irritated to the point of distraction at the way the weed-style growth of “like” has spread through the idiom of the young. And it’s true that in some cases the term has become simultaneously a crutch and a tic, driving out the rest of the vocabulary as candy expels vegetables. But it didn’t start off that way, and might possibly be worth saving in a modified form.

Tetsuya Noguchi’s Chanel Samurai Armor. Perfect for walking around the mall, especially if you don’t want to be disturbed.

I love armor. Which reminds me, my annual sword-sharpening day approaches.

Today on the World Domination Tracker:

Pinky Garcia was in Mitaka, Japan.

This is the Ghibli Museum dedicated to the work of Hayao Miyazaki.

Vincent Balasbas was in India.

This is the Archaeological Survey of India.

Daniel Infante Tuaño is in Barcelona.

This is Lake Banyoles in Catalonia.

In case you haven’t heard, if you are a Filipino living outside the Philippines, you are an Agent of World Domination. Email a photograph of your location to koosi.obrien@gmail.com so we know where you are.