The Riefenstahl problem
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.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
January 15th, 2010 at 17:57
I like how you ended your star piece.
I think another problem of genius is that it is autistic in its focus. (I can already hear the righteous hordes misreading that statement as a defense of Riefenstahl – admittedly, maybe it is…what can I say? Genius, in all its forms, fascinates me – and screaming, “Tell that to the millions of Jews exterminated!”)