[LEN-E] Wege etc/ cfr Thomas & Ron

[Luc Deneulin]

Hi
As for Wege, with Riefenstahl in it or not, it's very difficult to  
use only visual material, there are eg photographs of Riefenstahl  
which are really her, but which could be - if you do not know it - be  
easily seen as photographs from a person who looks a bit like  
Riefenstahl.

As for Thomas, I agree that Riefenstahl and The Third Reich can be  
considered finished for research. But:
there have been numerous studies about Riefenstahl's filmic  
techniques, in PhD's, articles etc. In France her Olympia was  
compared to eg Tokyo Olympiad.
When you name Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Vertov, these directors have  
written on film, had a film theory. Riefenstahl herself almost had  
none- my own research focused a lot on the influence of Belaz Balazs  
filmtheory which influenced, I think Das blaue Licht and Sieg des  
Glaubens, Balazs was eg very interested in Arnold Fanck's films and  
when Riefenstahl explained her story (well... hers...) of The blue  
Light, Balazs was very enthousiastic, since he saw a chance to put  
into practice his very interestin film theory (still available in  
German), he eg was more in favour of Fank films and quite negative -  
as a film theorician - about von Sternberg's Blue Angel. It took  
Riefenstahl almost 70 years to add Bela Balazs as co-director for Das  
blaue Licht (on her site)

I have compared the winter Olympics from 1928 and 1936 with Olympia  
myself over 15 years ago.

In France many research has been done on Cocteau/Riefenstahl, books  
and articles have been published, in French, Cocteau's partner and  
actor has been interviewed on this topic etc. Cocteau was not very  
interested in Riefenstahl's project, he saw some hom-erotics in  
Olympia and in Tiefland since he was in love with the actor who  
played Pedro.
Scolars have made film analysis of Triumph, of Olympia.
Tiefland is very difficult, as I'm studying this subject myself, -  
there have been at least 4 co-directors or assistant directors, all  
with their ideas, after the war they were not keen (due to the gypsy  
case) to ask credit-- so what was Riefenstahl's own input?

What is Riefenstahl's filmic style?  Her editing? The camera (or the  
choice of camera men?) More and more, unfortunately,-- I know some of  
her work since I'm 16 years old, I have almost completely changed my  
opinion, from Riefenstahl as a director with a very own vision on  
film which she applied on "her" films to Riefenstahl as a person who  
was rather very good at finding people who could work for her. In  
other words, in the beginning it looked as if Riefenstahl was a  
"auteur" as the French call it, but now... what exactly did she do as  
a director? You can see eg many photographs of her during the filming  
of the Olympics but these are not "snapshots", taken like that, many  
have been staged.

It's all too easy to say Riefenstahl couldn't work after the war  
because of her nazi past while Veit Harlan made about 10 more films.  
Harlan could make very cheap films, he could have only 3 hours of  
filming and cut a movie out of it. It's not something Riefenstahl  
could do.

This being said, great, very big directors like Flaherty (the father  
of the documentary tradition), Joris Ivens, Henri Storck have never  
had such attention as Riefenstahl.


  http://users.skynet.be/deneulin/books.html

On this site you can see how many works have been written on  
Riefenstahl and that's only a part, what I have studied myself. My  
aim is to gather more material and ad summaries of it., in the  
meantime I'm working on my book "Leni Riefenstahl's Films" which  
deals with a few topics Thomas wrote about, it must be ready within  
one year.




In a way, indeed everything has been said about Leni's involvement  
with the Third Reich, and probably that's one of the reasons why the  
interest seems to fade, as Luc points out. BUT: to my knowledge noone  
has ever attempted to do much more than this. There are no books that  
try to place Leni in the context of filmmaking, no books that have  
researched in detail how her works and filmic techniques relate to  
other filmmakers of the time. I think especially of the Russians:  
Eisenstein, Vertov, Pudovkin. We still don't know for sure HOW new  
(if at all) her filmic strategies were, what her very special and  
personal innovations were. We don't have a book that compares the  
style of  "Olympia" to other sports films made before and after ( a  
comparison of the 1928 Fanck "Winter Olympiad" film, Leni's "Olympia"  
and Ichikawa's "Tokyo Olympiad", for example). Noone has investigated  
the stylistic similarities of "Tiefland" and Cocteau's films, nor her  
professional relations to Cocteau and the abandoned film project on  
Frederick and Voltaire which she wanted to do together with Cocteau.  
I guess one could find many other neglected topics for book-length  
studies of Leni's works. But everyone seems to be revolving endlessly  
around her involvement with Hitler and her politics instead, a topic  
which indeed begins to smell stale.

Luc Deneulin
luc.deneulin at skynet.be