Leni Riefenstahl Dead at 101

Started by Raikus, September 09, 2003, 09:20:09 AM

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Sigur Rós

OK, nobody wanted to guess it so here's the answer:

He breaks his nose! :-D

Just a little joke to make you lads cheer up!

Ravi

Quote from: AlguienEstolamiPantalones
Quote from: mutinycoIf you can separate art from politics she was a genuinely great filmmaker. .

i never bought that shit about seperate the art from the artist , because if your art is not a extension of yourself then your a hack

I wouldn't say Riefenstahl is a "hack," but neither is she a great filmmaker without any caveats.  There is no denying that her cinematic skills were highly developed.  But it is also true that those skills were used to serve evil ends.

I do agree that the art and the artist are inseparable, so the fact that Riefenstahl made Nazi propaganda films should not be ignored.

Find Your Magali

Riefenstahl was an important and innovative filmmaker, but, in the end, should be held accountable for what her films helped bring about. (How much her films helped to stoke the Nazi fires is forever debatable.)

In an educational system of unlimited resources, students would watch "Triumph of the Will" ... followed immediately by "Shoah."

AlguienEstolamiPantalones

Quote from: Ravi
Quote from: AlguienEstolamiPantalones
Quote from: mutinycoIf you can separate art from politics she was a genuinely great filmmaker. .

i never bought that shit about seperate the art from the artist , because if your art is not a extension of yourself then your a hack

I wouldn't say Riefenstahl is a "hack," but neither is she a great filmmaker without any caveats.  There is no denying that her cinematic skills were highly developed.  But it is also true that those skills were used to serve evil ends.

I do agree that the art and the artist are inseparable, so the fact that Riefenstahl made Nazi propaganda films should not be ignored.

i just had a one hour PM back and fourth discussion saying that she was not a hack she had a gift and brotha she used it for evil, filming gypsy kids right before they were to be killed just for the realalistic look on their faces is sick and twisted

she may of had a gift and hell maybe charles manson could of been the worlds best bongo  player , but he choose another path

and she knew what she was doing, all those later day interviews was all bullshit in certain circles its still hip to be down with the nazi's, and she was held up as a cool icon of taboo era

even one of my heros david bowie gave a heil hitler sign to a crowd and flirted with nazi'isums , then later he went all Kabbalah on us so he goes with the flow i guess , whats hip he is down with

still for a guy who chases trends ( no hip genra has he yet tried to jump on the band wagon with)  he makes great music


but this chick was hitlers bitch she wrote about how his speechs captivated her, and she made two films one she thought wasnt good enough then she re made it as " Triumph of the Will" IF HER HEART WASNT INTO IT AND SHE WAS FORCED TO MAKE IT WHY DID SHE NOT LIKE THE ORIGINAL PRODUCT AND SHE WENT AND DID IT OVER

Fuck her i hope she is getting a pineapple lodged in her ass in hell right now by harvy keitel

SoNowThen

Little Nicky references are part of what makes you great

8)
Those who say that the totalitarian state of the Soviet Union was not "real" Marxism also cannot admit that one simple feature of Marxism makes totalitarianism necessary:  the rejection of civil society. Since civil society is the sphere of private activity, its abolition and replacement by political society means that nothing private remains. That is already the essence of totalitarianism; and the moralistic practice of the trendy Left, which regards everything as political and sometimes reveals its hostility to free speech, does nothing to contradict this implication.

When those who hated capital and consumption (and Jews) in the 20th century murdered some hundred million people, and the poster children for the struggle against international capitalism and America are now fanatical Islamic terrorists, this puts recent enthusiasts in an awkward position. Most of them are too dense and shameless to appreciate it, and far too many are taken in by the moralistic and paternalistic rhetoric of the Left.

AlguienEstolamiPantalones

Quote from: SoNowThenLittle Nicky references are part of what makes you great

8)


thank you ma man

Pedro

Quote from: AlguienEstolamiPantalones

even one of my heros david bowie gave a heil hitler sign to a crowd and flirted with nazi'isums , then later he went all Kabbalah on us so he goes with the flow i guess , whats hip he is down with

I thought you hated being "trendy" and doin whatever is "hip"?

AlguienEstolamiPantalones

Quote from: Pedro the Wombat
Quote from: AlguienEstolamiPantalones

even one of my heros david bowie gave a heil hitler sign to a crowd and flirted with nazi'isums , then later he went all Kabbalah on us so he goes with the flow i guess , whats hip he is down with

I thought you hated being "trendy" and doin whatever is "hip"?

bowie is the exception to the rule because he has shown himself to have real talant

mutinyco

I'm curious. Can we compare modern day commercial directors to Leni Riefenstahl? Essentially, they're propagandists like her. Should say...David Fincher be held accountable for doing Nike commercials -- meanwhile their entire company is based around slave labor?...
"I believe in this, and it's been tested by research: he who fucks nuns will later join the church."

-St. Joe

Pubrick

Quote from: mutinycoI'm curious. Can we compare modern day commercial directors to Leni Riefenstahl? Essentially, they're propagandists like her. Should say...David Fincher be held accountable for doing Nike commercials -- meanwhile their entire company is based around slave labor?...
um no.
under the paving stones.

mutinyco

Aside from the scale of atrocity, it's essentially the same thing.
"I believe in this, and it's been tested by research: he who fucks nuns will later join the church."

-St. Joe

Gold Trumpet

Mutinyco, that argument is insane. Yea, Nike does hold factories in asian countries that bring about modern slave labor, but Fincher directing their commercials is an indirect endorsement to the problems in the company. Riefenstahl directed films directly for the inhumane ideas supported by an institution. Fincher's commercials aren't spouting hate at all. Hers were. And if you wanna continue the argument and start comparing how one evil is worst than the other, than that is another insane argument.

Actually, I just wanted to post Stanley Kauffmann's (film critic) very negative remembrance of her:

Taking Sides, reviewed here two weeks ago, dealt with the post-World War II inquiry into the alleged Nazi activities of the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, with the possibility of separating art and politics. After considerable trouble he won his argument that, for him, the two were separable. On September 8, Leni Riefenstahl died at the age of 101--an artist under Hitler who had very little trouble with the American authorities in freeing her art of political guilt. Yet this was a film-maker whose two major works were celebrations of Hitlerism: the documentaries Triumph of the Will and Olympia. The former, a film that is still frightening nearly sixty years after Hitler's death, glorified a gigantic Nazi rally in Nuremberg in 1934. Olympia celebrated the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, and again was a swelling hymn to Nazi principles. Despite these films, despite the innumerable photographs and accounts of Riefenstahl's association with Hitler and her praise of him, she was very quickly de-Nazified by the American occupation command.

She certainly must have had charm: in her autobiography she recounts how, during the days of Army inquiry, she was invited to tea by top officers. She certainly had unique talent: her worst despisers (I am one) cannot deny it. Before the war she had starred in Alpine films in which her physical feats were astounding. After some twenty years of postwar inactivity, she became a photographer, most notably of the Nuba in Africa, and at the age of seventy-one she learned to scuba dive and did underwater photography.

Her later life, because it was so extraordinary, seemed an attempt to counterbalance her past with apolitical dazzle. When questioned about her work for the Nazis, she always responded that she had never actually joined the Nazi Party and that she had changed her views in 1944 (as did other Nazi supporters when they saw that Hitler was going to lose). She made her own subsequent attempts to separate art from politics. She would often say, "I didn't do any harm to anyone. What have I ever done? What am I guilty of?" I haven't yet read the response that could have been made: "Your work--in fact, your best work--helped inspire millions to do enormous harm."  

Riefenstahl's plea of political innocence can be settled with one question. If Hitler had won, wouldn't he have made her the queen of Third Reich filmmaking? He happened to lose, so she became non-Nazi. It was possibly ignoble of me, but the news of her death gave me a surge of schadenfreude.

~rougerum

mutinyco

My argument is very simple. It has nothing to do with Fincher or whoever else. It's about a culture and its ability to emphatically choose a glorifying aesthetic over the very real evils that support it. People are extremely passive. How many people in Europe, Jews included, didn't believe until the very moment it happened that it was going to happen? It's called denial. 9/11 is a perfect example of our denial. For years anybody watching international news knew that a terrorist attack on NYC was inevitable. Just a question of when and to what extent. Then it happened and what was everybody's reaction? Oh, my God! It was so unexpected! I didn't know there were people in the world who hated us!

We've gone from a great manufacturing nation to a managing nation. Everybody else makes everything for us. What happens when they start to revolt? Oh, I didn't know they hated being slaves while we lived like kings! And what then, robots? And what happens when they revolt?

Man, I love getting paranoid! I'm right though.

Anyhow, I'm just asking questions. I elaborated on my idea a bit in my last editorial.
"I believe in this, and it's been tested by research: he who fucks nuns will later join the church."

-St. Joe