|
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|
|
||
Elizabeth Hamilton Talks about Riefenstahl
By Carole Baden
NOVEMBER 5, 1999--The most controversial film in Oberlin's New German Film Festival is the 1936 film Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl's documentary of the Nazi congress and rally. Riefenstahl was a noted actress and film director whom Adolph Hitler approached and asked to make propaganda films for the Nazi Party. She made a two-part documentary film of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin that may have been funded by the Nazi Propaganda Ministry. To this day, however, Riefenstahl maintains that she was simply an artist and had no connection to Hitler and the Nazis.
Elizabeth Hamilton, visiting assistant professor of German, says that the viewer faces certain problems in watching this film.
"It's very difficult to look at the film today, knowing what we know about the Holocaust, and knowing how the media manipulates us," she says. "We know how to be cynical and skeptical about things like sound bites, and at least we think we know how to see through them. Riefenstahl was making her film when people weren't so savvy with respect to the media, or to the medium of film, and so her film was doubly effective. And so I think the best way to approach that film is historically, to appreciate its technical achievement, because it is a technical achievement, and to put that achievement in an historical context.
"Riefenstahl incorporated mythology and made new mythology in the film," says Hamilton. Riefenstahl uses images of Hitler literally descending from the clouds, to create the impression of his having supernatural connections.
"She was acutely aware of all of the possibilities film offered that other artistic media didn't. She used camera techniques to create the impression of an adoring public that reacted immediately to Hitler's every word in order to persuade an audience to assume the same worshipful, admiring position.
"The ideology of the film is horrible, and we reject it because that ideology says that certain kinds of people, certain kinds of order, certain kinds of societies, are acceptable. We know from history that anyone who fell outside the boundary of that ideology was targeted for murder.
"The film doesn't show the murder. It doesn't show the anti-Semitism, the discrimination that Jews and anybody would have experienced who didn't fit into this Nazi logic. The film shows the Nazi logic, and it really does have a Fascist aesthetic. It shows order; it shows very parallel lines; it shows very straight sturdy square male bodies, adoring women.
"Today we can look at this film extremely critically and see how this vision doesn't leave room for difference. It doesn't leave room for people who look different from these glorified people.
"The problem, too, is how we evaluate a work that is such an achievement artistically, and divorce that from its ideology."
Please send comments, questions, and suggestions about Oberlin Online news and feature articles to Linda.Grashoff@oberlin.edu.
