"In the world which is upside down, the true is a moment of the false."
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| rock and roll means fuck "In the world which is upside down, the true is a moment of the false." |
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Wednesday, September 10, 2003 ok. finally have a minute to breathe. some musings on the subject of the previous post. oddly enough the past couple of weeks have found me thinking about riefenstahl more than i have in years. i had been thinking about the manipulation of moving images for the purpose of persuasion most of the spring and summer which inevitably leads back to leni. then, last week, riefenstahl's name was bandied about quite a bit in describing the made for tv film 9/11: time of crisis. i though it odd that tha she finally croaketh the day after that shiny piece of GOP hagiography made it's debut. speaking as both a filmmaker and as a human being, riefenstahl poses quite a quandry for me. on the one hand, she is a giant, a titan of my craft. i heard bob mondello, in a commentary on npr, describe her as the most effective cinematographer in the history of film. i would certainly agree with that statement. but, i think that sells her short in many ways. i think she was one of the most important visual artists of the last century. as a filmmaker, she was an innovator. she not only was keenly aware of and constantly making use of the latest techniques and technology that was available to her, but she also used these these methods and things in ways that no one had ever really thought of before. she came at film as someone who had ideas about what film could be, what places it could go that just far exceeded that of almost anyone else in the medium at the time. she was a bad ass that broke rules and rewrote them as she went along. she really was a visionary. and, well, let's not forget that she was also, first and foremost, a "she". she was also a nazi. not some artist sucking up to the status quo for patronage, but a real fucking nazi. i think one of the reasons that she was, as mr mondello described, "effective" is that she was a true believer. she believed that her images could bring about the fuhrer's vision on earth. in a way she was the one that made that vision real. hitler spoke of a masterful, unstoppable race. and that is what she showed first the german people and then to the world. triumph of the will shows hitler, a small and rather unimposing man, as nothing less than a god. and he is speaking to the largest, most fearsome, most orderly, most seemingly inevitable people on earth. the images she captured at nuremberg have become modern day visual shorthand for big, bad shit. those images are all through our culture. you can find them in advertising, entertainment, literature. you can see them in freakin' cartoons! it is difficult to overestimate the influence she had on the culture that we live in now. olympia is simply one of the most beautiful, lyrical and exultant collection of images that i have ever seen. it's influence is seen everywhere. pick up any major magazine. so many of the fashion ads feed from this trough it's almost funny. billboards. print ads. she's everywhere. and yet, she was pretty much lex luthor evil, yo. as bad as bad gets in many ways. i am so torn by my appreciation of her contributions to the medium, shit, her absolute mastery of the persuasive image, and my absolute repulsion at the ends to which these masterful means were put to work. she was obviously one of the great cinema artists and innovators of the age and also responsible for using that talent for futhering one of the great calamities of all time. voluntarily and with great glee, no less. i'm torn. which reminds me of this little ditty... bikini kill: "capri pants" "yeah, i like you... ...but, baby, it's all wrong!! " posted by downtown | 11:02 PM |
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Cost of the War in Iraq
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