Walter Meyer <[log in to unmask]>

>So far as I'm concerned, her true artistry, was demonstrated in *Olympia*
>the 1936 Olympics.  (To keep this post from straying too far from the
>topic of music, let me point out that it has a fine musical score by
>Herbert Windt.) It depicted German triumphs and debacles (such as their
>blowing the women's relay when the baton was dropped at the last exchange,
>giving the victory to the Americans), and also Jesse Owens' exploits.
>The choreography by camera editing of the diving competition, the bicycle
>races and the marathon was simply spectacular.  It makes you embarrassed,
>if nothing else has done so, to watch the TV coverage of the Olympics
>in recent years.
>
>Possibly because she did *not* get along with the Nazi establishment (she
>claimed to have had a personal animosity w/ Goebbels), she never made
>another film for the Germans again.  And, after the war, she was deemed
>so tainted that she never had the opportunity to make a film then either.

There _is_ a musical spin to this piece; but to get there, one has to take
a whirlwind tour through the life & artistic times of Leni R.  to get
there....

Walter isn't exactly right on LR's career post-Olympia:  it's more accurate
to say that she may never have _completed_ another film for the Nazi regime
(although she is credited (?) with having produced a birthday present film
- a glorified home movie? - for Hitler during WWII).  She certainly seems
to have shot enough film to create a couple of narrative epics; & at least
one post-Olympia picture was completed after WWII (title escapes me...  my
propagnada-as-art notes are in my other computer); but the controversary
over the film (& apart from everything else, there's a fair bit of evidence
to suggest that Gypsy extras was trucked in from concentration camps for
the shoot; although whether LR knew about this is less clear) buried it (&
her).

One has to remember that LR saw herself as a cinematic auteur of the
silent school (like her mountainclimbing mentor, Frank):  shooting for
ages; editing for longer (Olympia was in production for a year prior to
the games they were supposedly recording - virtually none of the classic
angles from the diving, yachting, marathon, etc were actually shot during
the games themselves; though LF's fetishisation of Jesse Owens's body
certainly was - & the film remained in post-production for another two
years after that); & beyond a certain point, never actually getting around
to completing anything (qv, Welles); so her apparent silence post Olympia
has more causes than just a falling out with the leadership (which did
occur; but later & more personally that supporters of the director would
like to admit).  Her relationship with the Nazi party remains ambiguous at
least in part because - like that Veit Harlan, the director of Jud Suss &
the astonishing Kolberg - her story seems pretty impossible to believe:  LR
established a total control of her art when such control didn't exist in
any cinematic society, much less under Dr G's rigorous censorship regime.

(I accept, however, that societies - especially totalitarian societies -
tend not to be rational; & the mere fact that a story seems implausible
doesn't necessarily make it untrue.  Still:  i know which side my money's
on...)

On Walter's more general point:  the absence of overt propaganda in LR's
masterpieces is unstandable & fairly common in German cinema during the
Nazi period.  Notwithstanding the reputation of films like Jud Suss,
much of the Nazi message sending was filtered through heroic - & overtly
Hollywood-inspired - narrative conventions such as the _Old Fritz
(Friedrich the Great)_ & _Genius_ genres rather than by blockbashing people
with hate messages.  This absence of overt The guy was an unreconstructed
nut; but Goebbels was also fairly nearly a genius:  i really doubt that
anyone in this century has instinctively understood the art & craft of
manipulation than he did...

...  which brings us back to CM & Wagner & political Beethoven:  _all_
>art is inherantly manipulative; but some art is more overtly manipulative
>than others.  With Wagner (& LR, for that matter) the manipulation is
>uncompromisingly naked; while Beethoven & Verdi (& of course, Neilsen)
tend to hide their propagandas under a thin veneer of objectivism.  It's
fair enough to prefer one approach to enough; & noone is expecting people
to completely divorce the image of Wagner-the-bloody-jerk from their mind
when they try to get a handle of Wagner-the-erratic-but-often-
transcendentally-inspired-artist; but to dismiss Wagner as an artist
because he was a bloody jerk seems to miss an awful lot of interesting
points....

(A last return to Nazi art, a subject i have an inexplicable interest in.
A sense of propagandistic history tends to reveals a certain grim irony
in post-WWII aesthetics:  in modernism's almost desperate flight from the
perceived excesses of Nazi romanticism - which tended to be, in fact (as
opposed to narrative) a fairly lightweight chocolate Bavarian rather than
unmittigated Gotterdammerung - their schools have tended to idealise the
aesthetic form in a fashion sure to warm to cockles of any true Nazi
aesthetic.  Aesthetes have a tendency of becoming what they hate, i
guess...)

All the best,

Robert Clements <[log in to unmask]>
<http://www.ausnet.net.au/~clemensr/welcome.htm>