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LeNiews

Leni Riefenstahl in the News

Archive for 2007
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Triumph des Willens
Olympia
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December, 2007

December 30, 2007

  • San Francisco Chronicle: ASK MICK LASALLE, Chronicle Movie Critic

    Quote: "[Triumph of the Will is] not remembered for its techniques so much as for the effectiveness of those techniques in her hands, which I suppose means it's more remembered as propaganda — but propaganda raised to a level of art. I first saw the movie in a similar class in college and realized that Riefenstahl was on to something when I actually found myself smiling along with Adolf Hitler. It was an important lesson in the power of images to bypass the brain and the moral sense."

December 29, 2007

  • The Age: A catalyst for change

    Quote: "Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will is still the movie that most spectacularly collapses the distinction between cinema and propaganda. And it is the one picture that gets evoked just about every time the question of cinematic brainwashing is brought up. Not that surprising really, considering that Riefenstahl's depiction of the 1934 Nuremberg rallies has very little in common with the pedestrian 'agenda' films pumping out not so subliminal messages, but represents cinema at its most electrifying, innovative and accomplished. [...]"

December 24, 2007

  • Art Daily: Kunsthalle Bielefeld Presents 1937. Perfection and Destruction — Reactions To Exhibition

    Quote: "The exhibition begins with Arno Breker, Leni Riefenstahl, and the fascist painters supported by Hitler — some of the deceptive ideals of perfection promoted by National Socialism. In bold opposition, more than twenty reputable German artists, including Max Beckmann and Richard Oelze, portrayed the 'rude awakening.' From here, the viewer moves on to entire rooms of works representing the art scenes in Italy, Spain, and the Soviet Union."

December 20, 2007

  • The Republican: Ski movie 'Steep' goes to extremes

    Quote: "Actually, long ago, skiing was once common in mainstream movies. In 1919, a silent movie entitled The Wonders of Skiing was a big hit. So was the 1931 German film known in this country as Ski Chase. The visually-stunning movie has a simple plot. Skiers play a game of hide and seek on a gorgeous mountain in the Alps. One of the skiers was Leni Riefenstahl, the infamous movie maker known for her iconographic documentaries of Nazi rallies used by Adolph Hitler for propagandistic purposes."

December 16, 2007

  • Los Angeles Times: 'Cleopatra's Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire' by Judith Thurman

    Quote: "Thurman has chops. Still, in Cleopatra's Nose, certain twee intonations that can only be called New Yorkerese at times give the prose a mildly (if only momentary) self-parodic feel. German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, writes Thurman, 'was a strikingly attractive if hectic figure.' "

December 14, 2007

  • Brooklyn Rail: Jordan Harrison, Making Language Necessary

    Quote: "In Amazons and Their Men (a riff on Leni Riefenstahl's ill-fated film version of Penthisilea), the power of speaking in the third person is a challenge to the audience [...]"

December 9, 2007

  • Santa Cruz Sentinel: New Yorker author explores the madwomen in our attics

    Quote: "There are essays too [in Judith Thurman's Cleopatra's Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire], on tofu, on New York Brownstones, kimonos, Flaubert, etc., but for the most part, these pieces are about women. ¶ She looks at Nadine Gordimer's challenging heroines; at the authenticity of Anne Frank's diary; at why Leni Riefenstahl is not great [...]"

December 3, 2007

  • Bennington Banner: Bennington College professors' books win critical acclaim

    Quote: "[Steven] Bach's biography, which was published by Knopf, was featured on the cover of the March 25 edition of New York Times Book Review."

  • FilmStew: A Boffo Biographer

    Quote: "The New York Times' annual compilation of 'The 100 Most Notable Books of the Year' is certainly an intriguing way to measure the success of an author's efforts. In the case of Steven Bach, a professor of literature at Vermont's Bennington College, he's four for four."

November, 2007

November 29, 2007

November 12, 2007

  • Huffington Post: How Hitler Did It

    Quote: "If you look at Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, or more recent American and British documentaries, the way he used contagion shows. Hitler starts slow, speaking to one section of the crowd, one area, and slowly the feelings spread from that nucleus. Emotion, starting small, ripples from that center to the periphery."

November 11, 2007

  • Sunday Sun: Ferry's over fuhrer furore

    Quote: "[Bryan Ferry] said: 'My God, the Nazis knew how to put themselves in the limelight and present themselves. I'm talking about the films of Leni Riefenstahl and the buildings of Albert Speer and the mass marches and the flags. Just fantastic ... really beautiful.' ¶ He later apologised for any offence the comments caused, explaining they were meant from an art history perspective."

November 7, 2007

November 4, 2007

  • Variety: UFA plans feature on Nazi filmmaker

    Quote: "UFA will produce a two-part TV movie on the life of Leni Riefenstahl, the late filmmaker whose career was tainted by her association to Adolf Hitler and who was branded a Third Reich propagandist for her patriotic Nazi-era documentaries."

November 2, 2007

October, 2007

October 31, 2007

October 28, 2007

  • Statesman: You're so vain — Collection of Thurman essays examines our appetite for ego, style and happiness

    Quote: "The chapter on Riefenstahl, like many in the book, is pegged to the release of new biographies, in this case one by Jürgen Timborn, who was unable to persuade his subject to collaborate fully. Thurman observes that 'unwilling to misrepresent himself as a hagiographer, he was doomed to fail, though his disappointment does not seem to have warped his fair-mindedness. But I also suspect that the seeming absence of a talent for seduction — he writes in the patient, tongue-biting monotone that one adopts sensibly with a hysteric — turned Riefenstahl off.' "

October 27, 2007

  • Telegraph: Why 30,000 years of art will now fit on a coffee table

    Quote: "There are scholars who toil for years to produce a definitive study of a decade in the history of art. So imagine the effort and chutzpah required to write a history of art covering every corner of the Earth since 28,000 BC. ¶ That is the somewhat ambitious aim of a glorious new book, 30,000 Years of Art, soon to be published by Phaidon. [...] One of the book's most beguiling — and novel — qualities is that it sheds light on the very different types of art produced simultaneously in far-flung cultures. Around 450 BC, for instance, the ancient Greek master Myron was sculpting his famous discus-thrower, which featured in the opening sequence of Leni Riefenstahl's 1938 film of the Berlin Olympics. But at the same time an anonymous artist was fashioning an imposing male head out of terracotta in northern Nigeria."

October 18, 2007

  • Claremont Institute: The Claremont Review of Books

    Quote: "The Fall 2007 issue is now available, featuring [...] Algis Valiunas on Leni Riefenstahl [...]"

October 11, 2007

  • Times: Stade muffins in all their glory

    Quote: "Every year the more fetching examples (aka the flyhalves) of a French rugby club, Stade Francais, pose in the buff. [...] There is something reminiscent of Leni Riefenstahl circa 1930 Berlin in the glorification of the athlete's form in these pictures. The calendars have a slightly fascist approach to masculine beauty. It's a long tradition harking back to the day when people worshipped Apollo, god of the sun, poetry and buff bods — except, in this instance, there is also some dodgy evidence of pubic hair."

  • Ottawa Citizen: Africa from the inside out

    Quote: "The Nazis' favourite photographer and filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, was one of the most famous operators of what Nigerian-American art historian Okwui Enwezor calls the 'vampiric machine' that sucked all the individuality out of Africans and reduced them to stereotypes."

October 7, 2007

  • Independent: Berlin Babylon: Set for a sequel

    Quote: "It's where Marlene Dietrich danced in the Blue Angel, Fritz Lang created his Metropolis — and Joseph Goebbels filmed the Nazis' propaganda. Now Germany's long-neglected film studios are making an astonishing comeback. [...] The Nazis made extensive use of the studios, starting with the brilliantly executed yet shamefacedly pro-party films of the young Leni Riefenstahl. She is remembered most for Triumph of the Will her fawning portrait of Hitler at a Nuremberg rally (the film is still banned in Germany) and Olympia, her documentary on the 1936 Berlin Olympics "

October 4, 2007

October 1, 2007

  • Mehr News: Iran's "For Freedom" listed in BFI top ten world-shaking docs

    Quote: "Can films change history? Mark Cousins, critic of BFI Southbank cinema site, has come up with a list of ten films, including the Iranian documentary For Freedom by Hossein Torabi, that he considers to have shaken the world [...] 'From China we have The River Elegy (Jun Xia, 1988) [...] from Germany Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1936) [...]' "

  • News24: Power and glory of the Games

    Quote: "The torch relay, exploited in Leni Riefenstahl's film Olympia, made its first appearance."

September, 2007

September 25, 2007

  • Interfaith Family: Forbidden Love: Anti-Semites Who Loved Jews... And the Jews Who (Sometimes) Loved Them Back

    Quote: "The affinity of so-called pure races for Jews was not limited to men. German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl never officially joined the Nazi Party but she made her career by glorifying Hitler and the Aryan ideal in party-funded documentaries like Triumph of the Will. Riefenstahl, who died in 2003 at the age of 101, spent more than half her life downplaying her Nazi ties, claiming total ignorance of the Final Solution and defending herself with lists of 'Jewish friends.' "

September 24, 2007

  • Tucson Citizen: Controversial judge Carl Muecke dies

    Quote: "Charles A. Muecke was born in 1918 to German immigrants in New York City. After graduating from college and working in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Works Project Administration, he joined the Marines. Because German was his first language, he was assigned to the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, a precursor to the CIA, to hunt for Nazi war criminals. Among those he arrested was Hitler's filmographer, Leni Riefenstahl."

  • Huffington Post: The Attack on MoveOn.org and Other Dangerous 'Fingerprints'

    Quote: "Joseph Goebbels pioneered the 'embedding' of reporters with military troops as a way to support favorable coverage; William Shirer was embedded with German troops in the invasion of France and Nazi filmmaker Leni von Riefenstahl was embedded with German troops in Poland. [...] Take a look at Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, especially the plane descent. Then take a look at the 'Mission Accomplished' photo-op."

September 11, 2007

  • SFGate: Foster Turns Vigilante for 'Brave One'

    Quote: "[Jodie] Foster is just finishing the family flick Nim's Island and has been toiling for years to star in a film about Leni Riefenstahl, the filmmaker vilified after World War II for her propaganda pieces about Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. ¶ 'I wish I was better at making these things happen fast. That particular project is really hard to get right,' Foster said. 'It's going to be an interesting, challenging experience to make the movie and to defend it. I think that's what's going to be fun about it, really, is the discussion about it, these big, moral questions.' "

September 10, 2007

September 6, 2007

  • 411mania: Furious on Film

    Quote: "During World War II former soldier [Frank] Capra resorting to making American propaganda films. One of which, Predule to War, won an Academy Award. He considered himself the answer to the Nazi's Leni Riefenstahl."

September 4, 2007

  • Malta Independent: Official feature of the Maltese Olympic Committee

    Quote: "Authorities and famous personalities of Sport, Cinema and Journalism will attend the Opening Ceremony (October 27) and will be awarded with the Guirlande d'Honneur on occasion of the 25th year of [Fédération Internationale Cinéma Télévision Sportifs]. During the last editions among others there were: Pelè, Marcello Lippi, HRH Princess Haya Bint Al Hussein, Sergey Bubka, Hugh Hudson, Robert Redford, Leni Riefenstahl, Jury Chechi and Larissa Latynina."

August, 2007

August 30, 2007

  • 411mania: Furious on Film

    Quote: "As a young film maker in that area of the world [Fritz Lang] was head hunted by the Nazi's who wanted him to make propaganda films. No doubt blown away by the scope and scale of Metropolis they felt he could portray the Nazi's in the same way. Chances are his work with the Nazi's would have been even grander than Leni Riefenstahl. She tended to interject with images of great humanity. Under Lang the program could have been far more mechanical. Joseph Goebbels offered Lang the chance to head up the German film studio UFA but Lang fled the country instead disagreeing with the Nazi way of life."

August 23, 2007

August 22, 2007

  • Washington City Paper: The Picture of Stealth — How photography became a subversive medium between the world wars

    Quote: "[...] there's Martin Munkacsi's 1931 photo of Nazi propaganda filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl — glistening, covered in sweat, also barely smiling, looking as if she had just hiked up a mountain or something similarly healthful. Witkovsky suggests that the heroic, athletic European woman is a compensation for all of those destroyed young men, shambling along, nursing their phantom limbs: 'Machine-age models of womanly beauty disguised like a prosthesis, the maiming brought by devices of industrial technology "manly" fashions for women also masked the anxiety at dismembered masculinity within the defeated counties of Central Europe in particular.' "

August 21, 2007

  • A.V. Club Blog: The hits keep on coming: NFL Films and Hard Knocks

    Quote: "When it comes to sports movies, football flicks can't hold a candle to films about boxing or baseball. But for more than 40 years, NFL Films has been the greatest promoter of the country's most popular game because its filmmakers have applied stylish cinematic techniques to convey — and pump up in the most hamfisted fashion — the energy and vitality of the NFL. If you have never seen an NFL Films production, imagine if Leni Riefenstahl made movies for the NFL instead of the Nazis, and you'll get a sense of the company's operatic, worshipful tone toward the game of football."

August 8, 2007

  • Deutsche Welle: German Expert on Nazi Films and Propaganda

    Quote: "Were there Nazi directors and Nazi actors? Would people like Leni Riefenstahl and Zarah Leander have become well known without the Nazis? ¶ Of course, some of the directors and actors were National Socialists, along with other film people. As in the population at large, some were passionate Nazis, the others more half-hearted. Some were opportunists and while some were critical, they didn't voice criticism openly. People like Leni Riefenstahl, Zarah Leander and Veit Harlan would have become famous in the industry without the Nazis. But in the case of Karl Ritter it's questionable whether he would have been able to shoot his 14 films considering how wooden they were."

August 4, 2007

  • Hindustan Times: Venice Film Festival turns 75

    Quote: "Film directors like Rene Clair, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Jean Renoir and Ernst Lubitsch all flocked to the Venice. The festival enjoyed its freedom until 1938, when Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia received an award. But afterwards the biannual festival turned into an exclusively German-Italian event, which Joseph Goebbels — the head of the Nazis' propaganda machine — attended in his white linen suit."

July, 2007

July 30, 2007

  • Bloomberg: Guernica, Dresden, Baghdad: How Bombing Civilians Got Popular

    Quote: "As [Ian] Patterson notes, though, 'it was only one of a huge number of cultural artifacts — paintings, films, novels, poems, plays — to explore the idea of indiscriminate death from the air.' Auden, Bunuel, de Kooning, Riefenstahl, Verne, Sontag and myriad more-obscure figures — Patterson casts a wide net as he explores how artists dealt with the atavistic fear of the sky falling, what Proust called, during earlier zeppelin raids on Paris, 'an apocalypse in the sky.' "

  • Time: Why Ingmar Bergman Mattered

    Quote: "In 1960 [Ingmar Bergman] received a still higher honor: he graced the cover of TIME, the first foreign-language filmmaker to do so since Leni Riefenstahl in 1936."

July 27, 2007

  • 411mania: Furious on Film

    Quote: "While I can't agree with [Riefenstahl's] decisions in life it's a pity she never had the chance to work in the west and produce the kind of films she was capable of. As a result she's left with [Triumph of the Will] as her legacy."

July 24, 2007

  • Cape Argus: Tarantino keeps it under wraps

    Quote: "[Quentin] Tarantino draws a lot of inspiration from other films and film directors, controversially naming Third Reich propagandist Leni Riefenstahl as his favourite German director."

July 23, 2007

  • Telegraph: Hitler plot film sees Nazi studio rise again

    Quote: "Founded in 1911, [Babelsberg Studios] gained early celebrity with the filming of Fritz Lang's Metropolis in 1927 and the bewitching performance of Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel, in 1930. From then until the Second World War, almost 100 films were completed at Babelsberg every year. ¶ Among those working there was Leni Riefenstahl, who came to the attention of Goebbels, and went on to film the infamous Nuremberg rally for Triumph of the Will. As the Nazis cemented their grip on power, so the studio fell further under the sway of Goebbels."

July 18, 2007

July 16, 2007

  • ExileStreet: Michael and Me — Or, Moore v. Leni

    Quote: "Recently, Steven Bach discussed his book on Leni Riefenstahl on BookTV, noting the historical change she made in the documentary format: using feature-film methods, such as reaction shots, to make a docu which was more than the earlier cinema verite method of just pointing the camera and recording the event statically and without comment. ¶ She'd borrowed from her acting experience in [The Blue Light] and other rousing features to direct Triumph of the Will and Olympia with an emotional edge never seen before. 'It's a reality-feature more than it's a documentary' asserts Bach, 'and it's propaganda more than it's a reality feature. It's not a documentary in the sense of unmediated reality, captured by a disinterested filmmaker.' "

July 6, 2007

  • Film Threat: The Bootleg Files: "The Negro Soldier"

    Quote: "The film [The Negro Soldier] then traces contemporary African-American achievement by showing a number of prominent people from various professions. None of these people are identified by name, although it is easy enough to identify the surgeon Dr. Charles Drew and the contralto Marian Anderson. There is also a lengthy clip (complete with the original narration) from Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia that shows the victories of Jesse Owens at the Berlin Olympics. This clip was clearly bootlegged, as Olympia was copyright-protected."

July 3, 2007

  • Guardian Unlimited: How the Nazis took flight from Valkyries and Rhinemaidens

    Quote: "[...] the penetration of Wagner has been exaggerated. Leni Riefenstahl's The Triumph of the Will, about the 1934 Nuremburg rally, is often thought of as having a Wagner soundtrack. In fact, most of the music is Wagner pastiche."

July 2, 2007

  • Philadelphia City Paper: Spark Festival Showcase

    Quote: "Madhouse Theater is staging The Secret Diaries of Leni Riefenstahl, a satire about the woman behind Hitler's propaganda films."

June, 2007

June 29, 2007

  • Mirror: Bryan Ferry: An Apology

    Quote: "On 16 April we reported on an interview given by Bryan Ferry to a German newspaper. Our article was headed The Nazis were so amazing and claimed that Mr Ferry had been 'singing the praises of the Nazis'. We now accept this was not true."

June 21, 2007

June 19, 2007

  • Brisbane Times: The Chasers' apology

    Quote: "To pinch a line from H.L. Mencken, the only way a comic should ever look at a critic is down. So it's kind of disappointing that the Chaser boys apologised for their tasteless and ill-advised Leni Riefenstahl sketch recently. After all, being tasteless and ill-advised is why we love them so."

June 18, 2007

June 17, 2007

  • Stars and Stripes: Vicenza student's project a big hit

    Quote: "An eighth-grader from Vicenza Middle School in Italy nearly cracked the top 10 with a documentary she submitted at the National History Day competition. ¶ April Petersen, who produced Leni Riefenstahl: Trufthful Artist or Tragic Propagandist finished 11th in the junior individual documentary competition on Thursday. "

June 14, 2007

  • Financial Times Deutschland: Monstrous talent

    Quote: "Riefenstahl might be thought to have met her match in biographer Steven Bach [...]"

June 13, 2007

  • San Francisco Bay Guardian: Stage listings

    Quote: "Disney in Deutschland [...] John Powers's play focuses on Walt Disney's 1935 visit with Adolf Hitler and Leni Riefenstahl at the führer's Berghof retreat."

  • Washington Post: Rudolf Arnheim; Studied Art-Perception Links

    Quote: "[Rudolf Arnheim] also conducted interviews for German radio. He recalled having an unpleasant exchange over the air with actress and filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, who reportedly told him: 'As long as the Jews are film critics, I'll never have a success. But watch out, when Hitler takes the rudder everything will change.' "

June 12, 2007

  • Philly.com: O. Sembène, African auteur

    Quote: "Prompted both by his horror at the racism in Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia, with its fetishized images of black athletes, and by the experiences of colonialism, Mr. Sembène pledged to Africanize cinema."

June 10, 2007

  • Australian Jewish News: Apology sought over The Chaser's Holocaust gags

    Quote: "Mischief-makers from the cult ABC show The Chaser's War on Everything have come under fire over their send-up of Adolf Hitler, amid claims of 'extremely inappropriate' and 'tasteless' humour. ¶ The sketch, Hansfrau Hitler, parodies the Nazi film-maker Leni Riefenstahl and features a mock Adolf Hitler joking about aspects of the Holocaust."

June 4, 2007

  • NPR: Steven Bach, Looking Closely at Leni Riefenstahl

    Quote: "Steven Bach's biography Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl examines the filmmaker who celebrated the Nazi ideal and created the Third Reich's iconic images in Triumph of the Will and Olympiad. Bach details Riefenstahl's ruthless, opportunistic ambition, analyzes her 'self-righteous entitlement,' and explores her relationships with Hitler, Goebbels and Albert Speer. What emerges is a compulsively readable and scrupulously crafted work."
    Note: Includes audio interview with Steven Bach.

June 3, 2007

  • Decatur Daily: Filmmaker for the Third Reich

    Quote: "This is a well-researched and copiously documented biography [by Steven Bach], complemented by photographs. Leni Riefenstahl's legacy continues to be debated. Susan Sontag said, 'Nobody making films today alludes to Riefenstahl.' British filmmaker Tony Palmer said, 'Triumph of the Will is one of the few true manuals of the art of filmmaking, one that has influenced filmmakers from Orson Welles to George Lucas.' "

May, 2007

May 27, 2007

May 25, 2007

  • Financial Mail: An ongoing affair with history

    Quote: "Aside from detours into the ideology of eating in Africa and the ecstatic pain underlying Congolese music, [the book] Beautiful/Ugly includes an account of how an encounter with Leni Riefenstahl's photographic book on the Nuba motivated expatriate Senegalese sculptor Ousmane Sow to produce his Nuba-inspired works. In turn, Riefenstahl, Nazi Germany's visual ideologue of the pure body, came to Africa stimulated by the writing of a boozy romantic, Ernest Hemingway."

May 24, 2007

May 16, 2007

May 14, 2007

  • Starpulse: Bryan Ferry Not Fired From Modeling Job

    Quote: "British retail giants Marks And Spencer (M&S) insist they did not axe Bryan Ferry over his controversial statements regarding the Nazi regime — he had already completed his existing modeling contract."

May 13, 2007

May 12, 2007

  • Guardian Unlimited: 'As pretty as a swastika'

    Quote: "The New Yorker's response to Müller's documentary gets her about right: 'If you believe her, she's one kind of a monster; if you don't, she's another.' Beyond any ideology, she was fanatically obsessed, to the exclusion of all other feelings, with creating striking images at any cost, human, financial, spiritual. 'Of what am I guilty?' she used plaintively to ask journalists who challenged her. The answer must be: abdication from the human race."

May 9, 2007

  • Jerusalem Post: Reason — not law — will defeat hate-think

    Quote: "[...] in April the rock singer Bryan Ferry was pressured by the World Jewish Congress to apologize for saying publicly that he admired Nazi architecture and the work of Hitler's filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. The little Nazi architecture I have seen firsthand never made much of an impression on me, but Riefenstahl's work was revolutionary in terms of her cinematographic techniques and conveys the power of Nazi rallies in a quite awesome way. ¶ Expressing my view on this matter hardly makes me a Nazi sympathizer. In fact, it is only by admitting my own admiration for the skill of Riefenstahl that I can begin to understand the power of Nazi propaganda and how the Nazis were able to captivate a whole nation with their twisted ideology. ¶ Ferry was essentially making the same point, but nonetheless Jewish pressure groups called for the Marks & Spencers department store to axe him from their advertising campaign until Ferry backtracked with a public apology."

May 4, 2007

  • Telegraph: The festival that went from can't to Cannes

    Quote: "The following year's Venice proved decisive. The jury wished to award an American film but pressure was brought to bear from Berlin, and the distribution of prizes was changed at the last minute. Olympiad, Leni Riefenstahl's documentary on the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and Goffredo Alessandrini's Lucciano Serra: Pilote, shared the highest prize, the 'Mussolini Cup'. ¶ Both movies were fascist propaganda — and Riefenstahl's documentary was not even eligible for consideration, according to festival regulations which stipulated that only fiction films could compete. Mussolini dispensed with this impediment. This combination of blatant rigging and fascist cheerleading saw the American and British delegates resign before the prizes were even announced. "

May 2, 2007

April, 2007

April 30, 2007

  • iF Magazine: Jodie Foster to play Leni Riefenstahl — Biopic to portray Hitler's filmmaker

    Quote: "Oscar-winning actress [...] Jodie Foster will play the leading role of Leni Riefenstahl in a work that is bound to generate controversy, as it examines the beautiful woman who became Adolf Hitler's favorite director and whose brilliant propaganda films, including the classic Triumph of the Will, helped the Nazi war machine."

  • Cinematical: Jodie Foster Will Play Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's Director

    Quote: "With [Riefenstahl] having passed away, the Guardian reports that the project is once again gearing up, with Foster set to star and Rupert Walters currently writing the script."

  • Cinema Blend: Foster To Portray Nazi Heroine

    Quote: "The script isn't exactly completed yet, but for the first time in almost seven years, the project actually looks to be getting off the ground. So here's to the fearless visionaries ready to embrace media and public dissention in order to tell an amazing and historically accurate story."

April 29, 2007

  • Mail & Guardian: Hollywood tackles Hitler's Riefenstahl

    Quote: "Oscar-winning actress Jodie Foster will play the leading role of Leni Riefenstahl in a work that is bound to generate immense argument, as it examines the beautiful woman who became Adolf Hitler's favourite director and whose slick propaganda helped the Nazi war machine."

  • Guardian Unlimited: Leni: fully exposed — The lies spun by Leni Riefenstahl are forensically destroyed in Steven Bach's biography, says Taylor Downing

    Quote: "This is a fine biography and a great read. But there are a few quibbles. Bach never describes clearly the films themselves. Agreed, the key films are now available on DVD, but most readers will only know them from the clips regularly seen in television histories. The lines of uniformed party members, the drums, the flags at Nuremberg. Or Jesse Owens coiled in the starting blocks. But I could have done with more analysis. Her rally films such as Triumph of the Will fascinate as a filmic expression of the fascist ethic."

  • Independent: Leni: The life and work of Leni Riefenstahl, by Steven Bach — So much talent in the service of pain

    Quote: "Lucidly written and thoroughly researched, Bach's biography is magisterial with every lie and obfuscation that Riefenstahl resorted to nailed down and rebutted. But the author commits one sin of omission. Why, over the past 60 years has his subject been singled out for quite so much attention? ¶ After all, she didn't make films like the anti-semitic rant Jud Süss which was shown to SS soldiers before they rounded up Jews. She didn't produce newsreels that intercut infestations of rats with huddled Jews who had been crowded into ghettoes. But she did create two of the greatest documentaries in the history of cinema. Maybe that is why Bach heaps so much blame on her. Riefenstahl subverted so much talent in the service of so much pain."

April 28, 2007

  • The Record: Of Leni, let there be no doubt

    Quote: "Steven Bach, an American, has written what will become known as the definitive biography of Riefenstahl, a Berlin native who never joined the Nazi Party, but who enjoyed the warmest of relations with its leaders. ¶ After reading Bach's work, it's clear the debate about Riefenstahl should end. She was a lying, manipulative, opportunistic mythmaker who glorified Hitler and his Third Reich."

April 27, 2007

  • J.: Unrepentant to the last: Author explores life of Hitler's filmmaker

    Quote: "Even detractors concede Riefenstahl was a brilliant filmmaker. Bach noted that she applied 'fiction film techniques into documentaries in a way that caused a basic newsreel form to take on very powerful emotional and artistic qualities. Rather than going to the objectivity, she packed [Triumph of the Will] with emotion and romanticism.' ¶ In Olympia, Riefenstahl brought 'extraordinary imagination on how to best photograph the human body in motion. There's not a sports photographer alive who isn't in her debt in some way.' ¶ That's about all the praise Bach can muster for his subject."

April 22, 2007

April 21, 2007

  • Writers Institute Blog: Steven Bach Visits

    Quote: "Steven Bach joined us last evening for a talkback after the screening of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, her 1934 celebration of Hitler in one of the most skilled propaganda films ever made [...]"

April 18, 2007

  • New York Sun: Running the Germans Ragged

    Quote: "Biographies of Hitler, Owens, and Riefenstahl have fully treated their subjects' roles in the 'Nazi Games' of 1936 (Germany also hosted that year's Winter Olympics in the Bavarian towns of Garmisch-Partenkirchen). But [David Clay Large's book, Nazi Games] is devoted to the large and small moments of the games themselves and their accompanying politics, especially the international boycott movement during the stormy run-up to the Olympics."

April 16, 2007

  • Independent: Bryan Ferry's Nazi gaffe

    Quote: "[Bryan] Ferry, the lead singer of Roxy Music, has caused outrage at home and abroad for remarks he made to a German newspaper about his admiration for the work of Leni Riefenstahl, notorious for her Nazi propaganda films, and the architecture of Albert Speer. [...] Nick Viner, chief executive of the Jewish Community Centre for London, said that Ferry's remarks were 'ill-conceived' and [that] 'Riefenstahl was responsible for sending people to their deaths [...]' "

  • Times: Radio Choice — Book of the Week, Radio 4, 9.45am/12.30am

    Quote: "The film director Leni Riefenstahl died in 2003 at the age of 101 — further proof, many would argue, that the good die young. [...] All this week Kenneth Branagh reads from Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl by Steven Bach."

April 15, 2007

  • Sunday Times: Ruthless ambition

    Quote: "What the Leni Riefenstahl story inspires is not adulation or anger or contempt, although she aroused plenty of all three, but exasperation at her refusal to acknowledge what she had done. [...] Her work for the Nazis did not mean, of course, that she was a monster. It was just that her talents allowed her to do more harm than most of her compatriots. As Bach succinctly puts it, she used the century's most powerful art form to glorify a murderous dictator. But her worship of Hitler was shared by millions of Germans, otherwise he would have had no power. Her fault was simply that she believed art more important than people [...]"

  • San Francisco Chronicle: Ask Mick LaSalle, Chronicle Movie Critic

    Quote: "Riefenstahl was an opportunist, not a Nazi. In a way, she was like any other filmmaker, kissing up to power, wanting to get her movies made, except for two important details: She was an exceptional artist, and the power she was kissing up to was supremely evil. At the request of the Hitler government, she made one pro-Nazi propaganda film, in 1934. At the time, about 35 percent of the German public supported Hitler, even though it should have been apparent to any intelligent person that he was an anti-Semitic thug, a cutthroat and a megalomaniac. But could anybody in 1934 have really predicted Auschwitz? And even if someone could have, is it reasonable to demand that Riefenstahl should have?"

April 13, 2007

  • Los Angeles Times: Sleeping with 'Hitler's filmmaker' — A biographer says objectivity would have kept him from presenting a clear portrait of Leni Riefenstahl [by Steven Bach]

    Quote: "Riefenstahl portrayed herself as an apolitical artist first and as history's innocent victim second, and she was tireless in reiterating how she had suffered at the hands of enemies who failed to understand her art. But in reality, she didn't suffer. Her reputation was kept alive by images that won — and continue to win — accolades for innovation and aesthetic beauty. She kept working to the end of her life, and it is worth noting that she could never extend to the fuhrer's victims the sympathy she demanded for herself. Loathsome or not, there is something terribly sad about such blindness, or willful self-delusion."

April 12, 2007

  • Jerusalem Post: Hitler's image maker

    Quote: "I have always found it monstrous that the two most self-serving sycophants of the Nazi regime, Albert Speer and Leni Riefenstahl, should have escaped justice."

April 10, 2007

  • Phoenix: Deadly Art — Sorting out the life and career of Leni Riefenstahl

    Quote: "So is there any shocking, new information in these biographies from Stephen Bach and Jürgen Trimborn? Well, there is a great episode, generally unnoted in the Riefenstahl mythology, that in 1938, when Riefenstahl arrived in Hollywood expecting to be lauded as a genius but instead was shunned as a Nazi, one of the few people to be at all supportive of her was Walt Disney. But even this isn't a real surprise [...]"

April 8, 2007

  • Santa Cruz Sentinel: Chris Watson, Bookends: A life of denial and a triumph of will

    Quote: "However, despite Bach's even-handedness, few readers will, by book's end, see Leni other than a monster — a powerful, egocentric, offensive, manipulative woman and a monster."

  • Toledo Blade: Blinded by art and ambition

    Quote: "If you admire Riefenstahl, her talent can be detached from her life, held up, admired. Bach, to his detriment, doesn't dismantle this idea. He dismisses it much too broadly, with a broom, which may be honest but neglects a disturbing question: Can one admire her skill and keep their wits?"

April 7, 2007

  • National Post: Mistress Of Nazi spin

    Quote: "Riefenstahl will no doubt continue to fascinate. Both Madonna and Jodi Foster approached her to produce and star in a film of her life. (Riefenstahl claimed Foster was not good-looking enough. She thought Sharon Stone would be more suitable.) Andy Warhol and Mick Jagger had themselves photographed with her. George Lucas acknowledged the technical debt Star Wars owes to Triumph of the Will."

April 5, 2007

April 1, 2007

  • Scotsman.com: Her camera always lied

    Quote: "Leni Riefenstahl liked to say that her art and life were devoted to the pursuit of beauty. But her career, as Hitler's favourite filmmaker, stands as an enduring rebuke to Keats' assertion that 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' and that is 'all ye need to know.' "

March, 2007

March 29, 2007

March 28, 2007

  • Hollywood Wiretap: [Mia] Farrow compares [Steven] Spielberg to Riefenstahl, says he "Should be put on notice" for support of Beijing Olympics

    Quote: "The Farrows then equated the director to a modern-day version of Nazi propaganda filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, known for her 1936 Berlin games film Olympia. 'Does Mr. Spielberg really want to go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games?' "

  • LA Weekly: Leni Riefenstahl: Pretty as a Swastika

    Quote: "It is not quite how we are accustomed to seeing Leni Riefenstahl, one of Hitler's closest intimates and the director of that imperishably infamous docu-hagiography, Triumph of the Will. A photograph from Steven Bach's majestic new biography of the morally besmirched filmmaker known to 1930s anti-fascist wags as 'Hitler's Honey' shows her not in Nazi finery but in a cowgirl outfit with an uncharacteristically chastened look on her face. It is 1938. She is in Hollywood. And no one wants anything to do with her."

March 26, 2007

  • CounterPunch: The One Who Attacks — God Does Not Love the Aggressor

    Quote: "Leni Riefenstahl in the opening of her film Triumph of the Will says Germany was brought low, humiliated, wounded in World War I.. She limns the rise of Hitler and Naziism as resurrection from that humiliation and suffering. Revenge rationalizes the will to fight as righteous. Riefenstahl depicts Hitler as a messiah, descending from the clouds to rouse and lead the people in a righteous fight to rebuild German honor and power. The uniformed men marching in 1934 with shovels (because they weren't allowed arms) look to most people like soldiers with rifles. Metaphorically they were, forging plowshares into arms. German belt buckles in World War I and World War II said 'Gott mit uns' — God with us."

March 25, 2007

  • New York Times: First Chapter — 'Leni Riefenstahl' by Jürgen Trimborn

    Note: Excerpt of the first chapter from Trimborn's book.

  • New York Times: Reich Star

    Quote: "A brazen shout from long trumpets held high at the angle of a Hitler salute. Cut to medium close-up of young Aryan faces with puffed cheeks. Dolly back as two new biographies of Leni Riefenstahl appear virtually at once. J¨rgen Trimborn's book, well translated from the German by Edna McCown, has the better pictures. Steven Bach's book, backed up by his deep personal experience as a high-echelon film executive handling dingbat directors, has the better text."

  • San Francisco Chronicle: Focused on the Fuhrer — Riefenstahl Made Hitler's Films; New Biographies Ask: Did She Share His Beliefs?

    Quote: "Trimborn is the more agitated by Riefenstahl's unapologetic stance, and he works himself into a (completely understandable) tizzy over her bullishness, while Bach assumes that the facts will more than speak for themselves."

March 24, 2007

  • GreenCine Daily: Weekend shorts

    Quote: "The bulk of [Clive James' New York Times Book Review] is devoted to retelling the story his way, exposing Riefenstahl's lies at every turn, admonishing her 'cinéaste admirers' (quite sternly in his final paragraph, too) and cutting her a little slack just once: 'Susan Sontag later made a serious mistake in arguing that Olympia was entirely steeped in fascist worship of the beautiful body. But it's nature that worships the beautiful body. Fascism is natural. That's what's wrong with it: it's nothing else.... [E]verything she did in Berlin in 1936 was topped by what Kon Ichikawa did in Tokyo in 1964. Nevertheless, Leni, with her raw material handed to her on a plate, and unhampered by those requirements of invented narrative that she could never manage, had made quite a movie for its time.' "

March 23, 2007

  • Bloomberg.com: Leni Riefenstahl, Nazi Muse, Recalled in New Bach Biography

    Quote: "Hoelterhoff: 'What made you realize you wanted to write about Riefenstahl?' ¶ Bach: 'It was my growing frustration with reading her apologists, who seemed to believe that her extraordinary technique could be divorced from the content. You cannot divorce content from technique in any of the arts, and to do so in her case was not only ludicrous but immoral.' "

March 22, 2007

  • PrideSource: Parting Glances: Take me to your lederhosen

    Quote: "Judging from scenes in director/cinematographer — and Nazi darling — Leni Riefenstahl's 1934 groundbreaking propaganda documentary, Triumph of the Will, the Hitler Youth taking part in that year's Nuremberg Rally were a gung-ho lot in their unblinking devotion to leader Adolf Hitler. ¶ Leni's cameras smugly capture the faces of these singing, saluting, blond, blue-eyed Aryan warrior clones, most of whom will die for Hitler's mad dream of world conquest. (They are in stark contrast to flabby party goose-steppers Hess, Goring, Himmler, Bormann — who look about as much a member of the Master Race as does, say, our own Ann Coulter, Ms Anemia Nosferatu.)"

March 21, 2007

  • Daily Star: Of bigotry, severed heads and writers' rights

    Quote: "History is, of course, replete with instances of individuals and groups and governments persuading themselves that they ought to be arbiters of the moral parameters which underpin, or should underpin, life. There is the story of Leni Riefenstahl, the German film-maker and admirer of Hitler (until the Third Reich collapsed in a heap), for whom life after 1945 was essentially a tale of unbridled vilification. ¶ There has been nothing to suggest that she collaborated with the Fuhrer in the latter's nefarious attempts to reshape German society according to Aryan specifications. Not a shred of evidence has been found to implicate Riefenstahl in any of the crimes the Nazis committed in their twelve-year dominance of their country. But the film-maker continues to be reviled."

March 19, 2007

  • New Yorker: Where There's a Will — The rise of Leni Riefenstahl

    Quote: "Riefenstahl's 'genius' has rarely been questioned, even by critics who despise the service to which she lent it. (Bach's cool resistance to the 'often slavish lenience' of her rehabilitators is an exception.) Yet one has finally to ask if a creative product counts as a work of art, much less a great one, if it excludes the overwhelming fact of human weakness."

March 16, 2007

  • Rocky Mountain News: Hitler's image-maker — 'Leni' author digs into compromises ambitious propagandist made for 'art'

    Quote: "Lest you think from those words that Bach is a Riefenstahl defender, let me assure you that he's a dedicated member of the opposite camp. This book is a short, sharp, hard jab at the Leni Legend. Bach intends it, I think, as a knockout. It is, in its way, an indictment: 300-plus pages of detailed facts and references showing that, contrary to almost six decades of denial from her, Riefenstahl's involvement with and complicity in the Nazi regime was eager, willing and knowing."

March 11, 2007

  • Los Angeles Times: 'Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl' by Steven Bach

    Quote: "Leni Riefenstahl was a slut. Steven Bach is too graceful a writer and too nuanced a psychologist to summarize this life so bluntly, but, for the reader of his brilliant biography of the Nazi filmmaker, that conclusion is inescapable."

March 7, 2007

  • New York Sun: Leni Riefenstahl on Trial

    Quote: "Biographers are perhaps better situated than film critics to fathom the Riefenstahl paradox. New biographies by Jürgen Trimborn [...] and Steven Bach [...] dismantle Riefenstahl's myth that she was an artist innocent of political motivations"

  • Orlando Sentinel: Jodie as Leni, and if not her, who?

    Quote: "Reading Steven Bach's marvelously readable and utterly damning new Leni Riefenstahl biography, Leni: The Life and Works of Leni Riefenstahl, I was overwhelmed with the depressing feeling that we may never get to see Jodie Foster play this role of a lifetime."

March 4, 2007

  • Washington Times: Biography's story, a right hand man

    Quote: "Who would imagine Nigel Hamilton's compact, erudite book about the history and practice of biography — called Biography: A Brief History (Harvard, $21.95, 327 pages) — could be so wide-ranging and provocative? [...] Mr. Hamilton moves on to discuss the rise of film, particularly Leni Riefenstahl's hagiography of Hitler as well as Orson Welles' Citizen Kane [...]"

  • Washington Post: Triumph of the Shill — Hitler's favorite filmmaker, and the lies she told

    Quote: "Leni Riefenstahl was a liar. She was many other things: a dancer, an athlete, an actress, a feminist, an explorer, a bestselling author and even the world's oldest licensed scuba diver. But she was also Adolf Hitler's favorite filmmaker. Hence the lies."

  • Washington Post: Outrunning Hitler — How Jesse Owens disproved the Nazis' racial theories before their very eyes

    Quote: "Owens never met Hitler, but his victories were recorded by the Fuhrer's favorite filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, in her remarkable documentary about the games, Olympia. (While cajoling Nazi leaders, Riefenstahl carried on an affair with the American athlete Glenn Morris, who later played Tarzan in the movies. After winning the gold medal in the decathlon, Morris ripped open Riefenstahl's blouse and kissed her breasts in full view of 100,000 spectators.)"

March 3, 2007

  • Courier-Journal: Führer's filmmaker — Two books explore Riefenstahl's career

    Quote: "To Bach, she is 'Leni,' and like many American biographies, his traces the discrepancies between public image and private reality. To Trimborn, she is 'Riefenstahl,' deeply flawed, controversial, but 'she is also one of the most important film artists of the 20th Century.' "

  • Los Angeles Times: 'Ingrid' by Charlotte Chandler

    Quote: "[Charlotte] Chandler's tenacity drove her to seek out a nearly 100-year-old Leni Riefenstahl, who assured her that the reason Joseph Goebbels did not make a pass at Bergman when she made a film in Germany in 1938 was that she was too tall for him."

March 1, 2007

  • Globe & Mail: A postwar story that thrills a younger generation

    Quote: "In February last year, the always-compelling [Kate] Hennig starred in Mieko Ouchi's The Blue Light, a deconstruction of Leni Riefenstahl, German director and purveyor of 'fascist aesthetics' in film. She did an astonishing job of humanizing an unsympathetic woman while simultaneously capturing her powerful intellect and dogmatic belief in art."

February, 2007

February 25, 2007

  • Detroit News: 'Triumph' captures Jesse Owens' true Olympic spirit

    Quote: "Jeremy Schaap's wondrous, meticulously researched, incisive new biography of Jesse Owens [... ] Triumph concentrates on Owens' victories at the Berlin Olympics of 1936, with quotes from the prominent American sports and news journalists of the era. There was no television then to capture the greatness of Owens. But there were motion pictures, and Triumph also focuses the trials of German film mistress Leni Riefenstahl and her shooting of her grand documentary Olympiad."

  • Ottawa Citizen: Through a lens darkly

    Quote: "Controversial filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl who helped idealize the cause of one of the world's most violent and racist regimes as a patron of Adolf Hitler, insisted she was so focused on reinventing cinema she didn't recognize the goals of the Third Reich — until too late."

February 24, 2007

  • Globe & Mail: Triumph of the shill

    Quote: "Was Leni Riefenstahl the artistic equivalent to the concentration camp commander who read Goethe and listened to Bach while the ovens never ceased their pitiless work? Or was she a brilliant cinematic innovator who found new forms to express her vision while battling with her philistine producers, who just happened to be Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party? Was she a whorish opportunist, or the first truly great female film director?"

February 20, 2007

  • Vision: Dictators' Downfall

    Quote: "[Historian Ian Kershaw] notes that while Hitler had been the center of the rally in previous years, 'now he towered over his Movement, which had come to pay him homage.' Leni Riefenstahl's infamous cult film of the occasion, Triumph of the Will (commissioned and titled by Hitler), was soon playing throughout Germany. The opening scenes show the Führer's plane descending through the clouds, casting a cross-shaped shadow on the marching troops in the streets below. Historian David Diephouse draws attention to this blatant 'second-coming' imagery and the film's pervasive 'tone of insistent messianism.' At the conclusion of the film, deputy Führer Rudolf Hess is seen emphasizing the mystical unity of leader, party and people with the words, 'The party is Hitler, but Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler. Hitler! Sieg Heil!' "

February 16, 2007

  • Aspen Times: Before there was ski porn... — Old-school ski films to screen at Sky Bar

    Quote: "Scottish-born contemporary painter Peter Doig stood in the lobby of Aspen's Sky Hotel on Tuesday, excitedly describing the three ski films he has chosen to show on Friday. They're a far cry from today's ski pornography, he explained. Instead, they highlight interesting stories, unusual camera angles and critical historical moments for ski movies. [...] The three films Doig picked out mark major moments in the history of skiing films. Doig explained that the 1931 film, Der Weisse Rausch, roughly translated as 'The White Ecstasy,' is one of the first mountain films. ¶ 'It's just a race, kind of a mad race down the mountain,' Doig said, noting that the heroine of the film, Leni Riefenstahl, learned how to ski in order to be in one of director Arnold Fanck's movies. By the time the movie was released in the U.S. in 1938, Riefenstahl was the 'official' filmmaker of the Third Reich."

February 12, 2007

  • FilmJerk: The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl

    Quote: "[...] there is so much in Ray Müller's The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (biography, film history, history, politics) and the film is so straightforward in is intentions, that I doubt any fan of the documentary could see this film and watch the end credits without at least some form of satisfaction, entertainment, or education. Plus, who knows, you may even be compelled enough to track down one of Riefenstahl's own films. And, surely, that's not a bad thing."

February 11, 2007

February 8, 2007

  • Boston Globe: For World/Inferno, anarchy in the US

    Quote: "The band is made up of anti-authority lefties who adore Triumph of the Will director Leni Riefenstahl and whose performances often sport fascist undertones."

February 2, 2007

  • Deseret News: 2 biographies of 'Hitler's filmmaker' expose expert manipulator

    Quote: "Steven Bach writes that Riefenstahl's lifelong manipulations 'served the construction of a romantic image of instant stardom and spontaneous self-generation that she would refine and advance until she died in 2003 at the age of 101.' ¶ Jurgen Trimborn, whose book was originally published in German in 2002 before Leni died, writes, 'Until the end of her life she never showed any willingness to honestly confront her past.' ¶ Both books center on refuting Riefenstahl's denials concerning her involvement with Adolf Hitler and National Socialism. Both can be strongly recommended as compact yet highly informative studies of an extraordinarily long and event-filled life."

January, 2007

January 31, 2007

  • Calgary Sun: All the Rite moves

    Quote: "Mieko Ouchi's The Blue Light, which tells the life story of Leni Riefenstahl, a German filmmaker who directed some of the most technically innovative films of her time, is making waves across the country. ¶ It's already had productions in Edmonton and Vancouver and there are plans for a run in Toronto later this year. There is also an intention for it to be developed into an opera down the road."

January 28, 2007

  • Newsday: Two sets of eyes at ICP — Camera work of mentor and protege get shown off side by side in pair of exhibits

    Quote: "Journalism and poetry may seem like mutually exclusive pursuits, but they can overlap in the frame of a photograph. Martin Munkácsi, a photojournalist of the 1930s and '40s, churned out lyrical, vibrant pictures before wandering into premature obscurity. [...] Munkácsi was a shameless lover of the feminine, of sunlit hair and casual athletic grace. A radiant Leni Riefenstahl pauses while skiing, her face shellacked in sweat, her gaze on a distant peak, one ski pole leaning on her shoulder. She is the embodiment of youthful brio. "

  • Washington Post: On DVD, American Propaganda's High-Water Mark

    Quote: "At the 1938 Venice Film Festival, Pare Lorentz's The River won best documentary for his New Deal film about the flooding and 'taming' of the Mississippi River, beating Leni Riefenstahl's far more ambitious Olympia, a visual symphony shot at Hitler's 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Riefenstahl's celebration of athletic competition had strong Nazi undertones, but it was Lorentz's Mississippi film that was the more forthright exercise in propaganda."

January 19, 2007

  • Jewish Daily Forward: Jesse Owens, Man and Myth at the 1936 Olympics

    Quote: "The second part of [Jeremy Schaap's Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics] details the games themselves and the Nazis' efforts to use the Olympics as propaganda. Schaap focuses on Nazi filmmaker and propagandist Leni Riefenstahl's efforts to film the games, weaving together her famous — and infamous — effort to document the Olympics on celluloid with Owens's performance at the games."

  • Deutsche Welle: Sneak Peek: New German Books Hit the English Market

    Quote: "Jürgen Trimborn's biography recounts the life of Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003), a German film director most widely know for creating propaganda films for the Nazi party. Despite her association with Hitler and the Nazis, Riefenstahl earned respect in the film industry for her aesthetic developments."

  • Deutsche Welle: Hitler's Rant About a Leasing Contract a Hit on YouTube

    Quote: "Forget about the new film Mein Führer. The most successful Hitler parody on film is a short in which Adolf moans about a dishonest car salesman. It's attracted more than half a million hits on YouTube. ¶ The two-and-a-half-minute short was made by film student Florian Wittmann from the northern German city of Bremen. It marries footage of Hitler delivering a speech from Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will with the sound of a routine by German cabaret performer Gerhard Polt."
    Supplemental Link: Hitler Leasing! video on YouTube

  • AllAfrica: Africa: Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics

    Quote: "In Cameroon, a monumental 'statue of liberty' is made from scrap metal. In Congo, a thriving popular music incorporates piercing screams and carnal dances. When these and other instantiations of the aesthetics of Africa and its diasporas are taken into account, how are ideas of beauty reconfigured? Scholars and artists take up that question in this invigorating, lavishly illustrated collection, which includes more than one hundred color images. [...] Highlighting how ideas of beauty are manifest and how they mutate, travel, and combine across time and distance, continental and diasporic writers examine the work of a Senegalese sculptor inspired by Leni Riefenstahl's photographs of Nuba warriors [...]"

January 14, 2007

  • Broadway World: THE DANISH PLAY returns on February 22

    Quote: "Making her long-awaited return to the Dora Nominated role of Agnete Ottosen, Kate Hennig most recently played Leni Riefenstahl in The Blue Light and was nominated for Best Actress for a Betty Mitchell Award."

January 12, 2007

  • HeraldNet: Silent series shows classics from Germany

    Quote: "The White Hell of Pitz Palu, Jan. 22. A newlywed is trapped and lost on a mountain ledge on her honeymoon. ¶ The film follows the husband as he wanders the mountains for years until he encounters another couple who are willing to climb Pitz Palu again with him to help find his lost love. As they battle the elements, disaster strikes again. ¶ This film co-stars Leni Riefenstahl, who went on to make the infamous Nazi documentary Triumph of the Will."

  • Vancouver Sun: A portrait of the artist seduced by evil

    Quote: "Mieko Ouchi's fascinating play posits that Riefenstahl was too similar to her horrible overlords to see their filthy flaws. Egocentric and arrogant, she milked the fame received from her first film, The Blue Light, to land the role that ruined her, as the good German woman who recorded her country's march to war."

January 11, 2007

  • Worcester Telegram & Gazette: Putting tyrants on camera

    Quote: "The world's dictators who came of age in the film era certainly knew how to use the medium to their benefit. Adolph Hitler commissioned Leni Riefenstahl to produce propaganda pieces glorifying the emerging Aryan nation, which she dutifully executed with stunning effectiveness. Her greatest achievement was Triumph of the Will, a deft piece of filmmaking — some scholars have proclaimed it technically flawless — that remains an enduring oxymoron: a beautifully wrought ode to pure malevolence, a 'masterpiece' about the master race. "

  • University at Buffalo Reporter: Audiences set lineup for spring Buffalo Film Seminars

    Quote: "Jan 30: Triumph of the Will/Triumph des Willens, 1935, directed by Leni Riefenstahl. A visually brilliant and controversial documentary that uses the metaphor of athletic performance to celebrate the Third Reich."

January 9, 2007

  • USA Today: Sports movies have author's interest

    Quote: "Five years and 800 movies later [Randy Williams] has produced Sports Cinema: 100 Movies, The Best of Hollywood's Athletic Heroes, Losers, Myths and Misfits (Amadeus Press, $24.95, 429 pages). [...] Many of his movies exist on most top lists but he also has some unorthodox entries such as Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia (No. 6); Champion (No. 11) with Kirk Douglas; Tokyo Olympiad (No. 13); Night and the City (No. 25) and the Marx Brothers' A Day at the Races (No. 34)."

January 5, 2007

  • 24 Hours Vancouver: Leni: Under a blue light

    Quote: "[Mieko] Ouchi's underlying theme is that choices do not exist in a vacuum. 'In my heart, I'm a person who likes to shine lights on things, even when they're ugly or uncomfortable, and her [Riefenstahl] story merits exploration,' she says."

January 4, 2007

  • Vancouver Sun: The Blue Light focuses on filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl

    Quote: "[Mieko] Ouchi's play has drawn praise in previous productions across Canada. Now it's coming to the Firehall Arts Centre, with no less a talent than Gabrielle Rose in the lead role. As with its other incarnations, The Blue Light is going to stir up a great deal of debate about the obligations that artists do or do not have toward their communities."

  • Canada.com: Play looks through Riefenstahl's lens

    Quote: "In her second play, The Blue Light — named after Riefenstahl's 1932 directorial debut — Edmonton playwright Mieko Ouchi mixes fact and fiction to present an insight into the character of the woman who was the subject of Ray Muller's aptly titled 1994 flick, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl."

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