LeNiews

Leni Riefenstahl in the News

Archive for 2008

(Last update: 2007-02-14)

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• News for January, 2008

February, 2008

February 13, 2008

• Times : How stars turned the spotlight on Darfur

  Quote: "Spielberg has been pressing Beijing to use its influence with Khartoum for more than a year, since the doughty Farrow challenged him as to whether he wanted to be known as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Games. Riefenstahl, the renowned German actress, dancer and filmmaker, put her talents into the service of Hitler's propaganda machine to film the Berlin Olympics of 1936."

  Note: What is fascinating — and certainly noteworthy — about all of the press about Mia Farrow's editorial (last year) in the New York Times, where she vehemently asserted "Does Mr Spielberg really want to go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games?", and further asked whether he was "...aware that China is bankrolling Darfur's genocide?" — and now here we have an article applauding so many celebrities who have been making efforts to bring greater awareness around the world to the people of the Sudan (and their current plight). Interestingly, Ms Farrow neglected to point out in her comparison — just as this article now does — the much, much earlier contributions of Leni Riefenstahl to enlighten the world about those very same peoples! Selective memory, indeed.

• SFist: Disneyland In Germany On Howard Street

  Quote: "It's debatable whether Walt Disney ever really did meet with Adolf Hilter in 1935 — but what if they did? What if he met with Leni Riefenstahl and Joseph Goebbels and they talked about making fascist cartoons? ¶ Come check out this theatrical what-if exploration in the play Disney and Deutschland [...]"

  Note: The above article refers to "some intense discussions" which include numerous comments regarding Disney's meeting with Leni Riefenstahl.

February 12, 2008

• Hollywood Today: Hollywood Hero Spielberg Quits Beijing Olympics over Genocide

  Quote: "Activist actress Mia Farrow had asked filmmaker Steve Spielberg if he wanted to go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, because of his role as an artistic advisor for the opening and closing ceremonies. Spielberg gave his final answer today when he said he would never sign the contract sent to him by the Chinese nearly a year ago, ending his participation."

February 10, 2008

• Times: Festival in the Nuba

  Quote: "Adolf Hitler's filmmaking sidekick and fellow Nazi Leni Riefenstahl turned her attention from propagating perfect blue-eyed Germans to seeking strong-bodied Nuba wrestlers. Her sojourns in southern Sudan resulted in a visual document, Die Nuba, and of course showed the naked African in all his seemingly primitive glory from the Eurocentric lens."

• Sunday Times: Alexander Rodchenko at the Hayward Gallery

  Quote: "It's clear, for instance, that Leni Riefenstahl's sporting masterpiece Olympia, made for the Nazis in 1938, owes most of its best cinematic inventions to Rodchenko's Soviet sporting photography."

• Guardian Unlimited: Hollywood, without the songs

  Quote: "Even more troublingly, Rodchenko's Red Army soldiers merge with the ranks of helmeted Wehrmacht conscripts in Leni Riefenstahl's film of the Nazi rallies at Nuremberg. At the Dynamo Water Stadium, Rodchenko twisted the camera so that divers leaping from the board appeared to be soaring upwards rather than plummeting down. Riefenstahl employed the same trick in her film of the Berlin Olympics."

February 7, 2008

• Times: Alexander Rodchenko at the Hayward Gallery

  Quote: "The new exhibition, Alexander Rodchenko, Revolution in Photography, covers two decades of his work, showing his versatility and demonstrating his influence on artists such as Leni Riefenstahl and Fernand Fonssagrives. "

• Journal Sentinel: 5. 4. 3. 2. 1. — Exhibit highlights Europe's war fears and innovation

  Quote: "Leni Riefenstahl, the athlete turned controversial filmmaker, represents one version of a new feminine ideal in a photograph by Hungarian Martin Munkácsi. She is, all at once, lithe, athletic, damp with sweat and put together and fashionable in a vaguely flapper-like way."

February 3, 2008

• Movie Reporter: Exclusive Interview: Kenneth Johnson on V: The Second Generation

  Quote: "Johnson: '[...] When the Visitor leader arrives and has the big rally at Candlestick Park, I patterned it off of the Nazi rally in Nuremberg in 1935 which Leni Riefenstahl documented in her brilliant propaganda documentary Triumph of the Will.' "

January, 2008

January 31, 2008

• San Francisco Chronicle: A match with Zidane scores cinematic goal

  Quote: "In its celebration of the human form, Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait walks in the hallowed footsteps of two influential Olympics documentaries — Leni Riefenstahl's controversial chronicle of the 1936 Berlin Games, Olympiad, and Kon Ichikawa's brilliant take on the 1964 Games, Tokyo Olympiad."

  Note: View various trailers for this film.

January 26, 2008

• Guardian Unlimited: Making strange

  Quote: "[Alexander] Rodchenko's photographs are as grown up as it gets. If you are looking for obvious composition, his snaps of mass gymnasts exploit natural pattern. Stanley Spencer, painting first world war troops cooking with their skillets for the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere, talked about his composition as an obbligato of bacon rashers. The proper comparison, however, is not Spencer, but Leni Riefenstahl and her dramatic repeats."

January 23, 2008

• PopMatters: Faded Reflection: Lance Hahn, 1967-2007

  Quote: "Alongside tales of beery loneliness and anti-capitalist fervor, Hahn would go on to write songs about figures ranging from Leni Riefenstahl to Jennifer Jason Leigh."

January 18, 2008

• Star Tribune: What humans want

  Quote: "[Judith Thurman's] psychological insights, loosely Freudian, penetrate her thorny subjects with an exemplary economy, swooping down on them with lightning speed. About Leni Riefenstahl, who created her own legend, she observes that 'narcissism is often a kind of trance that insulates its subjects from feelings of worthlessness.' "

• Arizona Republic: 'Morat' frames debate of art vs. morality

  Quote: "Can great art be made for evil reasons? [...] Can Leni Riefenstahl be a great filmmaker if the films she made glorify Hitler? Can D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation really be one of the most important films ever made if its heroes are the Ku Klux Klan?"

January 16, 2008

• San Francisco Bay Guardian: Bye bye beautiful: Let's Get Lost, again — Bruce Weber's melancholic ode to Chet Baker is restored

  Quote: "[Bruce] Weber's velvety black-and-white cinematography has never met a silhouette it didn't like, and indeed, his documentary is first and foremost a tribute to [Chet] Baker's arch stylishness. Insofar as Josef von Sternberg, Leni Riefenstahl, and Michelangelo Antonioni's idolatrous visions are often said to anticipate modern fashion imagery, Weber must rightly be considered their direct descendent: a fashion photographer turned filmmaker unapologetically devoted to surfaces."

January 15, 2008

• Village Voice: Leni Riefenstahl Inspires Clubbed Thumb's Latest

  Quote: "Among other things, Leni Riefenstahl [...] could be called a queen of denial. How and when does an artist's narcissism — or, at least, the hermetic pursuit of beauty — become accomplice to a murderous regime? ¶ Amazons and Their Men, Jordan Harrison's new play [...] invokes these tantalizing questions but prefers coyness to dark answers."

January 14, 2008

• Sudan Tribune: Proud to be Nuba, stories of a long struggle

  Quote: "Visitors to Southern Kordofan who are familiar with Leni Riefenstahl's two books on the Nuba from the 1970s (The Last of the Nuba and People of Kau), may be struck that in the Nuba Mountains today, everyone is fully clothed; and clothed mostly in typical northern Sudanese Islamic styles."

January 11, 2008

• New York Times: The Will (if Not Triumph) of the Frau

  Quote: "The life of Leni Riefenstahl, the filmmaker who made movies for Hitler, has been examined and critiqued aplenty, but rarely so entertainingly as in Amazons and Their Men, a brash play by Jordan Harrison receiving a lively production by Clubbed Thumb at the Ohio Theater."

• Thought Leader — Yazeed Kamaldien: I think you might like this book...

  Quote: "Riefenstahl was initially inspired by a George Rodger photo of naked Nuba warriors taken in 1949. The image, published in the book, shows a strong-bodied Nuba warrior airlifted on the shoulders of another warrior. ¶ While her Nuba trips were about escaping her Nazi past, it was essentially influenced by the foundations of Nazism; that pursuit of finding the perfect human. Whereas Riefenstahl's films had to depict Hitler's perfect blue-eyed race, her naked Nuba warriors were her catalyst in continually attempting to define the perfect human."

January 9, 2008

• Variety: Amazons and Their Men

  Quote: "How fortunate for playwrights in search of a dominant dead woman to kick around that there will always be Leni Riefenstahl. With her artistic ego, Nazi connections and forceful female personality, the German actress-filmmaker proves irresistible to Jordan Harrison, who makes her a metaphor, in Amazons and Their Men, for theatrical narcissism, Nazi cruelty and female envy of pure gay love. Despite his glib psychosexual politics, scribe makes clever work of Riefenstahl, imagined here as an egomaniacal film director who has cast herself as Penthesilea, the Amazon warrior queen who falls in love with her enemy."

January 7, 2008

• TheaterMania: Amazons and Their Men

  Quote: "Leni Riefenstahl was one of the most accomplished and infamous filmmakers of the 20th Century, best known for her groundbreaking film of the Nazi Nuremberg rally, Triumph of the Will. While in her later life she insisted she made a documentary rather than propaganda, her entire career and legacy has been marked by her association with the Nazi party. Jordan Harrison's intriguing yet flawed Amazons and Their Men, currently being presented by Clubbed Thumb at the Ohio Theater, tells a fictional account of the filmmaker's aborted project Penthesilea, examining her complicity with what was going on around her."

  Note: Additional information about this play (including cast & crew, synopsis, etc.) can also be found on TheaterMania's section on Amazons and Their Men, or on Clubbed Thumb's web page for the play.

• Broadway World: 'Amazons and Their Men' Plays The Ohio Theatre thru Jan.26

  Quote: "The multiple Obie-Award winning theatre company Clubbed Thumb is proud to present Amazons and Their Men by Jordan Harrison, directed by Ken Rus Schmoll at The Ohio Theatre [...]"

January 6, 2008

• All About Jazz: Jazz: The State of the Art — A New York Perspective. Part 1

  Quote: "A much heralded new book has arrived in the last mail drop of 2007. Its title Modernism: The Lure of Heresy From Baudelaire To Beckett And Beyond is a good indication of the scope which writer Peter Gay [...] has undertaken. [...] Painters such as Picasso, Duchamp, Warhol and Lichtenstein, composers such as Stravinsky and Ives, architects such as Gropius and Gehry, writers such as Eliot, Joyce, Kafka and Woolf, choreographers such as Balanchine and Diaghilev, film-makers such as Griffith and Riefenstahl are all prominent names in Gay's book."

January 4, 2008

• Courier-Mail: Ancient lives uncensored

  Quote: "While Hitler's architect Albert Speer tried to build fatally flawed monuments for a 1000-year Reich, filmmaker Lennie [sic] Riefenstahl was busy creating idealised, but modestly covered, Olympian heroes."

January 3, 2008

• Gothamist: Pencil This In

  Quote: "The legendary Amazons, that mythical nation of all-female warriors, provide the template for Clubbed Thumb's elaborate study of German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, notorious for her Nazi propaganda film The Triumph of the Will. Before war interrupted her, Riefenstahl had been working on a film adaptation of Penthesilea, a play about the titular Amazonian queen. In Clubbed Thumb's fictional version, called Amazons and their Men, 'the play takes place on the Frau's sound stage, and we see the scenes of her film as if they're scraps of forgotten film rescued from the cutting room floor: Penthesilea falls dangerously in love with Achilles on the battlefield of the Trojan War. As Amazons progresses, we become increasingly aware that the world outside the Frau's sound stage is 1939 Germany.' "

January 1, 2008

• The Australian: How we wanted to be seen

  Quote: "It's even more unnerving when one considers that [Max] Dupain's father was a champion of eugenics. In her book Body Culture: Max Dupain, Photography and Australian Culture, 1919-1939, Isobel Crombie quotes Dupain pere: 'Whatever you think of Herr Adolf Hitler,' he wrote, 'there is one thing he must be acclaimed for — he has stopped the German race from degenerating physically.' There is no evidence that Max Dupain was a fellow traveller, but like many of his generation and of his modernist ilk, he was impressed by the work of Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's favourite photographer and filmmaker."

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