You can't come away from this film without conflicting emotions. On the one hand, you believe Frau Riefenstahl when she (adamantly) scoffs at any notion that she was involved in the party politics of the Nazis. On the other hand, you see pictures of her laughing and smiling with Hitler, letters she wrote him after his Blitzkrieg successes, and the obvious propaganda nature of her famous film Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will) about Hitler and his Nazi parades. But you cannot ignore her talent. This woman knew how to direct and how to edit. Her description of how she put together one of her earlier films after someone butchered it and what she learned from that process, and her thoughts on how to create an aesthetically pleasing film, show that she was as skilled a film auteur as any you can name today. Her technological innovations for filming her documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympic games alone are astounding -- digging pits for the cameras so that they could film up at the runners, creating a balloon camera that would float above the stadium, placing a camera along the sides of the track that moved at the speed of the race. Several of her innovations are commonplace today. If she had been allowed to continue her career, without the allegations of her instrumental part in Hitler's reign, she would have been among the most famous German directors ever. Of that, I have no doubt. But, of course, there were allegations and her career was destroyed before it started. The genius of this documentary is that it lets you decide on your own whom you want to believe. By the way, the translation of the German "die Macht der Bilder" is "the power of pictures," which seems much more apt a title.
original title: Die Macht der Bilder: Leni Riefenstahl
year: 1993
length: 180 min.
rating: 3.5
IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107472/combined
Sunday, December 28, 2003
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