English Writing
The author of the article reviews the German documentary “The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl”. The reporter describes the way the movie under consideration begins. He claims that it starts with a voice-over narration pointing out that the movie examines Riefenstahl’s career without prejudice. The author of the article indicates that it is not an easy task to scrutinize everything without preconception, as she has a reputation of Hitler’s favorite film director. Having such a name, nevertheless, Riefenstahl directed two highly successful movies, one of which was “Triumph of the Will”; it was commissioned by Hitler, another one “Olympia”, was generously funded by the Third Reich’s treasury. The author acknowledges that the filmmaker herself insists on the fact that her movies never did anything with the political program of National Socialism. She merely shot films looking at the world with a disinterested eye.
The author recounts that in “The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl”, the filmmaker is interrogated by Ray Muller and holds up impressively during the interview. Hence, the author argues that she is a monster anyway, though she represents herself as a tragic figure, an artist obsessively dedicated to aesthetic principles. The filmmaker paid a high price for her impertinent idealism; she has never shot a movie since the end of the war.
The author of the article concedes that Leni Riefenstahl had never heard of Hitler before she met him. According to the reporter, for her, “Triumph of the Will” was just a movie about peace and creating jobs, naturally, she did not consider it to deal with racial ideology. Riefenstahl was disillusioned at the end of the war, as she confronted the evidence of the Holocaust. The author observes that in Primo Levi’s final book “The Drowned and the Saved”, readers see that she seems to apologize for being a Nazi artist, making her beautiful images correspond to her leader’s deceitful words.
The author concludes by insisting that Riefenstahl’s thoroughly considered story has the same worthless and even pernicious beauty as her movies do.
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