Hi, Tuesday, September 16, 2003, 4:19:17 PM, you wrote:
> I'll add one more comment. Frankly, I don't care if Reifenstahl was a Nazi or > not -- her film, like all art work can stand alone, independent of the > creator. Her work is so recognisable as being of that time that I don't believe you can separate the 2 and see the work as something isolated, or fail to consider Riefenstahl's position in this. She was perhaps naive when she first became involved. Maybe she thought Nazism was much the same as a great big Busby Berkeley musical, all camera angles and synchronised high-kicking. Somehow I doubt that, and I don't think you can really view them in the same way you'd look at stills from a Busby Berkeley review. > And her propaganda did not significantly increase Hitler's power, the > events she shot he was doing anyway. He was already a master of propaganda without > her. I heard way back when in my film class that the problem was, "she did her > job too well." I tend to agree with that. Thus it makes it hard to see what > her own stand was or might have been independent of what she produced. But like > I said previously, no one else gave us a such a powerful visual record -- an > insight into the times and the thinking -- as close to insider glimpse of a > turbulent and very strange time in history as we are likely to ever have. We'd > be poorer, much poorer, without it. It is certainly a powerful record, and I appreciate it as much as anybody, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking it's an inser's view. If she was an insider then she must take her share of the responsibility for events. She claimed she was not an insider. Her pictures and movies are not in any way fly-on-the-wall stuff; they are all rehearsed and cannot possibly be treated as documentary in any modern sense of the word, so I don't see what glimpse we are getting of this time. Where is the insight in her photographs & films? They are extremely shallow. She saw only the surface of things. Look at what she has influenced: advertisements for Calvin Klein; James Bond films; Annie Leibovitz's celebrity portraits. Flashy, exciting, emotive, but trivial with no depth. She was ahead of her time. > But then I've always tended to think that "art" can stand and be judged > independent of the artist. Good thing, since many famous painters have been real > assholes in real life. In my opinion you can gain more from the art by knowing about the artist's life. Knowing that Picasso was Spanish certainly adds to the power of 'Guernica', for instance. -- Cheers, Bob mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
