COMMENT
Ideology on screen
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The documentary is a powerful tool for both information and disinformation as shown by the life and times of Leni Riefenstahl, writes AJIT DUARA.
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AFP
Leni Riefenstahl directing "Triumph of the Will".
THE death of Leni Riefenstahl at the venerable age of 101 has evoked a wide range of reactions, not many of them displaying veneration. She was both propagandist and poet laureate of the cinema to the Third Reich. Mesmerised by the charisma of Adolf Hitler, she made two masterpieces of documentary cinema financed by the Nazi party, "Triumph of the Will" (1934) and "Olympia" (1936). The films display an extraordinary eye, sense of movement and understanding of space and time. Though she lived for almost 60 years after the war ended in 1945, she could never make any films again and forever remained in `the shadow of evil', the dark world so eloquently described by her predecessors, the German expressionistic film makers of the 1920s and 1930s.
Can we separate ideology and art? This is the "frage" (question) her passing away has raised. Despite her protestations over the years and her attempts at self-rehabilitation by the publication of two books of underwater still photography — Coral Gardens and Wonders Underwater — there is evidence of ideological collaboration. Riefenstahl managed to explain away her telegram to Hitler congratulating him on the occupation of France, by saying that she sent it because she thought that the war was finally over. But to film makers, the damning evidence is her consent to the removal from the credit titles of an earlier film of hers, "The Blue Light", the names of two Jews — the co screenwriter and the Producer of the film. Her commitment to the Nazi party was clearly stronger than her professional ethics.
"Triumph of the Will", a celebration of the Nuremberg rally, shows Hitler arriving from the clouds (in an aircraft) for a grand show of German ideology and perfection — immaculate "Heil Hitlers", right arms pointing to the sky, military formation and, of course, the "fuehrer", shot from the most innovative angles to highlight the concept of "Deutchland uber alles". Most of us have seen excerpts of Riefenstahl's footage in countless documentary films, but the cumulative experience of "Triumph of the Will" must have been stunning to her German audience of the 1930s. Indeed, one young woman may have created the most destructive myth of the 20th century — the myth of German invincibility.
But cinema has been a weapon of ideology ever since the medium came into being. The father of American cinema, D.W. Griffith, was a Southerner of somewhat atavistic convictions and his "Birth of a Nation" (1915) is the most horrendous piece of racism in which Black Americans are described as lazy, cunning drunks and the real villains of the Civil war. The Ku Klux Klan, on the other hand, is shown with so much empathy, it would make you weep. But in its use of close-ups and incredible tracking shots, the film is way ahead of its time, technically as well as aesthetically.
Later, in the 1950s, the McCarthy era in the U.S. instituted a commission of enquiry into un-American activities (read communist sympathisers) in Hollywood and one of the artistes harassed was Charlie Chaplin. In an irony of the relationship between ideology and the movies, Chaplin's masterpiece "The Great Dictator" (1940) was on Hitler (called Herr Hynkel in the film and played by Charlie himself). He turns Hitler into a buffoon and a bully, but if you examine the film you will find that he is responding to the footage from Leni Riefenstahl's film, by turning the military precision, the salutes and the low angle shots of Hitler in "Triumph of the Will" on its head.
Closer home and closer to our times, 175 leading documentary film makers have recently decided to boycott the Mumbai International film festival of documentary films to be held in the city in 2004 because the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting now insists, for the first time, that a censor certificate is a must for Indian films to be screened at the festival. Clearly, the documentary is a powerful tool for both information and disinformation, and the life and times of Leni Riefenstahl illustrates this eloquently.
As a matter of fact, when the scales of judgment are brought into play, it will be found that Riefenstahl contributed to the development of the medium at the same time as she debased it. The images of athletes in action in Olympia, her documentary on the 1936 Berlin Olympics, are so memorable that advertising film makers and wildlife movie makers have been influenced by her use of multi-camera set ups and positioning of cameras in odd and unlikely places to get stunning angles of fast action, without necessarily using slow motion photography. Most of these filmmakers deal closely with the multinational corporations that finance them. So did Leni Riefenstahl when she worked with the Nazi party and was sponsored by it.
A more recent example of the brilliant use of miles of footage to reconstruct an event is Oliver Stone's "JFK", a film on the assassination of Kennedy. Stone combines footage from the Zapruder film (the man who shot the 8mm home movie of Kennedy's cavalcade on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas, capturing the moment of the killing on film), television footage of the period, newsreel material and recreated film in both black and white and colour, to present an ideological position — that there was a conspiracy in position before Kennedy arrived in Dallas on that fateful day.
In a democracy, we have to defend the right of every film director to have such an ideological opinion. If a filmmaker happens to be dishonest in his or her intentions in the film, this will soon come to light by counter reactions from other media, notably press or television. The problem (conundrum, perhaps) of Leni Riefenstahl is that she worked in a dictatorship and was financed by it. In Germany of that time, there could be no counter reaction to "Triumph of the Will". To all intents and purposes, Germans were presented the film as the absolute truth. Chaplin's hysterical mockery of Hitler in "The Great Dictator" had been banned. Therefore, in an epilogue to Riefenstahl, the case can be made that this outstanding filmmaker was both victim of a reprehensible period of history, as well as its greatest publicist.
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