The Olympics

I've seen Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl's documentary about the 1936 Berlin Olympics.  She also made Triumph of the Will, about the 1934 Nazi rally in Nuremberg, which is the most sentimental thing you've ever seen!  (I always say that sentimentality and cruelty go together.)

Leni Riefenstahl's a very controversial figure. (She lived to be 100, unlike some...) Many Germans did as much as she did to enable the Nazi order, but they did it on the quiet and escaped the sort of postwar criticism for which she became a lightning rod.  When she later published a photo album showing African tribesmen, Susan Sontag read a Nazi-style white supremacist aesthetic into it, which sounds like an unfair prejudgement to me.

Some years back, the Academy decided to award a lifetime-achievement Oscar to director Elia Kazan.  This caused controversy because in the time of McCarthyism Kazan had "named names" before the House Un-American Activities Committee and destroyed other people's careers to protect his own.  The Academy people said the award was about art, not politics. "If that's the case," I would have asked them, "when will Leni Riefenstahl get her Oscar?" The answer is, there's politics and then there's Politics!

Leni Riefenstahl certainly had great cinematic talent.  There's this one shot in Olympia of these statuesque women throwing the discus together, which they later showed in the World War II documentary series The World at War as an example of the nationalist imagery the Nazis were promoting.  She was surely a big influence on TV commercial directors and photographers like Helmut Newton.

I also remember this scene of an equestrian event where a long succesion of horsemen (no women were admitted yet) had to get through this water trap. Editing is everything:  you can show a rider going down at such a place and then getting up again, and he'll look competent enough.  But Leni Riefenstahl edited it so that one rider after another was only shown at his most awkward moment!  The effect was like a statement about the futility of life...

Watching Olympia is a pretty sad experience, really.  I couldn't help reflecting that just a few years later many of these athletes would be contending over something a lot more important than Olympic medals! (Athletes tend to make good soldiers...) The thing about war is that one side being in the right requires the other side to be in the wrong, raising ethical questions for the soldiers on that side.  If only both sides could be right!