SECTION FOUR
sm
COLUMN
NINETY-EIGHT,
OCTOBER 1, 2003
(Copyright © 2003 The Blacklisted Journalist)
ON
THE PASSING OF LENI RIEFENSTAHL
[Reg Hart is
a well-known film archivist who regularly lectures at his showings from his
collection of film classics at his Cineforum at 463 Bathurst in Toronto.]
I once saw
years ago at a film society screening TIEFLAND, the film Leni
Riefenstahl made after TRIUMPH OF THE WILL and OLYMPIA.
In TIEFLAND she
played a dancer who is rescued by an aristocrat from a brute who
is forcing her to be a whore.
She is grateful
but then she finds out the man who rescued her is a bigger monster than the man
she was rescued from.
There is a
moment in the film where she exhibits that pure terror that causes the bladder
to break and the bowels to burst.
We can't fake
that. We have to have experienced it.
In her art she
had answered those with eyes to see and ears to hear. For those who are
willfully blind and deaf (as was the audience at this film society screening who
hissed and booed when the film was done) no answer except silence is required.
For that audience she was silent and she remained silent until her death.
In that film
she also spoke for the German people who were rescued from the horror into which
they were plunged by the Treaty of Versailles by a man they took to be a Messiah
who turned out to be an Anti-Christ.
Writers are
fond of telling us Hitler snubbed Black American athlete Jesse Owens at the
Berlin Olympics. Actually, Hitler had been told by the Olympic Committee not to
greet any of the athletes after he did so the first day.
There is a
sanctimoniousness in the writing about Hitler, the German people and the effect
of the Nazis that turns a blind eye to the fact that we, ourselves, are not
without shame.
Owens returned
a hero to an America that did not want him.
He was never
welcomed to the White House. He was never hailed. It was not until the Civil
Rights Movement of the Sixties began that America was forced to have a change of
heart about a people deeply bruised.
We cry about
the persecution of the Jews but mention that Hitler took his plans for the
extermination of the Jews from the plans of The United States and Canada to
exterminate the peoples native to this continent, and---well, people refuse to
believe that. "That's different," we are told.
No, it is not
different.
Until
Riefenstahl made TRIUMPH OF THE WILL serious people thought Hitler a joke.
After she made
it they realized the joke was on them.
TRIUMPH OF THE
WILL is a Nazi propaganda masterpiece filmed by Riefenstahl at Adolf Hitler's
1934 Nuremberg rally. I have been publicly screening this film since 1972. I
have gone through many copies of it.
I have met many
men and women whose lives were altered forever by those times.
One woman came
to see the film eighteen Sundays in a row. I could someone coming to see it
Why
did this woman
come to see the film
eighteen Sundays in a row?
two or three,
even four or five. But I wondered why she was coming so often. "Perhaps she
is a Nazi," I said to myself.
Finally I asked
her.
"I am in
it," she told me.
I found out
that the first time she came it was because she had been a child in Nuremberg
when all this took place.
In one moment
of the film she saw her family (father, mother, brothers, sisters) leaning out
of a window in a building as a camera panned across it.
They were
waving Nazi flags.
They were Jews.
Except for her
they all had ended up dying in the German extermination camps.
She had no
pictures of them. She was coming for the few seconds she could see what had been
ripped from her.
It never
occurred to me to offer to have the scene made into a photograph until the next
day. I never even asked which scene it was. I was going to offer to do that when
I next saw her but she never came back.
"So long
as men want God on earth there will always be a Hitler," another woman who
had passed through those times said.
If Hitler was
only an anomaly then this would not matter.
He was not.
If what ended
with the Nazis truly ended Nazism, there would be no reason to show this film.
It did not.
One very
important writer/thinker who was for years a regular at these presentations
(until age made it impossible for her to get out) is Jane Jacobs.
Mrs. Jacobs is
best known for her first book, THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE GREAT AMERICAN CITIES.
The ideas in that book were not welcome in their day but now we see she was
right.
"The most
interesting thing about your presentations is what you have to say," she
told me this year.
This summer
Mrs. Jacobs spoke up publicly against what is happening in this town (and, by
extension, what is happening around this planet). "This whole project seems
to be based on cronyism, greed and denial," she said of the latest scheme
to fill pockets from the public treasury.
That got the
knell man going.
This woman
whose ideas burn like a light was subjected to jeers, catcalls and the kind of
boorishness the mediocre always resort to when shown they hold an empty hand.
As Don Wanagas
observed in THE NATIONAL POST (June 13, 2004), "This woman defined progress
in this city when it used to count for something."
"You are
reducing Toronto to a miserable shadow of what it used to be," warned Mrs.
Jacobs.
As the abuse
rained down on her Mrs. Jacobs said to the deputy mayor, "I don't know why
you keep warning these people and never do what you say you're going to do...I
didn't boo the port authority when it was speaking...I didn't boo you when you
were speaking. But I get booed and that seems to be OK with you. It's not OK
with me."
"Times
up," said the deputy mayor.
Not, "You
are right as every speaker deserves more respect than you are getting
here," but just those words the murderers always use; "You have had
your say; time's up."
When a reporter
asked one of the hecklers why he didn't add his name to the list of deputants
the knell man sounded the bell. "I don't have to. This is a done deal.
These people better start getting that through their heads." (NATIONAL
POST, June 13, 2003).
What Leni
Riefenstahl does in TRIUMPH OF THE WILL is document how skillful politicians get
away with murder.
Adolf Hitler
knew that power based on guns would not endure. He knew that to brave the
centuries he had to invade and conquer the soul.
In 1937 the
German church disavowed Christianity as a weak religion. "Adolf Hitler is
the true Holy Ghost. Adolf Hitler is God on earth," the German Church
declared.
"Seeing
this film, with Reg Hartt's commentary, is like getting an inoculation against
mass media manipulation." Mrs. Jacobs wrote.
As I read the
same tired phrases once again in all the press regarding this astounding human
being I see a world in more need now of that inoculation than it ever was.
Everyone who
lives dies. Not everyone who dies has lived.
Leni
Riefenstahl was a person who lived until the last breath left her body. ##
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