dvd report from florida

[Oscar Christie]

Mr. Blunt:

I was delighted to read you write so movingly of Liberty Valence.

With the exception of the Magnificent Ambersons, no movie has affected me as much as it has.

Why do you think Ford's crowning masterpiece, the summation of his career is not better appreciated?

[blunted by community]

i really, really love this film. it's sentimental, and it's strong.

a lot of people complain about the card board sets. i have no problem with them. i think they add to the film. they give it a surreal effect.

the searchers is a story about a search, and the desert as character is a very important part of the narrative. it is not an important part of liberty valance. liberty valance is filmed in some cramped sets, and this really pushes the story forward. the wide open spaces were being encroached upon by civilization. the west was dying. would the film be any better if the stagecoach robbery in the begining would have been filmed in monument valley? or if that town was not an obvious set but a real town in the desert? i don't think so. it's not a part of the story. the backdrop for the film is the cattle ranchers wanting to keep the plains open, and we never see cattle, or partures. it's all about the characters and their story.

ford made this film about the end of the west, at the end of his carreer, and just like the john wayne character in the movie, ford died a forgotten, broken down old man.

for a long while he was considered a classic. towards the end he was considered unfashionable.

[Oscar Christie]

I'd love to see it performed as a staged play.
With actors in their 20's or 30's instead of their 50's.

[Sir Bygber Brown]

On Triumph of the Will - if i remember correctly, that may well have been the first movie i saw that made me appreciate the visual content of movies. Watching Riefenstahl talk about how she'd created certain visual effects on the Muller doco i felt sad that it had to be THIS movie and THIS time she did it on - because there are some stunning images in Triumph of the Will, some really wonderful things. I'm not a fan of D.W Griffith (aside from Broken Blossoms), but i always wonder why people can appreciate Birth of a Nation for its art, despite its ideological content, but fewer people are prepared to give kudos to the art of Triumph of the Will (which does not actually condone racism or the killing of another race during its length, as Birth of a Nation does).

Some of the best things in it: the opening plane through the clouds, its shadow of the city, the camera behind Hitler on the car, the tracking shot around the statue seen through the bars, and the shot where she used a special lens (can't remember what) to capture a million flags all close together.

[Glenn Anders]

True. I suppose if Art does not have power of some kind it is not Art. The question, of course, is what lies beneath the power, what are its moral underpinnings? I am also impressed by those sequences in TRIUMPH OF THE WILL, and no doubt, these sequences and techniques, honed even more in OLYMPIA, impressed Orson Welles (and Gregg Toland). I am sure that the dual decision to cut a hole in the sound stage to photograph the scene between Charlie and Jed in CITIZEN KANE derives from Riefenstahl. The difference is that Welles saw the lure of the power depicted, and saw beyond it, put it in perspective. Riefenstahl, as in much of her work, simply presented the spectacle.

How well American Media has assimulated the above techniques in our TV advertising! From a bewildered American citizen's perspective, it is the answer to the question: "How could a democracy like the U.S. sign on to The Project for a New American Century?!!"

Glenn

[Sir Bygber Brown]

I couldn't agree with you more about Riefenstahl, Glenn. That's exactly right - she didn't understand the significance or the power of what she was doing. She just thought of it as presenting visual beauty, or making everything look as good as possible. Reading her memoir is quite a sad experience. You're just filled with regret at the way things went. She's villified the same way Nazi war criminals are! And she was just a gifted young filmmaker who was given the opportunity to meet one of the century's most powerful, hypnotic men - she knew nothing of the Final Solution or the plans for anti-Jewish legislation (or she chose to believe the man she met in private could not do anything that was wrong).

Completely ignorant of party politics, she proceded to make two of the most dazzling films of all time (Triumph and Olympia) glorifying these creatures and not considering the ramifications of what she's doing.

People will always have theories of her motives and there will always be more accusations and evidence claiming to increase her involvement in the proceedings, but i firmly believe the above, that she spent the last fifty years of her life unjustly tormented and villified. They can say that Triumph is a propaganda film, but they can not say Leni was a Nazi or that she approved of the anti-Jewish movement.

[blunted by community]

i have never been able to watch BIRTH OF A NATION in one sitting.

just like griffith did not understand what he was doing was racist, because after all, it was not just griffith's view, it was the view of the whole country. reifenstahl did not see she was doing anything wrong either, because it was the view of her whole country. If we call griffith a racist, reifenstahl was a nazi.

this whole country was racist. in the late 30s when joe louis fought max schmelling, the majority of americans were rooting for the nazi because louis was black. when we were discussing going to war with germany, joseph kenedy and charles lindberg were outraged, saying our real enemy was not the nazis, it was the blacks. so we fault griffith for being a racists and forgive the rest of the population, or do we say he was reporting the popular view like reifenstahl was?

history channel documentary HITLER'S WOMEN proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that reifenstahl was a nazi. unless history channel faked all those letters she mailed hitler. she didn't personally kill any jews, but she cheered, saluted, and wrote complimentary letters to hitler about his conquests in chekoslavachia (spelling?), poland, and paris. have we forgotten the bloodshed of the occupation of chekoslavachia, and poland?

eisenstein was a commie. reifenstahl was a nazi. griffith was a racist. and today, none of this deminishes the power of their images. they are world class artists and their films will be around for many years to come, but lets not white-wash one and condem the other.

i don't know how many of you know this but till that mini-series THE HALOCAUST, the german population didn't know what the nazis had done in the concentration camps. after the mini-series aired, angry germans took to the streets and defaced the walls of the homes of men they had considered war haroes. they painted swastikas, and wrote jew killer on their walls. the war attrocities were covered up pretty darn well.

[Sir Bygber Brown]

i don't agree that congratulating the leader of your country on a war victory in the abstract meant she understood everything each victory entailed. You said yourself that Nazi war atrocities were covered up so well that most Germans have only just found out about them... She's thinking (naively, of course) about a victory like the French thought about Napoleon's victories, like "hooray, another battle won" without having a clue of the horrors that were going on. I believe in her short stint as a war correspondent she was intentionally steered away from areas where war crimes were to be taking place.

And there is a difference between Riefenstahl and Griffith - Triumph of the Will condones the aspects of Nazi policy which were admirable (public road works, unemployment). Not once is an anti-Jewish sentiment expressed, let alone enacted. So if you say that she expressed popular sentiment in supporting the Nazi party because these policies were what Germans believed the Nazi party were about, then fine. But Birth of a Nation is a totally different case - it actually depicts KKK as heroic figures for killing african-americans. Which was NOT popular sentiment at the time - it was popular sentiment in the racist deep south, but in wider America Birth of a Nation was protested against. It was considered outrageously offensive. This is what Intolerance is about: America not being tolerant of Griffith's view as presented in Birth of a Nation.

These are massive differences between the two cases. Riefenstahl did not consider the idelogical content of her films. You can call her naive for this, because she certainly was. But you can only say she was supporting Nazism if Nazism is entailed in those "pre-Jewish question" issues.

And besides, for someone to "be a nazi" - they need to have a membership card, a uniform, attend rallies (aside from ones they have been asked to make documentaries of), and agree with all tenets of its theories. Leni was not any of these things. What she was, was in the unusual position of being quite familiar with Hitler, which stemmed from his admiring her dance to the sea in The Blue Light and asking to meet her. So she knew him personally, and thus would reply to his letters etc - what was she going to say in the letters? Why did you have that war? Why is a certain policy like that? If you don't know anything about politics, the safest thing is just to seem to be positive and agree with all his moves in your letter. I don't support George Bush's warmongering in any way, yet if he happened to be a friend of mine, since i don't know much about politics, i'd probably say a whole lot of nice things i didn't mean (this is similar to the friend's movie discussion - i agree with you that most people wouldn't do what Welles did).

Of course there will be documentaries which try to paint her as a Nazi, but how difficult is it to present a one-sided view in a one-hour documentary? Didn't "The Battle over Citizen Kane" prove this? They could have talked about the wonderful films Welles made after Kane - of Trial, Falstaff, Immortal Story, Shanghai, Touch of Evil. They particularly could have talked about Ambersons - how Welles did not want the lack of final cut to mean another film was taken away from him again, so he moved all over the world, raising money himself to make movies, only agreeing to accept backers if they gave him final cut - and THIS was the reason he was never the biggest man in Hollywood again. But (whether this is true of not), this theory would not fit in with their central theory (that Hearst and Kane ruined Welles), so they did not even mention any of these other wonderful movies. Truth is subject to how well it fits into what the documentarians want to convince the audience of. The argument they wish to advance. Same can be said of Charles Higham. Selective presentation of evidence.

[blunted by community]

marlene deitrich, fritz lang, and thousands of others saw the handwriting on the wall and left germany. leni knew less than deitrich and lang? hitler and his happy associate's speeches were full of things like, "and if those lying jews are not careful..." hitler's intentions were obvious, and their speeches were broadcast all over germany. nazi party posters depicted a brown-shirt smashing a chair over a jew's head. where was leni while all this was going on? living in fantasy land? you are going to tell me that poor fantasyland leni didn't see the anti-jew nazi propaganda films playing all over germany? leni didn't see any of the films playing in german theaters?

in the history channel documentary, it said while filming, she needed dark skinned people for a scene of gypsies in a film she was making for the nazi party, and she got permission to go to a concentration camp and cast her gypsies from there; men, women, and children. she was in a concetration camp where men, women and CHILDREN were being held prisioner.

the history channel documentary didn't do a one sided presentation, they presented their findings, and i made up my own mind. they did say she was very nice to the children she got from the concentration camp. after the filmming, they were all returned to the concentration camp.

the only thing the german people did not know is about the ovens. all germans were aware of what was being done to the jews because it was broadcast all over germany, on radio, in print, and in films.

i was not aware of leni making other films for the nazis. i only knew about triumph, and olympiad. but when i saw that she went to a concentration camp to cast dark skinned people, i slammed my gavel and labeled her a nazi. she also married a nazi officer she met while making this movie.

birth of a nation was praised as a masterpiece by most of america till some people started complaining then the praise was withdrawn, but it did not stop america from seeing it.


all this info i have in documentaries. get american master's griffith. they are a very reputable entity and really researched the events of birth. they presented their findings with newspaper articles, historians, and eye witness reports. then i made up my own mind.

[blunted by community]

quote:
This is what Intolerance is about: America not being tolerant of Griffith's view as presented in Birth of a Nation.

that is not what the american masters documentary said. it said griffith was a showman, all he cared about was getting people into the theater, his views changed like a revolving door. he had no causes to advance. birth of a nation was a huge success and made him very bankable. the movie raised such a stir that griffith saw a big audience on the other side of the coin, so his next film was to appeal to the other side of the coin. and the reason he got away with the insanity that went on in intolerance, elephants, thousands of extras, 40 foot walls strong enough to to hold up horses and chariots, directing from a balloon, was because he had a great success with birth, and was able to raise the money. had birth been a dispicable movie that was run out of town like a comon pygmy, griffith would not have been able to raise the money for intolerance.

i didn't see any message in intolerance that had to do with people not sharing his views on birth. the message i saw in intolerance was to have tolerance, to have humanity. both films have opposing views which can mean that the director had no views himself, other than making money so he could make more films.

[Sir Bygber Brown]

Not necessarily - Intolerance is a diatribe, a moral essay - just from watching it. The whole time its the least thing from subtle. He's banging his message home the whole way. Its obvious. This is a man with an agenda. That agenda is to condemn those who condemned Birth of a Nation - THESE people are the ones who were intolerant. Griffith just doesn't bring this up in the film and turns it into a generalised, universal diatribe about intolerance (making how indignant he feels about his racism all the more sickening).

I don't have the Masterworks DVD, but from reading the back cover online I can tell its one of those releases which avoids the nasty side of a director or a project in order to let the fans enjoy the work irrespective of the director's intentions. The other reason they wouldn't mention a little thing like making a multi-million dollar production like Intolernace because you were hurt at the reaction to your previous racist diatribe is that a DVD company is a business that wants to sell products, and this may discourage people from buying (though "may" is not a strong enough word).

In this case, we're talking about the director's intentions, which you'll read about on any other piece of information about Intolerance that exists. The first place i can think of is on the trivia page on the IMDB website page for Intolerance, where you'll read this:

"The inspiration for this film came from D.W. Griffith's surprise at the loud protests against his previous film, The Birth of a Nation (1915). In response to those attacks, he wanted to illustrate the problem with intolerance to other people's views."

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0006864/trivia

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the gypsy controversy was indeed a nasty mess which has been the bane of her life till her death. This happened while Leni was making a movie called Tiefland, which was not funded by the Nazi party (though it was, like all films, heavily monitored by them), and nor was it a propaganda film or did it have any Nazi messages. In fact, it had an anti-fascist message, a message about freedom.

"Riefenstahl plays Martha, a Gypsy dancer seduced by an evil nobleman. She has argued that Tiefland was her apology for her involvement with the Nazis, calling it her 'inner emigration' from the regime."

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/interna....00.html

For what its worth,

"The (gypsy) allegations go back as far as 1949, when they were made by a German magazine. A Munich court then declared Riefenstahl innocent."

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/interna....00.html

There are all manner of nasty stories from gypsies you can read first hand in this guardian article, which, on the whole, takes the voice of the gypsies. I don't know what to make of them. Its hard to ignore and deny them, i'll give you that. There's a story of Leni going to a concentration camp with a SS man - jeez, i don't know what to believe, but these people certainly have an axe to grind (who can blame them, for the horrors people they knew and themselves suffered under National Socialism). I can't resolve the gypsy controversy - i don't know enough about it. All I can tell you that she claims to the bitter end that the gypsies were not from a concentration camp, or that she didn't know they were, and that she didn't know what would become of them after the filming.

[Welles Fan]

I'm going to have to side with Blunted on his views of Riefenstahl. I have not seen the History Channel documentary on her (but I saw others in the series).

I read a book a few years ago on Nazi Germany called "Hitler's Willing Executioners". Its basic premise was that Hitler did not force people to kill jews in WWII- they already hated them and jumped at the chance to kill them. Leaving aside that premise, the cover of the book is telling. It is a photo of an anti-jewish rally in the early days of Nazism, around 1932-33. The people in the photo carry anti-jewish signs which read "The Jews Are the Source of our Misfortune", and so forth. The anti-semitism of the Third Reich, and its desire for the extermination of jews was manifest from Mein Kampf onward. I am certain that not all nazis made "the Jewish Question" their main reason for siding with Hitler, but they were at least aware of it. I remember reading that one of the high-ranking nazis (maybe Goering), on first meeting Hitler after one of his speeches said something to the effect of "What a magnificent speech! I didn't agree with all that stuff about the jews, but the rest was spot-on!" IMO, Riefenstahl was at least an "enabler" of Hitler anf the Reich, unless it can be proved she acted under duress. (I also saw a documentary a few years ago called "America During the Holocaust". It showed how anti-semitism in this country was pretty damned bad, too, and how FDR did nothing to help the jews emigrate to America-a la "Voyage of the Damned", so a lot of countries have the blood of millions of jews on their hands).

BTW, I fail to see the fascination of Triumph of the Will. I have always found it rather boring, and I'm a history buff. I liked Olympia, though.

[blunted by community]

lwell, we all have our views, and casting at a concentration camp, if it happened, makes it hard to defend her. but i don't care about that. i like both her films that i've seen, i like griffith's films, and i like eisenstein's films, and can watch them without a trace of repugnancy at their message. leni is dead now anyway, so none of this matters. what matters is anything tangible she left behind - 2 films that i've seen so far that i like.

you are wrong about the griffith documentary. american masters is a distinguished english company that puts out a product worthy of a class room. i have their chaplin, keaton, griffith, and scorsese documentaries, they are all excellent. and none are what you thought the griffith one was from the abstrac you read. it's neither a feel-good, or sensationalist and tawdry offering.

wellesfan:
i felt the same way about triumph the first time i saw it. i found a lot of very bad filmming. but i do like the events that were being filmed. what is good in triumph can be attributed to hitler's choreographer, and lightman. triumph should be called "hitler on tour." the joke around germany was that those that could not hold down a job joined the nazy party and went on tour with hitler. hitler's desk in the reich chencellory was empty. no papers, no records, nothing. it was a prop that he sat behind. funny shit.

also, in one of the documentaries i have, bud schulberg, who went into berlin with the american forces, said he was looking through file cabinets and found records of the films hitler had ordered. THE GREAT DICTATOR had been ordered twice!

[blunted by community]

brown:
i've only been able to watch intolarence in bits and pieces, and i didn't get anything that you saw in it. and neither did the one documentary i've seen on griffith. i'm not saying you are wrong, i justs didn't see what you saw, but that is fine. we all judge based on personal experience, and knowledge. some one from idaho will see something different than some one from new york.

intolerance is certainly a curiosity. and banging the audience over the head with a message like it was a baseball bat happens all the time. watch a spike lee movie.

[Sir Bygber Brown]

Yeah - that's why i've steered clear of Spike Lee so far. That kind of baseball-bat filmmaking makes my skin crawl. Just entertain me, for chris-sakes, and if you want to tell me something, at least make it subtle, so i feel like i have to work it out, and therefore WANT to find the message.

The Big Lebowski is a good example - i enjoyed realising this was an anti-war movie, because i didn't realise the first time i saw it. Now i think its both clever and funny.

And, like you say, we all have our opinions. Sometimes i think its strange how a hundred different people can go in to see a movie and they will all have seen a hundred different movies. A film buff, like us, would take almost everything in, including mise-en-scene, choreography, lighting, music - whereas a beginner may just be looking for the story. And people who are interested in different areas (like visual arts or dance or interior design) may appreciate a movie for completely different reasons. I don't know whether this is a weakness or a wonderfulness about cinema.

p.s - i could only watch the first forty minutes of Intolerance - my skin started crawling. Griffith was more literary than cinematic IMO - his movies have more words than images, and the words tell you what you're about to see anyway. That's the other reason i find him frustrating. I enjoyed Broken Blossoms (aside from sterotyping of japanese), but he could have taken a lesson from Chaplin and had about a tenth that many title cards.