"Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl's four-hour 1938 documentary-a purported masterpiece on the Berlin Olympic Games-is impossible to get through in its entirety. You can't do it, not without several thumb leans on "Fast-Forward" to skip the dull parts. Her work has that in common with porn. It shares lots of the same characteristics, actually: an obsession with slick, perfect athletic bodies; monotony; repetitive floggings; manipulated states of arousal."
"The way to view Olympia is to sample it after watching the new documentary Riefenstahl, directed by Andres Veiel, a film that is genuinely impossible to turn off or away from. That work, which is now available for American audiences to stream, will be of interest to anyone concerned about the seductive creep of Nazism on a populace, especially given the tenor of modern right-wing movements in Europe and America."
"These questions are important, given Riefenstahl's enduring influence; her work is still taught in cinema classes for her monumental camera shots. The film critic and historian Mark Cousins has called her "the most technically talented Western filmmaker" next to Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock. Her body ideals have also hung around for decades, disguised as harmless expressions of "art" and "sport.""
Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia (1938) presents technically innovative camera work while remaining long, repetitive, and often manipulative. The film emphasizes idealized athletic bodies, repetitive imagery, and staged moments that produce a monotony likened to pornography. Andres Veiel's documentary Riefenstahl offers a compelling, unblinking biography that interrogates Riefenstahl's relationship with Nazism. Veiel concludes that Riefenstahl embraced fascist aesthetics and absorbed elements of Hitler's ideology rather than remaining politically naive. Riefenstahl's visual techniques and body ideals continued to influence film education and cultural standards of beauty for decades after the 1930s.
Read at The Atlantic
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