Olympia by Leni Riefenstahl
Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003), seen above with Adolf Hitler, was a famous – and infamous – German film director during the Nazi era. Her film Triumph of the Will about Hitler's 1934 rally in Nuremberg is considered the greatest propaganda film ever made.
Hitler, delighted with the film, commissioned Riefenstahl to film the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. The result was a two-part film called Olympia Part 1: Festival of the Nations and Olympia Part 2: Festival of Beauty.
Was Olympia another Nazi propaganda film, or was it a cinematic masterpiece? It has been called both. It documents and glorifies the "Nazi Olympics," and it shows Hitler in the audience. But it documents athletes from many different countries winning, not just Germans. It shows black American athlete Jesse Owens, whom Hitler had denigrated as racially inferior, winning four gold medals. At one point the narrator admiringly calls Owens "the fastest man on Earth."
The film revolutionized the sports documentary genre. Artistically and technically, Riefenstahl broke new ground with advanced techniques that later became industry standards, including unusual camera angles such as shooting from below, extreme close-ups, slow motion, underwater cameras, and putting the camera on rails to shoot moving action. Olympia appears on many lists of the greatest films of all time.
The reason I'm including Olympia here is to share a couple of scenes that show actual Olympic athletes in a state of nature. Olympia Part 1: Festival of the Nations opens with scenes of the Parthenon and ancient Greek statues. In the clip above, the famous discobolus (discus thrower) statue dissolves into German decathlon champion Erwin Huber, naked like the statue, holding a discus. As he rotates, preparing to throw, we even get a fleeting frontal glimpse.
Then we see Huber throwing the shot put and hurling a javelin (above), wearing a posing strap. By the way, the discus, shot put and javelin are all part of the decathlon, so this guy is not just acting – he knows what he's doing.
After this artistic opening, the rest of the film documents many of the actual Olympic events in the stadium, including the wins by Jesse Owens.
Olympia Part 2: Festival of Beauty opens with some nature shots around a pond. Then we see the scene above. Athletes emerge nude from a swim in the pond. They take a sauna, still naked, including a few frontal glimpses, and finally they dive back into the pond. The sequence was shot in the Olympic village, and these are real Olympic athletes, not actors. I'm assuming that they're German. Germans had an easygoing acceptance of nudity that had been pioneered by the FKK movement decades earlier.
The rest of the film documents more Olympic events, including the decathlon, in which Erwin Huber, who appeared naked in the opening of Part 1, competes (clothed, of course). Huber ends up 4th in the decathlon. But Huber gets short shrift in the film compared to an American decathlete, Glenn Morris, whom the camera lovingly lingers over. Morris won the decathlon, setting a new Olympic record, which may justify paying more attention to him. But the real reason for the film's fascination with Morris is that Riefenstahl was having an affair with him during and after the Olympics. Above, the two of them in the Olympic stadium.
Olympia Part 2 ends with shots of the diving events, in which the athletes are seen performing twists and turns in mid-air, photographed from below against the sky. It looks like aerial ballet, justifying the film's name Festival of Beauty. This is cameraman Hans Ertl shooting the divers against the sky. After each diver entered the pool, Ertl could duck underwater to film the diver there, too. That's why the camera looks odd – it's a 1936 underwater movie camera, probably custom-made.
Was Olympia Nazi propaganda? It shows Germany in a favorable light hosting the Olympics, but in my opinion it's not excessively pro-German, especially when compared to modern Olympic coverage by American TV networks, which concentrate on American athletes almost to the exclusion of all others.
Olympia does show Hitler officially opening the Games, and it shows him among the audience reaction sequences (cheering the German athletes), but after all, he was there. It does not in any way push the Nazi racial agenda; if anything, it undermines it with its sympathetic portrayal of Jesse Owens and other black American athletes.
Leni Riefenstahl always maintained that Olympia was not propaganda; it was a documentary, but after World War II she became a pariah in the movie industry because of her association with Hitler.
Leni Riefenstahl died in 2003 at the age of 101.
13 comments:
Wow! You've really outdone yourself with this post! Very interesting.
Larry, I can only repeat what SickoRicko wrote: you've outdone yourself. An outstanding presentation.
I didn’t know much of this about Riefenstahl (beyond Triumph of the Will), and it is fascinating. Thank you for that. The easy and unashamed nudity among the gorgeous men is lovely — but I can’t avoid thinking about where these men went from here. Most surely were Nazis and became soldiers … and who knows what horrors some of them perpetrated.
Leni Riefenstahl never joined the Nazi party, but wrote gushing letters of praise to Hitler and was paid 7 million Reichsmarks by him to make a dramatic movie during World War II. She hand picked the extras for that film from Gypsies in a concentration camp who were sent to Auschwitz after they were filmed. Riefenstahl spent about three years in various forms of detention by the Allies after the war. When they finally cut her loose, she had a second career as a wildlife and ethnographic still photographer in Africa. Late in life, she claimed to be politically naive, but most observers didn't believe her. She was talented, but also a piece of nasty work.
The thing about Riefenstahl is, she's subtle. That's why the ending scene in Star Wars can have Luke as Hitler. (No, seriously.)
But that's what makes her insidious.
Jerry, I agree that she was a nasty piece of work and not politically naive. This post was not intended as an apologia for Riefenstahl. But it's impossible to talk about the film Olympia without taking about her, which showcases the dilemma: how do you view a great work by a despicable person?
epic!
Even though Leni is generally held in low regard by most, she isn't by me. I have a fascination about her life among the Nuba people of Africa. I can't help but think that she enjoyed seeing all of those naked Nuba men. She was close to at least one, and I hope that she got to intimately enjoy him and others. She was definitely quite welcome in their village. She was a remarkable woman in her photographic works which included her diving underwater to film sealife when she was around 90.
How did cameraman Hans Ertl's suit compare to what his diving subjects were wearing? For 1936, it seems a bit in advance of what American men were wearing.
You can see for yourself in this clip of the final diving sequence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwmYFz01MxA. Some of the men wore one-piece swimsuits like women's swimsuits that covered the chest; others wore shorts that were short at the thighs but had high waists.
If you go on the internet CBC Canadian Broadcast corp. has an interview with Leni from 1965. The thing that shocked me most is when she referred to her witnessing the atrocity by German troops in Kronski, Poland in 1939.
She mentions witnessing the killing of 30 innocent villagers, and then goes on to say how 1 German soldier was also killed, she seemed more upset about his death than the 30 villagers ! And her claims of not associating with the Nazi leadership, when in fact she did. Point in fact, Leni owned residential and commercial properties in Munich that survived damage during the war.
AFTER the war she rented flats to former leading Nazi officials (Kaltenbrunner family, Emmy Goering, several former SS officers, etc.).
Not to mention the once so often trips to the Victoria Luise Hotel (in Southern Bavaria), were former Nazis and neo-Nazis would gather to celebrate Hitler's birthday and other Nazi tributes with her in attendance at times.
Also take a look at the documentary film The Eyes of the Reich about Walter Frentz . In the documentary there is a sequence where Leni is talking to Frentz and Guzzi Lantschner about filming Olympia. During the conversation it turns to other events of the time. She notices the camera is still filming and tells the two men to keep quiet, their listening. W
Continued from above-
Yes, Leni was quite contradictory to say the least.
The reason she told them to keep quiet (Frentz and Lantschner) was because they started talking about things they had witnessed in the Nazi Regime. And here they were still paranoid about their true Nazi feelings being discovered in a conversation that was filmed in 1990, 45 years after the end of WW2 !
-Rj in the IE
The athletes in the sauna were Finns according to several books on the subject of the film Olympia.
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