Tiefland

To many people's expectations, Leni Riefenstahl's honest answer to such a question would have to be "spent it as Hitler's bitch." According to Leni herself, however, nothing could be farther from the truth. Leni and Hitler admired each other, but strictly as intellectual friends and fellow artists, other than which the relationship was entirely platonic, by tacit mutual agreement. The reward of Hitler's admiration was that, whenever Leni challenged Hitler's views or said something he didn't like, especially toward the end, Hitler would merely pout, dismiss her from his circles and shun her for a time, rather than shipping her off to a concentration camp. Leni's haters, who are legion, dismiss all this, of course, and call her a liar. Her account, however, seems credible enough, at least to me. If Leni were a proper liar, after all, she would surely have said she secretly despised Hitler, kissed all the right ideological rings and tried to get herself on the side of the historical angels, right? Instead, it seems rather as if Leni's detractors don't really hate her for lying, they hate her for telling the truth.For us, who live in a country whose last significant experience of home front warfare was in 1865, war tends to be a rather mythical, generally misunderstood business. In other countries, some relatively small percentage of the population marches off to war, another even smaller percentage stays home and runs the country and the war politically, and the great mass of the general population, at least until their national borders are broached, mainly just tries to get up every morning and go about their regular business as if war and all it portended wasn't really happening. What Leni did during the war, by all accounts, was go about her business, mainly spending it trying to make the movie she had always wanted to make in the middle of an avalanche of Allied bombs. That movie was "Tiefland" (Flatland.)Viewing Tiefland today, we can easily imagine Leni's logistic difficulties. The parts of it she could control are, as usual, beautifully done; the scene selections, framing and camera work are consummate, occasionally breathtaking, works of art. As to what she couldn't completely control, well... such are the fortunes of war. Leni was lucky enough to find a German soldier, a handsome talented amateur, for the perfect male lead. For the female lead, an ingenue role, preferably calling for a gifted beautiful teenage dancer, no one could be found. Leni ended up forced to tackle the role herself... at age forty. No sooner was the footage wrapped, however, then Leni's country was invaded and overun, her worldly effects confiscated and herself bounced round endlessly from one prison camp to another, one collaboration/Denazification hearing and war trial to another, a process that took years before her name was finally cleared of all the accusations variously and inevitably leveled against a German of her international celebrity. It was 1950 before Leni ever got to see a viewing of the film she had spent so many years trying to shoot... and when she finally got to see it, she was horrified. Whatever the film's inevitable deficiencies, the thing about it that appalled Leni most painfully was her own performance. At forty years old, still beautiful despite war's and film work's hardships, and still a fine dancer, Leni was obviously anything but an ingenue, and totally miscast for the role.Notwithstanding, it's still a great movie, and my friends and I who got together specially to view it enjoyed it enormously. One can only guess about all the great movies Leni Riefenstahl never got to make, and how things might have been, had a movie maker of her genius happened to be born in Hollywood, rather than WWII Germany.

"Tiefland" was reportedly Hitler's favorite opera, but this film is completely cinematic with no arias whatsoever. Best known for her documentaries  Triumph of the Will  and  Olympia , "TIefland" was Leni Riefenstahl's first (and last) foray into fictional cinema. She displays the tight storytelling (there's hardly a wasted moment) and innovative camerawork that were both evident in her earlier films. No one does crowds of people like Riefenstahl, and in several scenes with groups of peasants, their movements are as gripping and surprising as the much larger groups in her other films. "Tiefland" showed what Riefenstahl was capable of when she had complete control over the actors as well as the camera. Watch for the scene where a group of supplicants bow as they ask the Mayoral for water, or the coordinated movements of the audience in the tavern scene, or the men outside the mill during a windstorm.It's not clear why Hitler found this story so appealing. It has a strong theme of the hardworking, honest peasants arrayed against the cruel and selfish marquis, who diverts the local water source for his prize bulls, preventing the peasants from growing their crops. We also learn early on that the marquis' apparent wealth is a sham; he lives in a castle, but is deeply in debt and on the verge of foreclosure unless he can quickly arrange a marriage to a wealthy woman. Riefenstahl herself plays Donna Martha, a traveling dancer who inadvertently finds herself enmeshed in this conflict. In a scene in a tavern, we're treated to a remarkable display of her dancing ability (Riefenstal was originally a dancer before she got into filmmaking). Riefenstahl played the role herself because she couldn't find anyone else she wanted to do it, but when she saw herself onscreen, she felt the role was miscast as she looked too old (Riefenstahl was 40 at the time; the character was supposed to be in her 20s). As far as I'm concerned, she looks fine; Riefenstahl retained a youthful appearance her entire life, obtaining a SCUBA license at age 80 by plausibly claiming to be 60.Derided as "Hitler's filmmaker," Riefenstahl was never a Nazi party member, and claimed to have never heard of Hitler before she met him. She said that her sole intentions were artistic and that if she had been Russian, she would have made films for Stalin, and if she'd been American, she would have made them for Roosevelt. "Triumph of the Will," while superficially a record of the 1935 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, is also a celebration of the spectacle of a large, unified group of people (that is, if you can put aside who these people were, and what they did only a few years later). At the same time, the film doesn't exactly show everyone in a positive light - Hermann Göring looks like a fatuous clown, and Rudolf Hess is a terrifying figure, his eye sockets bottomless black pools. "Olympia" is a record of the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, but the athletes of all nations, not just Germany, are celebrated, and in some ways, the black American Jesse Owens is one of the film's heroes. The message is clearly that physical beauty and athletic prowess are completely independent of race or nationality.So the argument could be made that Riefenstahl was a pure artist who only by chance of birth found herself in what was one of the worst regimes in human history. But she crossed the line with "Tiefland." Requiring Spanish-appearing actors for the crowd scenes, she recruited Roma and Sinti prisoners from the Maxglan-Leopoldskron "Zigeunerlager" near Salzburg, and the Marzahn camp near Berlin. Despite Riefenstahl's insistence that she followed up on the actors after the war and confirmed that they all survived, nearly all Marzahn prisoners were eventually moved to Auschwitz, where they were gassed. Despite the aforementioned artistic quality of the crowd scenes, they're difficult to watch knowing the actors' fate. It's one thing to work independently within a system, quite another to deliberately take advantage of the benefits of that system's worst aspects. In short, you can't enlist concentration camp victims on the way to their deaths as extras in your film if you expect anyone to ever want to work with you again. In fact, Riefenstahl never obtained outside financing for any of her films after "Tiefland;" her subsequent work was all self-financed. Her later films of the Nubians may have been an attempt to counter charges of racism while avoiding any association with the horrors of European history by working with people who had no connection to it. Her final underwater films escape the human world altogether by focusing on fish.Sometimes described as "the greatest female director," Riefenstahl is certainly in the running for the title of best director, period. "Tiefland," however, despite her complete artistic control, falls short of what she showed she was capable of in her earlier documentaries. This may be due to its smaller human scale, although the story does connect to larger concerns of power and oppression - a supreme irony considering what many of the actors were experiencing when they weren't on set.

Leni Riefenstahl’s allegory of mountain men, wolves, downtrodden peasants, callous aristocrats (especially an evil Marques), and gypsy musicians is a cinematic triumph. Highlights include the wolf attack, Leni’s flamenco dance, and the knife fight. I leave to others to decipher Tiefland's political subtext, if indeed there is any.Anyhow I was pretty impressed with the film. Not only was Ms. Riefenstahl a great visual stylist right up there with the best directors of her era – Welles, et al. – but also a darn good storyteller. And she does some fine acting as well. BTW she bears an uncanny resemblance to Greta Garbo. I’m not qualified to comment on the technical quality of her dancing – I understand she was a dancer in her early years – but for me her performance captures the spirit and energy of the gypsy dance, and it's all rendered in most atmospheric fashion by the smoky, shadowy photography.My only reservation: we have a very Spanish subject and setting, but the actors speak German, and my DVD was subtitled in English. All a bit confusing. But no matter. Tiefland is much recommended.Aside: I just caught the director’s The Blue Light, which, for all its visual panache and myth-invoking story line, I consider mildly inferior to Tiefland. My lukewarm response is perhaps due to Das blaue Licht’s technical limitations (it’s more or less a silent movie) and thus its primitive look and feel. Still, Tiefland strikes me as a far more polished product and a stronger story told in a smoother narrative style. And perhaps Ms. Riefenstahl simply became a better director over time.

une belle preuve du talent et des qualités professionnelles de cette grande dame. Et quel bel emploi de la lumière!

Leni Riefenstahl hat bessere Filme gemacht, und auch in besseren Filmen ("Der heilige Berg" sei an dieser Stelle genannt!) mitgespielt. Die Geschichte von Tiefland ist unglaubwürdig. Die Bilder sind gestochen scharf, wie immer bei ARTHAUS DVDS, die schauspielerische Leistung von Minetti ist großartig.... und doch bleibt nach dem Sehen des Films ein zwiespältiger Eindruck zurück.

arrivo nel tempo previsto. non ho ancora provato il dvd ma penso che sia conforme visto la correttezza nella spedizione.