MATT'S EDITORIAL 6/8/2014 - Cinema as a political statement
This week was the week of documentaries. Sight and Sound released for the first time a list of the greatest documentaries of all time, and I myself drew up one. Yet, when making such lists, one must take in consideration the certain specific canons and value influence over personal taste.
But this is not going to be an editorial about why I chose some films over others and far from it. This morning, I awoke and read the news that Tricycle Theatre refused to host this year's UK Jewish Film Festival. The theatre would have screened 26 of its films. Yet, this is not going to be a political editorial about what is happening in Gaza either - I could not say more than the vast majority of your Facebook friends already have anyways.
This piece of news got me thinking instantly about a documentarian whose life and work was tainted by her affiliation with the Nazi Party. I am talking of course about the infamous genius of documentary, Leni Riefenstahl. Leni was a ballet dancer, turned cinema actress after an injury, then actress director of fiction films before becoming one of the most important innovators of the form of filmmaking Grierson sanctified as documentary.
The Nazi Minister of Englightenment and Propaganda Goebbels, an evil genius of brainswashing in his own right, instantly recognised Riefenstahl as a talent that could work wonders in favour of the Third Reich. And so, she was called to film a few rallies before her big masterpiece Triumph of the Will, a film which scared the world over with its depiction of diligence and disciplines of enormous scales. The doctrines of the 'men in black' are shouted passionately, greeted by cheers. Hitler, the proud leader is shot like a divine creature. Triumph of the Will is a documentary of epic proportions and frighteningly unstaged. It even had the ideal art director in Albert Speer, another blacklisted great artist.
The masterwork would be followed up by Olympia, on the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where she let loose her adoration of the perfection of human anatomy and the human body in a drastic mixture of chronicles and poetics.
Needless to say that once the war was over, Riefenstahl was branded a Nazi and therefore hardly ever worked again. She was very resilient and lived to be over one hundred years old, re-inventing herself as an marine photographer among other things. She even won the respect of colleagues - among them even blockbuster favourite and (most importantly) Jewish filmmaker Steven Spielberg!
That's all well and good, but sadly this simply means that the intolerance that had become synonymous with the name Leni Riefenstahl meant that we would never see any other majestic productions from the German filmmaker for quite sometime. She had been named and shamed as a key contributor to the rise of evil in Germany. She had even been gossipped about, rumours had her as the fuhrer's mistress after all she did was admit to feeling overwhelmed upon meeting Hitler, because of the aura of power around her.
This type of intolerance has been felt by many filmmakers, many of whom contriuted to masterpieces. Griffith instantly springs to mind, with his racist epic from a racist's point of view to this day bad mouthed by the likes of Tarantino, who said to have included a scene in Django with dimwitted Ku Klux Klan as a 'fuck you' to the father of modern cinema, the innovator of American narrative cinema and a bigoted racist who would go on to struggle with his conscience without ever really wanting to. And out of this struggle, Intolerance - a film of exciting new language and majestic beauty would be born.
The troubles at Gaza were always going to be influencing cinema and Tricycle's decision is a type of 'fuck you' to the violence supported by the Israeli embassy. Impossible to define who is right and who is wrong. The UK Jewish Film Festival should simply not be backed by the Israeli embassy and Tricycle should be avoiding generalisations at all costs. In the end, however, cinema is the damaged party. Malevolence and cinema have always walked hand in hand and always will.
The final take home point, however, is that what happened today shows us how cinema is still feared as the type of powerful message carrier that Goebbels saw when he decided to hire Riefenstahl. And yet, today we watch in awe as Leni films the athletes girate in the air as they take flight off diving boards. What will we be watching tomorrow?