BroadcastChic Excellent, a Must See

Kidskycom It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

SeeQuant Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

Roxie The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

bragant Although this remarkable documentary is usually known in the English-speaking world as "The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl," the German title (in translation) is "The Power of Images: Leni Riefenstahl." The difference is not merely one of semantics - Ray Muller's biopic of the woman best remembered as "Hitler's favorite filmmaker" goes beyond its subject to raise profound questions about the deepest effects of art and the visual image on history and human consciousness. Leni Riefenstahl's 1930s films - the NASDAP films "Victory of the Faith," "Triumph of the Will," the little-known (and long-thought-lost) "Day of Freedom: Armed Forces," and "Olympia" simultaneously broke new ground in the development of cinematic form, made her the first internationally-celebrated female director, and created an image of National Socialist Germany so powerful and compelling that to this very day, images from Riefenstahl's work are routinely stolen and used to symbolize the Nazi period in literally hundreds of television programs (just watch anything on the History Channel!), usually without any credit to her. Indeed, as Mueller points out, it was Riefenstahl whose work transformed a ragtag, motley band of German politicians and soldiers into awesome figures of terrible strength and force - as Muller notes, "She made the Nazis look like Nazis." Already one of the most famous women in Europe long before she started working for Hitler, Leni Riefenstahl was a legend in her own time and is still the best-known female director in history, despite the fact that she made only one major film after 1938. This documentary artfully mixes period footage, extended clips from Riefenstahl's films, and interviews with the director and her associates, including cameramen who worked with her and her longtime companion (who was 40-plus years younger than his famous lover!). Proceeding in chronological order, Muller's film covers every aspect of this amazing woman's life, from her early days as a dancer in the mode of Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis, to her ground-breaking and technically stunning "Mountain Films" where she was usually cast as a lovely daredevil, to her later work as a photographer in the Sudan and in the deepest ocean.It is impossible to watch this film and be unimpressed with Frau Riefenstahl's talent, drive, and sheer force of personality - one can hardly believe one's eyes when one watches this tiny, wizened ancient bellowing orders at the director and literally shaking him senseless (a man a quarter her age and half her size!) when he has the temerity to disagree with her suggestions on how she should be photographed. It is also impossible not to be disgusted by Frau Riefenstahl's complete self-involvement and her total refusal to consider that the content of her work might have a political component beyond her original intent.Riefenstahl is a rare example of a female aesthete - a woman whose whole life was governed by a vision of ideal beauty. Beauty, however, is not a democratic phenomenon, and this is where Riefenstahl's life and career begin to raise some very dark and troubling issues for those of us who like to tell ourselves that art is always a force for good. To the end of his days, Hitler saw himself first and foremost as an artist - an individual who uses their powers of perception to shape a new reality. For both Riefenstahl and Hitler, the art of ancient Greece and Rome represented the pinnacle of human physical capacity and offered a vision of perfect beauty beyond time and space, a vision which Hitler was determined to transform into reality, using the "Aryan" German people as his raw material. A single shot in "Olympia" makes this notion quite clear - the famous lap-dissolve between the white marble of Myron's celebrated "Diskobolos" and the living, moving body of an Olympic athlete hurling his discus into space. Connoisseurs of art will know that the pose of Myron's statue is in fact anatomically impossible to assume (try it yourself), but Riefenstahl's evil genius and simplistic mind equated physical reality with the principles of classical art, itself almost always ideal rather than real. Our own society over the past few decades seems to have succumbed to a kind of thinking which - like Riefenstahl, Hitler and the Ancient Greeks - equates physical beauty with moral virtue and ultimate truth. No wonder Riefenstahl's visual style and photographic skills are copied again and again by sports shows and commercials - all of which are usually selling a product to a viewer by appealing to our vanity and desire to be "perfect" - and thus loved and adored. This is why Leni Riefenstahl's work is so dangerous - consider the suffering generated in our own society by the obsession so many of us seem to have with being "beautiful" and "perfect." In a world where plastic surgery is now a multi-billion dollar business and millions of people seem to have no other ambition than maximizing their physical attractiveness, shouldn't we be asking ourselves some very serious questions about our own aesthetic ideals and their consequences, given the fact that the cult of beauty and perfection in our age seems to result so often in death and pain? Ray Muller's film is one of the few works of art in our time to raise these questions seriously. Whatever you may think of Riefenstahl and her art, the fact remains that her life and career are more relevant than ever. "The Power of Images" indeed.

a Lu If you really want to know about her work, this is definitely the best piece of information to get started. About 3 hours long, it covers her extraordinary life from early beginnings as a dancer to growing fame as actress, film director and photographer - and along the way, of course, meeting Hitler and becoming "his" infamous cinematographer. After the Second World War she was vilified as Hitler's mistress and icon of obstinacy for more than 50 years. While some of the myths surrounding her are only recently being - audibly - refuted, can we now step forward and take Leni Riefenstahl for who she was - especially Germans?This film was the first to try. It is careful to create a continuing dialog with its subject, something all other portraits I've seen so far are lacking. While its approach focuses on film-making techniques, the political side of things is never out of the broader picture. The filmmaker doesn't avoid confrontation, but in all fairness - you see the response immediately on screen, sometimes in off-camera moments that are quite funny to watch. You get to know the less pleasant sides of Riefenstahl's personality as well - clearly she's often uncomfortable with prying questions, but her occasional outbursts are a display of honesty and make the film more interesting to watch. Especially "Olympia" 1936 and "Triumph of the Will" are extensively featured, but also the first images of her 2002 documentary "Underwater Impressions".This film deserves 10 stars out of 10. It is unique in its fairness and will likely never be surpassed in depth because of Leni Riefenstahl's death in 2003, at the age of 101. The controversy around her will surely last. Quite believably she never was a Nazi or a Jew-hater, but that didn't prevent her from promoting the champion of Antisemitism (who only showed the best of his faces in her films). There has been a lot of reevaluation going on around her, sparked not in the least by this documentary - too much, some critics fear. Riefenstahl belonged to those who didn't sign a blank confession and go on with their lives, or weren't allowed to. All these years she didn't apologize enough - that is the reason for her reprobation, but maybe it is honest to say that letting "Hitler's" filmmaker get back to business in the sight of the world would have been too embarrassing for Germany, which is still being judged by the Second World War. Her guilt is that of the wartime generation, with added sentence for her willingness to play along rather than emigrate - which she might have done at any time.So while she is not entirely a martyr of German guilty conscience, she deserves to be cleared from the heaps of dirt flung upon her by paparazzi, and she deserves to speak for herself.

tedg Interesting. This is a good documentary about a great documentarian.I guess the normal form for commenting on this is to take a side on the art/politics controversy. Or perhaps to note film as propaganda tool today. I think I would rather simply remark that you just cannot watch movies as a lucid viewer without understanding something about who you are in the things. And that means wondering about who the filmmaker thinks you are. And that in turn means considering what it means when a camera is placed or moves in a certain way. If you do, you will find yourself wondering about the camera of Hitchcock and Welles. Surely that is at least as fundamental as you need to go. But you can go a half step further back and you will find yourself here, with this woman and her dancing eye.Yes, her personality at 90 is still German, which means she is a romantic idealist and an apologist for her generation. Annoying, but typical. And does it matter? Does it matter if, say, van Gogh was an anti-Semite? You decide. For me, I assume the artist is often the dumbest person involved in the process and the last person to ask. So the art is the thing.There are three great things she did, and these are apart from the idealization of the body, a constant theme. She advanced the art of filters to create abstract frames. In this, she was merely one in a line of talents. She was an innovator in creating a new philosophy of the camera. In this, she was a genius. But that wouldn't have mattered if she wasn't also a genius innovator in the art of editing.She understood that in addition to the story, the images themselves have a rhythm and song apart from the thing depicted. I think she really means it when she says her great propaganda film could have been of any choreographed event. She was a master of exploiting the movement of the eye as well as the movement of the subject, even the rhythm of the greyscales and depths. You need to watch "Triumph" and "Olympia" ignoring the subject, perhaps upside down as I did to see the music.Having said that, the effect of these two films undeniably altered life. The Nazi film was the single greatest influence in convincing the rural German public to support Hitler. That's huge. But perhaps a larger impact was on sports. Until that point, sports were something you did or read about. You might go to a contest purely for the association of the thing.What her art did, incidentally, was she made sports cinematic. And we may all be the worse for it.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

fkerr For American tastes, this documentary is much too long for the subject matter. Yet, it is worth watching for several reasons. Considerable insight into the early appeal of Hitler to the German people shows through Frau Riefenstahl's comments. More than that, though, is the detailed presentation of a master documentary filmmaker and her secrets. As evidenced through her later work in Africa and under the sea, she is an amazing woman. Her comments and her work are presented in such a way that both can be appreciated.