randy_byers | The strange love of Leni Riefenstahl

The Paramount theater is in the midst of a three-film series of silent German films from 1929. I highly recommend the third film in the series, Asphalt, which is showing next Monday, the 29th. It's a simple, even conventional, story about a naive traffic cop (played by the lead from Metropolis, Gustav Fröhlich, except looking almost butch in gleaming leather boots) who is seduced by an aggressively sexual jewel thief played by Betty Amann. Other than Amann's fascinating character -- quite different from the aloof femme fatales of the era played by Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich -- the main attraction is the high-Ufa style of the production. The sets and lighting and cinematography (by Günther Rittau, who also worked on Metropolis and The Blue Angel) are all outstanding, with more than a hint of the dark urban pleasures of film noir to come.

Last night, I met up with

akirlu and

libertango to see the second film in the series, The White Hell of Pitz Palu (Die Weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü), which is apparently the pinnacle -- nay, the very peak -- of the strange German genre of the mountain film. The movie was a strange hybrid of nature documentary, with some utterly gorgeous shots of ice crystals and ice caves and swirling, evaporating mists and cloud shadows racing over brilliant fields of snow, mixed with a soapy tale of hubris, the humbling power of Mother Nature, redemption through self-sacrifice, and with an unarticulated love triangle for spice. There was something truly weird about the whole project that I found quite compelling despite the longueurs of the so-called narrative. ("I thought it was only 90 minutes long," Hal protested when we were told it would run just over two hours.) Not the least weird was Leni Riefenstahl, who plays the glamorous tom-boy girlfriend of a feckless man, all the while casting hot looks at the manly but suicidal Gustav Diessl (who played Jack the Ripper in another -- much better -- German film from 1929, Pandora's Box). What strange ecstasies she experiences in this film, asking one man to give his life for another while tears freeze in a crystal mask on her face.

Riefenstahl's directoral debut, before she went on to make propaganda for the Nazis, was another mountain film called The Blue Light (1932), in which she also played the lead. IMDb says: "Junta is hated by the people in the village where she lives, especially by the women, who suspect her of being a witch ..."

Well, if the shoe fits ...

Burn her!