The strange love of Leni Riefenstahl

[randy_byers]

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!

Comments

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Somewhere I read a comment about that 75 minute version that it's actually a lot better than this 135 minute version. But which half of the movie did they cut?

Every other shot? Seriously, even within the framework of repetition to re-establish scene context, or show the passage of time, the number of times we see the exact same shot over and over seemed excessive to me. I'm sure I've been ruined by modern rapid-fire filmmaking technique, but I couldn't help getting a certain, "Yes, yes, I get it. What's next?" feeling whenever we hit the third or fourth shot of the same dripping icicles or Föhn-driven spindrift snow skirling along the same ridge. I think the film could be much improved by picking a representative subset of the absolutely gorgeous scenic cinematography and letting it do the work of its near duplicates.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Yes, you're right about that. One got the feeling that Fanck was so in love with the imagery that he got just a leetle bit carried away with it. One shudders to think how it was ballooned out to 150 minutes.

Another thing that could have gone was the whole subplot about the five (or was it four?) students from Frankfurt who try to get to the top first. Clearly another strand of hubris, but pretty much completely unnecessary narratively. Although that was the strand with the best visual pyrotechnics, of course.

But there's another sense in which they could have gotten rid of the story entirely and just shown the nature photography as an abstract hommage to the mountains or something.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I didn't mind the students as a subplot. For one thing, they make a number of aspects of the A-plot more plausible. It's the ego threat of being beaten out by the students that gets Diessl to consent to Riefenstahl tagging along at all, and presumably keeps him from deciding to take the other two back off the mountain at various points when circumstances would suggest that turning back would be wiser, and later, it's all that faffing about in the ice-caves that provides at least some account for why we don't get on with the search and rescue of the lost trio sooner.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Fair enough, but I thought they should have found the lost wife frozen in a pillar of ice, too, just for added Teutonic romantic morbidity. Perhaps with an inexplicable white rose clutched in her perfect teeth.