Conor and list,
She heard Adolf Hitler speak at a rally in 1932 and was mesmerized by his powers as a public speaker. Upon meeting Riefenstahl, Hitler, himself a frustrated artist, saw the chance to hire a visionary who could create the image of a strong, proud Wagnerian Germany radiating beauty, power, strength, and defiance, an image he could sell to the world. During a personal meeting he asked Riefenstahl to make a documentary and, in 1933, she directed the short film Der Sieg des Glaubens (Victory of Faith), an hour-long feature about the Nazi party rally at Nuremberg in 1933 (released on DVD in 2003). Reports vary as to whether she ever had a close relationship with Hitler but, impressed with her work, he then asked her to film the upcoming 1934 Party rally in Nuremberg. After initially turning down the project because she did not want to make “a prescribed film," Riefenstahl began making another film titled Tiefland. She hired Walter Ruttmann to direct it in her place. When she fell ill, Tiefland was cancelled. Upon her recovery, she reviewed Ruttmann's initial footage and found it to be terrible. She eventually relented to Hitler’s pressure, and resumed her role as director of the film. She was given unlimited resources, camera crews, budget, complete artistic control and final cut of the film. Triumph of the Will was a documentary glorifying Hitler and widely regarded as one of the most effective pieces of propaganda ever produced. It is generally regarded as a masterful, epic, innovative work of documentary filmmaking. Because it was commissioned by the Nazi party and used as propaganda, however, critics have said it is nearly impossible to separate the subject from the artist behind it. Triumph of the Will was a rousing success in Europe, but widely banned in America.
Triumph of the Will won many international awards as a ground- breaking example of filmmaking. She went on to make a film about the German Wehrmacht, released in 1935 as Tag der Freiheit (Day of Freedom).
Conor, you write:
Watching France play surrounded by thousands of french fans reflecting the diverse backgrounds of the team, a team it seems that embody so much of the political issues that are important in France today. But when the ball kicks off all that matters is the game and you are exposed to some form of bare life where the highs are ecstatic and the lows terrible but all that matters is the moment and there are no differences, no class, no colour just for that moment. Then it all comes crashing down in an instant as it did in Berlin when Zizou walked off the pitch taking French hopes with him and we all left to be greeted by phalanxes of riot police batons drawn and ready for action.
There is another more optimistic aspect to Bare Life. Agamben notes that Bare Life is " a form of life over which power no longer seems to have any hold" which opens up possibilities for a "lyrical or even ecstatic" dimension. Colin McQuillan in his essay 'The Political Life in Giorgio Agamben ' argues that Agamben "defines this politics in terms of “a life directed toward the idea of happiness and cohesive with a form-of-life” in which “the single ways, acts, and process of living are never simply facts but always and above all possibilities of life, always above all power.” and that “Agamben’s conception of the political life is the result of a radical rethinking of the potentiality of life, and life as
potentiality.”
...... it is the humourous Joyce, the lyrical Joyce, the politically conflicted Joyce who abhorred the absolutist position and most of all the Joyce who believed that the highest form of art was to be found in the everyday lives of ordinary people, that I find of most interest and that informs my recent work. I am interested in the idea that by focusing on simple everyday things like walking through a city, we begin a process which clarifies what we do and how we relate to our world and reveals greater truths about ways of being in the world..
the glossallalia of Finnegans Wake speaks right from the heart of this.
“radical separation between painful subjection and joyous liberation” .
Christina