She had an unmatched sense of composition. She had a natural talent to intuitively manage the relation between shapes and frames perfectly bundled with the rhythm of the scene. Leni Riefenstahl was brilliant artist tainted by the context in which she revelled. The Big Lie was transformed into a cinematic aesthetic where the occult and the obscure were insidiously and manipulatively presented as beauty.
The Third Reich’s principal propagandist was able to manufacture emotional content, plastic souls and cellophane emotions to inhabit a world, a fantasy of worthless destructive beauty; the inhuman perfection that the ideal shares with the merely unreal.
Beautiful empty images with uncanny precision. A type of definition of materialism corresponding to the values and ideologies of Riefenstahl’s era. Essentially, she took the artistic path of least resistance acting as cheerleader and pied piper of a losing cause: a glorification and exaltation of denial. History, collective memory and personal identity are pulled apart and then welded and glued into a monster like Frankenstein. Memory repression was the order of the day and instruments like Riefenstahl were catalysts of remarkable precision by limiting dissent in a tidal wave of images, symbols and metaphors which promoted conformity and hierchial behavior as socially advantageous.
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