Olympia (film)
Olympia is the title of a two-staged propaganda film of the German director Leni Riefenstahl from 1938. The film documents the propaganda during the Nazi era in Berlin discharged 1936 Olympic Games .
action
The prologue of the first part ( Festival of the Peoples ) is known worldwide in the film scene: The pictures show the Athens Acropolis, then overlay onto individual heads of ancient athletes and goddesses , onto the sculpture of a discus thrower , the discobolos , which then becomes a “living image “Of a naked athlete presenting discus, javelin and shot put by the sea in slow motion . With naked gymnasts, whose movements are overlaid by the Olympic flame, and the relay of Olympic torchbearers through Greece to the Berlin Olympic Stadium , antiquity is brought into modern times, the Berlin of 1936. Riefenstahl was advised by “ Nelly ” (Elli Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari), who, as a Greek photographer and artistic representative of the “ New Objectivity ”, had already taken such pictures. However, the entire prologue was shot by Willy Zielke as author, director and cameraman without Riefenstahl's involvement.
There is also a prologue in the second part ( Festival of Beauty ): Morning forest, in which rangers appear in a row as silhouettes and jump naked into the water, sauna , shiny athlete bodies, mutual massaging and pounding with birch veins, smiling faces in the shower .
Even better known is the conclusion of the film: The Diving Men, the weightless flights to a sequence in the sky is. In the stadium there is evening lighting, bells with peal, Olympic flame and flagpoles that lean towards each other and are decorated with laurel . The Olympic flag and the “dome of light”, staged by Albert Speer , conclude the film.
In both parts, the camera work alternates between reportage-like panorama, pan, passages from below , in slow motion, with a subjective camera , parallel drives. The montage focuses on symbolic exaggeration through optical cross-fading, on emotionalizing music or on the tension between sporting competition and cheering the audience on. The cut creates direct visual connections between the German Olympians 'will to win and Adolf Hitler's (or Joseph Goebbels ' and Hermann Göring's ) applause. Further design principles are the impressionistic mounting the body in flight ( pole vault , high diving ), the assembly of an exemplary Marathon -Dramas between declining strength (legs in slow motion) and anfeuerndem will (street scenes in time lapse to motor music), silhouettes on the floor ( fencer ) as well as the change between purely musically illustrated passages and parts that seem to have been commented on authentically by the speakers and audience reactions.
The commentary in the German version rhetorically emphasizes the analogy of sporting and armed struggle, interspersed with racist ideology, for example when it says: "Two black runners against the strongest of the white race ".
First part: Festival of the Nations
The film begins with pictures of Greek temple ruins, Greek sculptures and fades into the presentation of the classic disciplines of discus, shot put, javelin and gymnastics. After the Olympic flame has been lit , the torch relay through southeast Europe to Germany is symbolized. Adolf Hitler declares the XI. Olympic Games in Berlin's Olympic Stadium opened for.
The full range of athletics competitions and their winners are shown.
Part two: Festival of Beauty
After an introduction that shows the Olympic Village and the leisure activities of various teams, the other sports (mostly with their winners) are presented. In addition to the decathlon, which was left out in the first part of the film, you can see gymnastics, sailing, fencing, modern pentathlon, polo, cycling (road racing), boxing, field hockey, football, riding (military), rowing, swimming and diving.
The film ends with a " dome of light " above the Olympic Stadium after the Olympic flame has gone out.
background
In the course of the shooting, numerous technical innovations were introduced, for example an underwater camera developed by the cameraman Walter Frentz himself. Slow-motion recordings and material from small handheld cameras with only 5 meters of film were also used. Riefenstahl's team also experimented with images from hot air balloons and a zeppelin. The photographer "Nelly" acted in an advisory capacity.
Before filming began, many of the procedures were tested and perfected at other sports competitions. During the preparation phase and the filming itself, Riefenstahl often came into conflict with judges, IOC officials and Joseph Goebbels , who complained that their cameras were disturbing either the athletes or the invited guests of honor.
In addition to the recordings of the competitions, a prologue was produced under the direction of Willy Zielke , for which scenes in Greece and on the Curonian Spit were filmed. Since these nudes of temple dancers contained what was anything but common at the time, Zielke suspects that Riefenstahl had given him responsibility for the prologue in order to be able to pass any anger on to him.
A total of around 400,000 m of film was available for editing, the first viewing alone (10–12 hours per day) took over two months. The entire post-production took two years, which brought Riefenstahl into conflict with Joseph Goebbels, who wanted to evaluate the film as soon as possible.
Riefenstahl worked with a staff of over 300 on the film, including 34 cameramen and with a budget of 1.5 million Reichsmarks, which her Reich Propaganda Minister Goebbels had received through a front company, Olympia-Film GmbH . Nevertheless, she always claimed to have made the film on behalf of the IOC and not the Nazi regime. Riefenstahl's statement that the “Olympia” film had been independently pre-financed through the sale of the distribution rights to the Tobis was not correct. A corresponding rental contract was only concluded at the end of 1936. After the film had started, it was possible to transfer all of the financing back to the Reich through the cinema revenues in Europe. Despite protests against the Hitler sequences in the film, the foreign income exceeded that of the entire remaining German annual film production in 1938. With the employees of the Ufa-Tonwoche , who had to provide their footage of the games for the "Olympia" film, their staff came up with a total of 300 employees. Riefenstahl's film crew withdrew their better camera positions from the newsreelers in the Olympic Stadium and threatened to withdraw their press permits.
Goebbels increased the Riefenstahl fee while working on the film from an initial 250,000 to 400,000 Reichsmarks.
Many of the funds shown in the film for mass production came from the Nazi major events, such as the large-scale parades of flag bearers with swastika flags, or the Nazi Party on 11 September 1936 in Nuremberg, such as Hitler's personal architect Speer designed Lichtdom - the after deleting the Olympic fire shone from the stadium with the help of flak spotlights, and were later incorporated into Nazi propaganda.
Reception and criticism
The film premiered on April 20, 1938, Hitler's 49th birthday, in the Ufa Palace in Berlin . As part of the international exploitation, Riefenstahl took part in premieres in 19 European capitals, where the film was largely enthusiastically received, only in Great Britain there was resistance. The intended marketing of the film in the United States failed because of Leni Riefenstahl's closeness to the National Socialists : Her initially friendly reception in New York was overshadowed by the Reichspogromnacht, which took place three days after the premiere there in Germany on November 9, 1938, during which numerous Jewish events Property, especially synagogues , were destroyed, around 400 Jewish citizens were murdered and 30,000 others were interned in concentration camps. The New York Anti-Nazi League (which included some of their former Weimar friends ), New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia , whose mother was Italian Jewish, and the Motion Picture Artists Committee successfully called for a boycott of the film .
The critics' opinions of the film were divided. It was largely agreed that the film was aesthetically masterfully staged. He was criticized, however, in particular for his propaganda elements. These consisted - in addition to the glorifying representation of athletic bodies, often referred to as the " fascist body cult" - in particular in omissions. For example, black or clearly non-white participants were only shown when it was unavoidable, as in the case of the Afro-American athlete Jesse Owens , who became the first athlete to win four gold medals at the Olympic Games. In addition, results that the regime did not like were simply withheld. For example, the final of the hockey competition (Germany versus India) is shown in excerpts in which Germany scores a goal. However, it goes unmentioned that Germany lost this game 8-1.
The French newspaper Le Figaro wrote on July 6, 1938 about the end of the film in “Festival of the Nations” :
"And then the Olympic flame, which rises with the national anthems in an atmosphere that has never been more favorable for peace in the world."
The writer Susan Sontag attested Riefenstahl's film that, due to its aesthetic qualities, it exceeded the categories of mere propaganda. "Leni Riefenstahl's film genius ensured that the 'content' - even if perhaps against her own intention - played a purely formal role." Michael Töteberg, author of the Metzler Film Lexikon , contradicts Sontag explicitly: "This can be countered: The form, be it the choreography of the masses or the worship of muscular fighters, shows the politically naive Leni Riefenstahl as a propagandist of the fascist image of man. "
In the course of a detailed iconographic analysis, Martin Loiperdinger comes to the conclusion that the film “is almost a remake of Riefenstahl's party conference film Triumph des Willens ”. Michael Töteberg also points out that the prologues to both parts of the film “ looked like a copy of Paths to Strength and Beauty ”, a film with Leni Riefenstahl in a small role from 1924/25.
Awards
The film about the making of the two film parts had already won a gold medal at the Paris World Exhibition in 1937 . In the Third Reich was Olympia from the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda assumed a film inspection with the predicates "state politically and artistically particularly valuable," "culturally valuable", "people making" and excellent "educational film". Riefenstahl received the National Film Prize in 1938, the Swedish Polar Prize in 1938, the gold medal Coppa Mussolini of 1938 for the best foreign film at the Venice International Film Festival , an Olympic gold medal from the Comitée International Olympique 1938 and the Greek Sports Prize. In 1941, the film received a Kinema Junpo Award in the category of best foreign-language film, as well as an Olympic diploma at the Lausanne Film Festival in 1948. The TIME magazine ranks the film is still one of the "100 best movies of all time." The Wiesbaden film evaluation agency marked the release of the “ denazified ” DVD as “particularly valuable”. The fades to the “Nazi greats”, for example, are missing.
Exploitation rights
The film was commissioned by both the IOC and the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda . It was financed from Reich funds. To this end, Leni Riefenstahl and her brother Heinz Riefenstahl founded Olympia-Film GmbH , which was subordinate to the Propaganda Ministry.
Later there was a dispute between Leni Riefenstahl and the Federal Archives about exploitation rights, which was resolved in 1964 with a settlement. Riefenstahl and Transit (Vertriebs GmbH for films owned by the federal government) agreed on joint ownership. From then on Riefenstahl was allowed to call itself the owner of the exploitation rights and received 70% of the rental fees.
In 2013 it became known that Leni Riefenstahl had negotiated a sale of the exploitation rights with the IOC in 2003. This sale was supported by the Gerhard Schröder government and took place on December 22, 2003. At that time, the Federal Republic was in the application phase to host the 2012 Olympic Games.
After the rights were sold, the IOC had a restored original version of the film created in 2008/2009, which has not yet been available on DVD or BD (as of 2015). The DVDs released in Germany in 1999 and 2006 contain an abridged version made by Riefenstahl in the 1950s, in which several Nazi symbols and Hitler's appearances were removed.
Trivia
The band Rammstein used excerpts from the film for their music video for the song Stripped (1998).
literature
- Cooper C. Graham: Leni Riefenstahl and Olympia. Edited by the British Film Institute . London 1992.
- Daniel Wildmann: Desired bodies. Construction and staging of the “Aryan” male body in the “Third Reich”. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1998, ISBN 3-8260-1417-0 (preview on Google Books).
- Susan Sontag : Fascinating Fascism. In: dies .: In the sign of Saturn. Essays. Hanser, Munich et al. 2003, ISBN 3-446-20424-5 , pp. 97-125.
- Michael Mackenzie : From Athens to Berlin: The 1936 Olympics and Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia. In: Critical Inquiry. 29, 2, Winter 2003, ISSN 0093-1896 , pp. 302-336, available online .
- Hannah Schaub: Riefenstahl's Olympia: body ideals - ethical responsibility or freedom of the artist? Fink, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-7705-3790-4 .
- Rainer Rother : Riefenstahl's Olympia. The 1936 Summer Olympics as a cinematic event. In: Gerhard Paul (ed.): The century of pictures. Vol. 1: 1900 to 1949. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2009, ISBN 978-3-525-30011-4 , pp. 506-513.
- Taylor Downing: Olympia. 2nd Edition. Palgrave Macmillan, London 2012 (first 1992), ISBN 1-84457-470-9 ( review ).
Web links
- Of the peoples in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The beauty hard in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Olympia. Part 1: Festival of the Nations at filmportal.de (including premiere poster, contemporary magazine title, company photos)
- Olympia. Part 2: Festival of Beauty at filmportal.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ Michael Töterberg: Classic film. 120 films. Metzler Verlag, Stuttgart et al. 2006, ISBN 3-476-02172-6 , pp. 104-105, (selection from the Metzler Film Lexicon ). Martin Loiperdinger: The party conference film "Triumph of the Will" by Leni Riefenstahl. Mobilization rituals. Leske + Budrich, Opladen 1987, ISBN 3-8100-0598-3 ( Research Texts Economics and Social Sciences 22).
- ↑ Esther Sophia Sünderhauf: Greek Longing and Cultural Criticism. The German reception of Winckelmann's ideal of antiquity 1840–1945. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-05-004100-5 , p. 196.
- ^ 3sat article about Willy Zielke
- ↑ Die Weltwoche, edition 32/2008, Berlin 1936: How Olympia lost its innocence , accessed on January 23, 2015, http://www.weltwoche.ch/kosten/2008-32/artikel-2008-32-wie-olympia -die.html
- ^ Hanns-Georg Rodek: “Olympia” film: How Gerhard Schröder sold Leni Riefenstahl. In: welt.de . April 22, 2013, accessed October 7, 2018 .
- ↑ https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Leni-Riefenstahls-100jaehriges-Vermaechtnis-fuer-Hollywood-3426413.html
- ↑ "heise online", by Peter V. Brinkemper, August 22, 2002, https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Leni-Riefenstahls-100jaehriges-Vermaechtnis-fuer-Hollywood-3426413.html
- ↑ http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/4903/2/Teil_2.pdf
- ↑ http://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/historiker-sehen-parallelen- Zwischen-millenniums-lichtkathedrale-und-speers-lichtdom/ 109864.html
- ↑ L. Joseph Heid: Hitler abused the Olympic spirit. In: welt.de . July 30, 2011, accessed October 7, 2018 .
- ↑ http://www.deutschlandradiokultur.de/ns-olympiade-in-aesthetisch-heroisierenden-bildern.932.de.html?dram:article_id=243797
- ↑ Both quotations: Michael Töteberg: Film classic. 120 films. Metzler Verlag, Stuttgart et al. 2006, ISBN 3-476-02172-6 , p. 105 (selection from the Metzler Film Lexicon ).
- ↑ Quoted from ibid., P. 104. Cf. Martin Loiperdinger: The party conference film "Triumph des Willens" by Leni Riefenstahl. Mobilization rituals. Leske + Budrich, Opladen 1987, ISBN 3-8100-0598-3 ( Research Texts Economics and Social Sciences 22).
- ↑ killer mountain: movie classics. P. 105.
- ↑ spiegel.de: Riefenstahl films “The woman who created the perfect Nazi body” , http://www.spiegel.de/einestages/riefenstahl-filme-a-946887.html
- ↑ Olympia, Parts 1 and 2 (1938) . Film review by Richard Croliss and Richard Schickel in TIME Magazine, 2005.
- ↑ "The World" of April 21, 2013 "Olympic Games"
- ↑ http://www.festivalofarchives.org/2012/11/28/the-making-of-leni-riefenstahls-olympia-1937/