In Riefenstahl’s spirit

Editorial

For those of us more animated about the road closures and associated inconveniences than about the competition set to begin next week, a promo film released recently by the Vancouver Olympic organizing committee (VANOC) could actually have evoked some enthusiasm. Instead, it has raised the spectre of the 1936 “Nazi Olympics.”

The film, titled Lights Will Guide You Home, combines the lyrics of Coldplay with the history of the modern torch relay. Of course, as the film and the controversy around it remind us, the torch has taken some dismal turns.

VANOC’s unfortunate use of footage from the Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl should give us all pause. Riefenstahl’s epic, emotive filmmaking was the moving picture equivalent of Albert Speer’s architecture. An obviously talented director, Riefenstahl’s skills were appreciated by the Führer for immortalizing on film the Nazi obsession with depicting itself with the classical grandeur befitting a 1,000-year empire. When she died, in 2003, her legacy was dissected, though the footage of thousands of chanting Nazi party officials and supporters probably remains more familiar than her name.

The general consensus is that her work was more than mere documentary; it was deliberately intended to glorify the Nazis’ Aryan ideal and to depict Hitler and Hitlerism as even more larger-than-life than they may have been at the time. Her most notable works were Triumph of the Will, a documentary of the 1934 Nazi rally in Nuremburg, and Olympia, about Hitler’s 1936 Berlin Olympics. It was from the latter film that VANOC took a two- or three-second clip of the torch entering the Berlin coliseum and included it in Lights Will Guide You Home. The original version of the clip includes Hitler-saluting observers, an image VANOC filmmakers opted to black out.

The very existence of the film Olympia presented VANOC with a no-win choice. To leave out the clip could have left them open to criticism of completely whitewashing history. Putting it in with the saluting Nazis intact would have been abhorrent. Including the footage with the Nazi salute blacked out fails as a satisfactory compromise.

What should they have done? Recent German responses to such issues are illustrative. An ideal example is the very site that provided the backdrop to Triumph of the Will – the Zeppelinfeld in Nuremburg, where the massive 1934 Nazi rally took place. The site now houses a documentation centre and museum educating about the causes and consequences of Nazism.

The Nazi party rally ground continues to take up a huge section of central Nuremburg, now repurposed into museums, stadiums and green space. Yet the echoes of the past remain for visitors with historical knowledge and those who stroll the documentation centre’s exhibits. Before the renovations, care was taken to make architectural changes that negate Speer’s intention of inspiring awe and wonder at the power of the reich.

Before opening as a museum just last year, architects pierced Speer’s Nazi architecture with a glass and steel “arrow” slammed through the unfinished heart of what was to have been the Nazis’ congress hall, designed to welcome 50,000 sycophantic observers. This imaginative response addresses the Nazi past while forbidding its monumental esthetic from inspiring anything but contemplation and revulsion. Germans continue to creatively and responsibly confront the physical and emotional remains of the darkest era of their past – and we should learn from their approach.

Ultimately, the problem with Lights Will Guide You Home is that it uses Nazi-era monumentalism in service of a 21st-century monumentalism, blacking out the context in which it originated yet preserving the spirit in which it was intended. This obviously invites more misgivings about the film than does the use of the small clip itself.

It may be that VANOC believes that the Games can be politics-free, but we know from history – whether it’s the 1936 Games in Nazi Germany, the 1968 athletes’ Black Power salute on the Olympic podium in Mexico City, or the murder of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists during the 1972 Games in Munich – the Olympics have not proved to be free of identity- and geo-politics.

The issue is not so much the inclusion of the short clip from Olympia but the fact that the entire four minutes seems to owe an artistic debt to the spirit of Riefenstahl. While this could be said about any film that relies on emotion and triumphalism, when a VANOC film screens like the trailer for a remake of Olympia, it implies an ignorance of history and the power of propaganda.

There is no need to remain ignorant, however, especially with such open access to information nowadays. Unfortunately, not all sources are reliable, but in this instance, VANOC officials could have easily taken a trip to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. If they had visited the current exhibit – More Than Just Games: Canada and the 1936 Olympics – perhaps they would have better understood that they weren’t just blacking out Hitler salutes, they were blacking out a genocide. This is not the way to inspire the human spirit to greatness.

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