Blurring the lines

I really didn't have a topic today, I thought about writing on the $87 billion that Bush requested on Sunday night, or about spending almost every waking moment with your significant other or some bar in DC. I guess those topics will have to wait a bit.
Yesterday in Germany, Leni Riefenstahl died. If you don't know her name, you definately know her work. She was the documentarist for the Nazi party, and from her position filmed Olympia, from which we have many images and film of the 1938 Berlin Games and, most notably, Triumph des Willens or Triumph of the Will a film that both made and destroyed her career. She was asked in the early 1930's to make films for the Nazi party. She filmed the 1934 party congress in Nuremberg (the film is one of the reasons why Nuremberg was chosen for the war crime tribunals). It was an amazing film, for many reasons. It's argued to this day how much of a role she played in the congress, but she definately had some say in the staging of the congress. The film angles, the positioning of the people (an aside, most of the people filmed in the documentary are actually not soldiers and they are farmers, that's why they are carrying forks and hoes), the speeches from Hitler, it all had one purpose, to show the greatness of the Nazi party. Riefenstahl would say that it wasn't propoganda, that she was only showing a focused truth. A truth that she focues with her camera lens. Either way, it was a breakthrough film. Breakthrough on many fronts. It is an early example of a wartime propadana film. She made the film complete, from the planning and execution, to the use of innovative camera mountings and the post editing, Riefenstahl had a story to tell through her film, a story that she told most effectively. So much so that Frank Capra was inspired to make his own documentary on the war, Why we Fight. She was cleared of all propoganda charges, but was never able to seperate herself from her earlier work for the Nazi party. She continuted to be a documentarist and eventually became interested in naturalist documentaries and even became a scuba diver.
Her work is amazing, though you can never seperate it from the fact that her most famous work was for the Nazi party. If you haven't seen Triumph of the Will from begining to end, I suggest renting it. But also rent something from the Capra series, Why we Fight or a great british war film, like In Which we Serve.
To this day, we can see echos of the of using film and cinema as propoganda. Both sides did it during WWII and we continue to do it today.