Tag: superiority

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Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Riefenstahl

Directed by Andres Veiel
Certificate 15
115 minutes
Released 9 May

There is something deeply depressing about the fact that one of the most talented female film directors who ever lived is also without a doubt also one of the most troubling. Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003) is best known today for the documentaries Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938), the first a record of the Nazi Party’s Nuremberg Rally, the second of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Both eulogise large scale spectacle, with Olympia in particular celebrating the human body as it undergoes the rigour of sports disciplines. Both celebrate victory, superiority, dominance.

Riefenstahl lived to the ripe old age of 101, claiming over the years that she was an artist who happened to fall in with the Third Reich by dint of birthplace and time; she didn’t really understand what that regime was doing and simply got on with making the films that she made under their patronage.

There have been documentaries about her before, yet what makes this one different is that… [read the rest at Reform magazine…]

[Read my alternative review on this site…]

Trailer:

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Origin

Director – Ava DuVernay – 2023 – US – Cert. 12a – 135m

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A US journalist researches a book reinterpreting US racist attitudes to black people through both the Nazi’s segregation of Jews and the Indian caste system’s treatment of Dalits – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 8th

This is based on both the 2020 nonfiction book Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents and its author US journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winner Isabel Wilkerson’s journey in writing that book. Highly effective in putting the first of those elements on the screen, the screenplay, credited to both DuVernay and Wilkerson, proves much more uneven in its attempts to do so with the second.

Wilkerson’s thesis looks at the US’ historic racist treatment of black people through the lens of a caste system. The term caste system derives from the Western European analysis of Indian society, and to a lesser extent other South Asian societies, in which certain designated groups are elevated above others to produce and maintain a social hierarchy. As portrayed here in the film, the book looks firstly at the US in these terms – a caste system favouring white people over blacks – then Nazi Germany – a caste system favouring Germans over Jews, a radical use of caste as an historical analytical tool I have never come across before – and finally India – a caste system putting the Dalits, the untouchables who traditionally clean latrines, at the bottom of the pile below everyone else.… Read the rest