The ambiguous personality of Hitler’s favorite photographer, a romantic epic in Asia from the last century, a social comedy about two warring brothers, a female genre film where bulls play werewolves… The films being screened this week year are very varied. styles.
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“Leni Riefenstahl, lights and shadows”: a Hitlerite feminist
During her lifetime, Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003), director of Triumph of truth (1935) and stadium gods (1936), she refused to let Hollywood make a biographical film about her. Several tried it before giving up: Jodie Foster, Steven Soderbergh, Paul Verhoeven. Many screenwriters must have broken their teeth there. Empathy would be complicated; judgment, uninteresting. And what to show? The free woman, pioneering director, who established herself in a man’s world? The filmmaker favored by Hitler, helped shape the superman and aesthetically put together the IIImy Reich? Or the repentant woman who spent the post-war period rewriting her history and lying, claiming ignorance of what Hitler’s regime was doing? To answer these questions we will now have to take into account the documentary by Andrés Veiel, who consulted some 700 archive boxes preserved by the filmmaker’s partner. A colossal work of archiving and editing, Andrés Veiel’s documentary is parsimonious in the voice-over and never tells us what to think. Giving a verdict is not your primary concern, and that is your price. It is pleasant for the viewer to have that feeling that does not choose between the horrible and the fascinating, the monstrous and the feminist. From then on, we are given the space to reflect: on the beauty that can blind and serve as a pretext for immorality, as well as on this woman’s gaze that colonizes everything she looks at. Mr. Jo.
German documentary by Andrés Veiel (1h55).
“ Grand Tour”: double conceptual travel story in Asia
1918. Edward Abbott, a young British civil servant stationed in Rangoon, learns that Molly, to whom he has been engaged for eight years, plans to join him. He decides to leave, beginning a journey that will take him from Burma to China, passing through the Philippines, Japan and Vietnam. The young woman, refusing to believe that he has run away to escape marriage, goes out to look for him, carefully following his footprints in the places where he has passed. Each trip is marked, for the two Westerners, by unforeseen encounters. Without being able to go through a formal and sensitive experience that has no real equivalent in current cinema, let us point out that, at the origin of the film, there are documentary images taken by director Miguel Gomes and his team during a trip to Southeast Asia. , plans without a preconceived scenario and filming interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Upon arrival, the discursive redistribution of the material is put at the service of an original narrative. Unless it is the opposite, that is, the recomposition of a romantic plot adapting to pre-existing images. In any case, it is a tragicomic, picaresque and epic story, as much as it is a mixture of sensations, a geographical and mental journey, a conceptual puzzle. JF. TO.
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