>Ron Leming <[log in to unmask]> writes: >I don't want to sound like I'm supporting Leni Riefenstahl entirely. I'm >not sure the truth will ever be known. As for there being a choice, I'm >not so sure about that. You [[log in to unmask]] mention Lang, Wilder >and the Siodmaks, but >there's a very basic difference you're overlooking there. The examples >you mention are all men. Even today, women aren't represented all that >well in film making, though it's getting there. There may have been >other women film makers in the 40s, but I can't think of any. Women filmmakers who chose not to support Nazism -- Leontine Sagan, for example. And let's not forget (though not a director) Marlene Dietrich. >It's quite easy to look back at history >now and say this was a horrible thing. But we forget that, at the time, >many of the German people thought what was happening was a good thing >for Germany, and many didn't know about the activities of the SS and the >camps. Claiming ignorance, or that one was simply following orders, has been the most indefensible political position of the 20th century. See Claude Lanzmann's work, to name just one. >I find it reprehensible to blame anyone and everyone who didn't actively >contest and fight for what happened and hold them responsible for the >acts of others. Of themselves. We are talking about Leni's work as a filmmaker supporting the Nazi regime. What I find reprehensible is this condoning. When is it gonna stop? >She has always maintained that she didn't know what was >happening until it was too late. Until someone can prove, beyond a doudt >that she did know, I choose to believe her statement. I would like to quote Debra Winger's character Joy Gresham in *Shadowlands* here, when she responds to a statement made by one of C.S. Lewis's colleagues with a question -- but I am afraid I would be censored by Screen-L's new moderator. As for the proof of knowledge you are seeking, it will never come from Leni -- she will continue to lie for the next 100 years. I would also like to comment further with a personal story. My father, born in 1927, grew up in Italy under Fascism. He did not have access to anything else -- he, also, was surrounded by the belief that "what was happening was a good thing for [Italy]." However, at the age of 16, with the events of 8 September 1943 (Italy's surrender to the Allied forces) and afterwards (the German occupation of Northern Italy, the republic of Salò), he made a choice. And he has been an anti-fascist ever since. Giuliano Montaldo's film *Tiro al Piccione /Pigeon Shoot* (1961), chronicles this major turning point in the life of that generation. Gloria Monti ______________________________ Gloria Monti, Ph.D. Research Associate University of California, Santa Cruz Film and Digital Media Department e-mail: [log in to unmask] "Given the realities of widescale migration, the end of conventional colonialism, and the emergence of the new non-European worlds from subjection and marginality, we need to jettison Eurocentrism definitively." Edward W. Said ---- Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu