Her film is called "Impressions Under Water." I wonder what kind of "impressions" Moroder may find while working for Riefenstahl, who is now 100!

Rifenstahl?

The plan for Riefenstahl's Underwater Impressions is to release it in August around the time of her 100th birthday.

From what I know of it, it is taken from footage she made scuba-diving over the years. Similar footage appeared in the documentary about her as well as in the Biography episode on her life. She has also published a book of still photos from her dives.

Riefenstahl is a Romantic in the 19th Century sense who has spent her century of life looking for a perfected beauty. She first sought it in the physical: dance, skiing, mountain climbing, and Olympic sport. Then she sought it through the Cinema and the Nazis: both to her were about creatively designing reality so as to "improve" it into an idealized state.

Her most personal film statement, however, is neither Triumph of the Will nor her masterpiece Olympia, but The Blue Light.

In The Blue Light, the villians are the common people who cannot understand the magic of the light and who destroy it when they are able. The violation of the cave of crystals is a rape metaphor, a statement in favor of the feminine actually. Basically, she's saying that most people are punks, that only a few appreciate beauty and they tend to lose defending it. It's a very Nazi statement but a very Riefenstahl one as well--Leni and the Nazis are forever aligned by this together in my mind. We always think of Riefenstahl as making films for the Nazis and never the idea of Riefenstahl using Cinema to reshape Nazism according to her own desires for it.

In either case, with the collapse of the Nazi dream, Riefenstahl retrenches. Her post-war film, Tiefland, seems a renounciation of politics. Riefenstahl's character flees the landowner (a stand-in for Hitler) to the mountains where she meets a simple-living hunk. The people in the valley are oppressed and revolt. In the end, Riefenstahl's character leaves the mountains with her hunk but doesn't live in the valley with the peasants either--she goes off with the guy away from it all.

Her "hunk" turns up again in the form of the younger lover-cameraman she's been with for many years and in her travels to the Nuba tribe of Africa.

The Nuba represent for her a natural human perfection (the Germans tried to shape themselves into this but failed). The Nuba are born perfected and don't seem to require cultivation or politics. She published two books of photos with the Nuba and shot a lot of film that I hoped she would make into a film at some point. But having found the Nuba, Riefenstahl took flak again (from Susan Sontag among others) for photographing them as she did the Nazis from low angles looking up at their physical perfection. Still, having found a source of perfected human beauty in the Nuba, Riefenstahl could move on. She she didn't quit, instead she sought another refuge from the flak and yet another source for her ideal of perfected beauty: the world underwater.

Diving is akin to dancing so her life comes full circle, and to film the oceanic beauty is to serve up the ultimate of nature's perfection without being criticized for it or disappointed by it.

I'm not sure if Moroder is the right composer to match Riefenstahl's romantic imagery, but Riefenstahl must think so (or else she knew that other people she would have liked to use instead would have refused her--my guess is she really wants Philip Glass).

In any case, I'm looking forward to this film and am interested to see what Moroder makes of it and if her images and his score will go together.