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Minutes for Monday, October 6, 2003
By Heidi Peters
Dr. Reimer handed out a study guide for the midterm on
Wednesday
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matching
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short answers (50 words)
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essay questions (150 words)
We started the class off by picking up with Leni
Reifenstahl and her films THE TRIUMPH OF THE WILL and OLYMPIA.
Dr. Reimer showed three segments of the film OLYMPIA:
1.
the opening clip
2.
a Jesse Owens clip
3.
a diving clip
- Opening Clip: The movie starts off by
showing the ruins in Greece; the music for the sequence starts off sort of
dark and then as the scenes change the music becomes more triumphant.
Next, it pans to some of the statues that the ancient Greeks sculpted in
the image of their athletes and what they thought was the ideal body of
humans. Leni Riefenstahl spends two or three minutes on the statues and
as the scene goes on the statues change into real people. The people
display some of the sports events in which men and women participated in
1936. As the film moves on we see the Olympic flame being lit and runner
after runner exchanging the flame. The scene then turns into a map of
Europe and there is a line showing the destinations of the flame naming
big cities and the countries it is carried through to its final
destination Berlin.
- Jesse Owens Run: This clip shows two of
Jesse’s triumphant wins. Reifenstahl was good at not taking away from the
victories of non-Germans.
- Diving Sequence: Reifenstahl never shows the
results of the dives. The scene starts off normal with the divers jumping
into the water. She makes the diving look like its more an aesthetic
exercise than a competition. As the clip goes on there is no water shown
just the divers jumping off the diving boards. She uses strange (unusual)
camera angles for a diving event, even placing one of her cameramen in
the water. Riefenstahl changes the lighting, and she even uses reverse
motion in the clip.
Riefenstahl is often referenced in the works of
directors who came after her, for example the closing ceremony in George
Lucas’s Star Wars.
-The last clip shown in class was from the movie
GERMANY AWAKE aka Deutschland erwache(was by Erwin Liser):
This was a combination of clips from different German
films.
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