The Last Of The Nuba

From 1962 until 1977 Riefenstahl had been living as the first white woman with a special permission issued by the Sudanese government in the remote valleys of the central Sudan among the Nuba tribe. She studied their way of life and recorded it on film and in pictures. These picture documents hold a unique anthropological, ethnological, and cultural-historical importance due to the circumstances through which the Nuba's historical way of life is approaching its irreversible end, primarily through the advance of civilization.

The conflict in the Nuba Mountains in central Sudan illustrates how state policies concerning the control of land can cause local conflicts to escalate into large scale wars, which become increasingly difficult to manage or resolve.

Leni Riefenstahl, the woman known as “Hitler’s filmmaker,” made some of the greatest and most innovative documentaries ever made. They are also insidious glorifications of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Now, Steven Bach reveals the truths and lies behind Riefenstahl’s lifelong self-vindication as an apolitical artist who claimed to know nothing of the Holocaust and denied her complicity with the criminal regime she both used and sanctified. A riveting and illuminating biography of one of the most fascinating and controversial personalities of the twentieth century.

Susan Sontag's third essay collection brings together her most important critical writing from 1972 to 1980. In these provocative and hugely influential works she explores some of the most controversial artists and thinkers of our time, including her now-famous polemic against Hitler's favourite film-maker, Leni Riefenstahl, and the cult of fascist art, as well as a dazzling analysis of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Hitler, a Film from Germany. There are also highly personal and powerful explorations of death, art, language, history, the imagination and writing itself.

Leni Riefenstahl is larger than life. From the lure of her persona as it enters our homes via television to our pleasure in the recognition of her film images at rock concerts, to her place as part of the history of the Nazi period, Riefenstahl lives on in our imagination and in our cultural productions. Thus, the editors' introduction to this volume examines the manner in which Riefenstahl 'haunts' debates on aesthetics and politics, and how her legacy reverberates in the contemporary cultural scene. The editors view the collection as a three-part framework. The essays in the opening section of the book show that Riefenstahl is still very much alive and well - and controversial - in popular culture. Her films continue to determine the way in which we think about the Nazi period, providing instantly recognizable images and messages that often go unquestioned. We cannot separate these phenomena from Riefenstahl's years of avid self-fashioning. The second section of the book offers treatments of the shifting, mobile relationship between Riefenstahl's stubborn attempts to create and control her personae and her reactions to others' re-appropriations of the meanings of her life and work. Reading the texts and discourses surrounding 'Riefenstahl,' these scholars treat her memoirs - and her repeated assertions about herself - as a springboard into understanding anew how we might approach her films in a productive way. The closing section of the volume comprises essays that go right to the heart of the matter: Riefenstahl's films and photography. The new contexts-theoretical discussions and emerging discourses that animate these essays-include Scarry's treatise on beauty, justice and the global, the problems of history and memory, the place of Riefenstahl's filmmaking technique in contemporary cinema, and her appropriation of German musical traditions. Fueled by the work of a diverse range of scholars, then, Riefenstahl Screened offers an opportunity to rethink the place of Leni Riefenstahl and her work in contemporary culture and in academic discourse. It insists upon a critical self-examination that maps a topography of how scholars and teachers avail themselves of Riefenstahl's corpus.

In this thoughtful introduction, Nichols provides a context for the paradoxes that confront film studies today. He shows how shared methods and approaches continue to stimulate much of the best writing about film, points to common problems most critics and theorists have tried to resolve, and describes the internal contradictions that have restricted the usefulness of post-structuralism.