Latest news with #LeniRiefenstahl
Time Out
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Leni's Last Lament
Photograph: Courtesy Francis Krow | Leni's Last Lament Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl reflects, deflects and tries to justify her past in a satirical dark comedy by Gil Kofman that takes the form of a desperately self-serving cabaret act. Jodie Markell stars as the ever-fascinating fascist, accompanied by Spiff Wiegand on accordion and violin; Richard Caliban directs. Thu, May 29, 2025 Fri, May 30, 2025 Sat, May 31, 2025 Sun, Jun 1, 2025 Thu, Jun 5, 2025 Fri, Jun 6, 2025 Sat, Jun 7, 2025 Thu, Jun 12, 2025 Fri, Jun 13, 2025 Sat, Jun 14, 2025 Show more By entering your email address you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and consent to receive emails from Time Out about news, events, offers and partner promotions. 🙌 Awesome, you're subscribed! Thanks for subscribing! Look out for your first newsletter in your inbox soon! Discover Time Out original video
The Independent
23-05-2025
- Sport
- The Independent
100 years after Hitler's infamous Games, the Olympics could return to Berlin
Berlin is making a bid to host the Olympic and Paralympic Games, potentially marking a century since the controversial 1936 Games held under Nazi rule. Mayor Kai Wegner is set to unveil the city's plans on Tuesday at Berlin's Olympic Stadium, joined by representatives from four supporting German states. While the invitation to the Tuesday event, sent on Friday, is ambiguous about the specific target year, the timing of the announcement suggests that the city is aiming for 2036 – 100 years after the last Berlin Games. Los Angeles has been confirmed to host the event in 2028 and Brisbane in 2032. However, the German Olympic Sports Confederation has also suggested a possible bid for the 2040 Games. The states of Brandenburg, Saxony, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and Schleswig-Holstein would also host competitions as part of Berlin's bid. Berlin's Olympic stadium, known as Olympiastadion in German, was built for the 1936 Games, as were multiple other gymnasiums and smaller arenas. Adolf Hitler was personally involved in the design and construction of the 100,000-seat track-and-field stadium after the Nazis assumed power in 1933 – two years after the Games were awarded to the city. The Nazi leader was initially unenthused by the idea of hosting the Games, but he changed his mind after being convinced of their potential for propaganda. He invited Leni Riefenstahl to film the event and she used the material for her documentary film Olympia, released in 1938. German Jewish athletes were mostly barred from competing in the 1936 Games, which were the last to be held for 12 years due to the turmoil caused by World War II. The next Summer Olympics were in London in 1948. American track and field athlete Jesse Owens was the most successful athlete at the 1936 Games, winning four gold medals. ESPN later said that as a Black man, Mr Owens 'single-handedly crush[ed] Hitler's myth of Aryan supremacy'. Olympiastadion is still in use and hosted the European Championship final between Spain and England in 2024. Hertha Berlin plays its home games there, and on Saturday it will host the German Cup final between Stuttgart and Arminia Bielefeld.
Associated Press
23-05-2025
- Sport
- Associated Press
Berlin wants to host the Olympics again as 100th anniversary of 1936 Games looms
BERLIN (AP) — Berlin is making a bid to host the Olympic Games again, possibly 100 years after the city hosted the 1936 edition under the Nazis. Berlin mayor Kai Wegner is to present plans to bid for the Olympic and Paralympic Games, with help from four other German states, on Tuesday at Berlin's Olympic stadium. The invitation to the presentation sent Friday does not mention which Games the city is bidding for, but the next available edition will be in 1936 — the 100th anniversary of the Berlin Games. The German Olympic Sports Confederation has said a German bid for the 2040 Games is also possible. Los Angeles hosts the 2028 Olympics and Brisbane was awarded the 2032 edition. The states of Brandenburg, Saxony, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and Schleswig-Holstein would also host competitions as part of Berlin's bid. Berlin's Olympic stadium, known as Olympiastadion in German, was built for the 1936 Games. Adolf Hitler was personally involved in the design and construction of the 100,000-seat track-and-field stadium after the Nazis assumed power in 1933 – two years after the Games were awarded to the city. Hitler was initially unenthused by the idea of hosting the Games, but he changed his mind after being convinced of their potential for propaganda. He invited Leni Riefenstahl to film the event and she used the material for her film Olympia. Olympiastadion is still in use and hosted soccer's European Championship final between Spain and England last year. Hertha Berlin plays its home games there, and on Saturday it will host the German Cup final between Stuttgart and Arminia Bielefeld. ___ AP soccer:
Telegraph
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The strange story of the visionary director trapped in Goebbels's fist
Halfway through The Director, Daniel Kehlmann's engrossing and terrifying seventh novel, its protagonist meets a powerful politician, a Minister of the Reich. This man has a Rhenish accent and a slight limp on his right side. 'Delighted, delighted, delighted!' the Minister says on meeting his guest, until, when the supplicant rejects one of the Minister's suggestions, the latter changes his tack. ''Wrong answer,' said the Minister. 'Wrong answer, wrong answer, wrong answer, wrong answer, wrong answer.'' The lack of exclamation mark reveals which statement is serious and which is not. The unrelenting repetition is ruthless and shocking. The Director delivers such shocks with similar ruthlessness but far more subtlety. Kehlmann proves his mastery of the historical form in reconceiving the life of GW Pabst, the Austrian director who was the contemporary and compatriot of Fritz Lang – whose visionary Metropolis (1927) remains as visionary as the day it was made. Pabst's name has mostly passed into obscurity; it's the names of the women whose early careers he furthered, among them Louise Brooks, Leni Riefenstahl and Greta Garbo, whose reputations have endured. The real Pabst made films – not as successfully as he would wish – in France before the Second World War. Kehlmann takes effective liberties with his story by getting him to Hollywood, that place garlanded with alien palms. But it's true that Pabst returned to Austria (renamed Ostmark) during the war. Here, extraordinarily, he and his wife Trude cross the border back into the Fatherland just as his compatriots are escaping. Yes, his mother is ill and needs to be cared for; but yes, a charming Nazi agent persuades him that back in the Reich he will have all the money he needs to make the films he wants, all the staff, all the freedom. Yet the knowledge of how that meeting with Hitler's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels is going to go – for, although he is never named, it is he in the scene described above – underscores, rather than undermines, the dread. Kehlmann's last novel, Tyll, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2020. It was centred on another entertainer caught up in a destructive conflict: the Thirty Years' War of the 17th century. Tyll himself is based on a character from German folklore, a jester, a trickster. Both novels use shifting viewpoints to observe global events, and human responses to those events, with a wickedly observant eye, though where Tyll is a spark, Pabst is, in Kehlmann's depiction, eternally gloomy. Yet his inertia, which takes on a haunting, deeply surreal air, is frightening: we feel ourselves drawn into his paralysis and the paralysis of everyone around him, including his son, Jakob, who's inducted inexorably into the Hitler Youth. Over and again, Kehlmann's central characters observe themselves performing actions as if from a great distance – or indeed, as if in a film. Jakob, as a teenager, learns to be a bully, learns that violence in his new world brings dominion and success. 'When you can't do something, and at the same time have no choice but to do it, there's only one solution: have someone else do it. Someone who looks like you and who uses your body, but who has no difficulty shooting two bullets into the head of a small screaming deer.' Perhaps it is a deer, or perhaps it is not. As in Tyll, Kehlmann draws in elements of German mythtelling to deepen his tale. When Pabst and his family arrive at the family home near Salzburg, they are met at the station by the caretaker, Jerzabek, who rants about the Jews – 'The Führer was now driving out the vermin' – to his passengers in the carriage. If those passengers take issue with these sentiments or even reply, the author does not note it. But gradually Jerzabek develops into an ogre, his two monstrously tall and cruel daughters like trolls in a dreadful fable. Is Jerzabek real, or a figure of Pabst's imagination? The truth is somewhere in the middle: his sinister weirdness demonstrates how much the power of our own storytelling, for good or ill, compels us. Make peace with a monster, Kehlmann suggests, and the monster will appear in another form, right in your own house, opening a trap door to a cellar – and by then it's too late.
Times
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Riefenstahl — a devastating, five-star portrait of Hitler's propagandist
★★★★★It's not often that films get better on a second viewing, but this dense, challenging and intellectually rigorous documentary about 'Hitler's favourite film-maker' Leni Riefenstahl is one of those exceptions. I gave it a four-star rave when I saw it last year at the heady, buzzy Venice Film Festival. But a subsequent, and more composed, encounter reveals even greater depths and bolder ambition from the German writer-director Andres Veiel. He has delivered an expansive work about the woman behind the Nazi blockbusters Triumph of the Will and Olympia, and someone who was counted as, according to the diaries of Joseph Goebbels, a 'friend' of Hitler and his propaganda minister. It's a disturbing film that knits together previous Riefenstahl profiles (including TV interviews, newsreel
