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Wednesday, May 22, 2019



This 1936 Leni Riefenstahl photo takes us into the the Nazi era and is probably part of a series she did associated with the 1936 Berlin Olympics.  A willing propaganda tool of the Hitler regime best known for the Nazi love-fest movie Triumph of the Will, Riefenstahl tried to rehabilitate herself after World War II by doing nature and ethnographic photography, mostly in tropical locales.

1 comment:

  1. German Olympian Erwin Huber. From the prologue of Oympia.
    The part where they light the Olympic torch and the torch relay
    was filmed in Greece. Leni wanted to use Greek youths, but they were too modest to wear the posing straps she wanted them to wear, instead they showed up in long shorts. She soon found a young, striking Russian youth (Anatole Dobriansky, refugee living in Greece with his exiled family)
    He' s the youth you see carrying the Olympic torch when its lit.
    For the rest of prologue, filmed in Greece, German athletes had to be recruited.
    Later in the prologue, the filming was done on the Baltic coast at the Kurisches Nehrung near Koenigsberg (now Kaliningrad). The Baltic location with its cloudy skies allowed better lighting and contrast possibilities and mood lighting effects. The men and women used in that part were local athletes from East Prussia (now Masuria/Mazury region of Poland).
    -In regard to Anatole - He went to Berlin after the filming of Olympia to pursue a film career which did not pan out. Because he was stateless, he was put to work in an armaments factory.
    Eventually he joined the German Navy (1944) on a minisub unit, miraculously he survived the war. After the war he became a stocking salesman. He died in Bavaria (1982).

    -Rj in the IE

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