Ex-filmmaker for Nazis unrepentant at 100

THE VANCOUVER SUN, FRIDAY, August 23, 2002

Leni Riefenstahl is still working at craft

By DAVID RISING

   BERLIN — The films she made for Adolf Hitler brought her international attention, then destroyed her postwar directorial career. But as she turned 100 on Thursday, it is still those movies that Leni Riefenstahl thinks of most proudly.

   Once dubbed a "Nazi pin-up girl" by The Saturday Evening Post, Riefenstahl remains unrepentant about her work for Hitler, saying her films portraying Nazi Germany were about art, not propaganda or ideology.

   Speaking to The Associated Press by telephone from her home near Munich, she dismissed the notion, prevalent in Germany, that she should apologize for helping to glorify Hitler and the Nazi party. Instead, she emphasized the prizes she received for them.

   "I don't know what I should apologize for," Riefenstahl said. "I cannot apologize, for example, for having made the film Triumph of the Will. It won the top prize. All my films won the top prize."

   In Triumph of the Will, a critically acclaimed documentary, Riefenstahl employed a crew of 120 with 40 cameras to put together mesmerizing montages of goose-stepping soldiers in torchlight parades, endless rows of swastikas, and close-ups of Hitler and other Nazi leaders speaking to a dazzled German public.

   Riefenstahl admits it was used to sell National Socialism, but says that was not her intent.

   "One can use it for propaganda, but in and of itself it is no propaganda film — it has absolutely no commentary. . . . There is not one single anti-Semitic word in my film," she said.

   One of Riefenstahl's biographers, Rainer Rother, called her view simplistic.

   "I think she might not have been an anti-Semitic woman, but she still was aware of what was going on," said Rother, whose book Leni Riefenstahl: The Seduction of Talent is being released in English this month to coincide with her birthday.

   "National Socialism means at least you don't say no to anti-Semitism — that's something she must have known at the time and calculated."

   Despite her age and poor health due to injuries sustained in accidents — including a helicopter crash in Sudan in 2000 — Riefenstahl is still working and physically active — diving for three weeks in March in the Maldives.

   She is also about to release her first film in nearly half a century. A 45-minute documentary cut from footage shot during dives in the Indian Ocean between 1974 and 2000, Impressions under Water will be broadcast on German television later this month in honour of her birth-day.

   So powerful were the images in Triumph of the Will and her documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Olympia, that Riefenstahl was unable to escape their stigma after the war. She turned to still photography, but still faced criticism that she promoted a Nazi esthetic of the Uebermensch, or superman, in particular in her photos of sculpted African tribesmen.

   Born Helene Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl in Berlin in 1902, Riefenstahl was a dancer until she sustained a knee injury. In 1926, she debuted as an actress in the derring-do movie The Sacred Mountain — one of director Arnold Fanck's many alpine films emphasizing athleticism.

   After several more movies, she made her directorial debut in 1932 with The Blue Light, in which she also starred. While her documentaries have won the most praise, it is this metaphorical film that is Riefenstahl's favourite.

   "The action, the story and also the reproduction of the film make it particularly beautiful and picturesque," she said.

   The same year that The Blue Light was released, Riefenstahl heard Hitler speak at a Berlin rally and offered her services as a filmmaker. "He had everyone under a spell," she later said.

   She provided the Nazis with a medium that transcended borders, Rother said.

   "She never was a true believer, but she had a unique opportunity. No one else at that time could command such a lot of cameramen and the support of the party and state for the rallies. She used, in a way, the system for a work of art but also served the ideology. There's no doubt the party rally films are carefully constructed to support the party message."

Early movie artifact comes to light

Stained glass sign for the Kinemacolor Theatre was found in ex-restaurant site

 

A circa-1913 stained glass window that was missing for decades is now in the
possession of a dealer in architectural antiques

By JOHN MACKIE

Vancouver Sun

   A unique artifact from the dawn of the movie age has sur­faced at a Vancouver antique store — a stained glass sign for the Kinemacolor Theatre.

Kinemacolor was a primitive colour film process that was all the rage in Europe just before the First World War.

   Its North American debut was at Madison Square Garden in New York in 1909, and on Feb. 24, 1913, Canada's first Kinemacolor Theatre opened at 603 Granville, at Dunsmuir.

   But it failed to ignite Vancou­ver's masses, and by 1914, the the­atre name had been changed to the Colonial. The Colonial lasted until 1972, when it was torn down to make way for the Pacific Cen­tre Mall/Block 42 development downtown.

   The kinemacolor process died out by 1920, a victim of a patent lawsuit in England and the inven­tion of technicolor in 1917. Most kinemacolor films have been lost, and any kinemacolor memorabil­ia is extremely rare.

   The Kinemacolor Theatre stained glass was recently pur­chased by Eric Cohen of Archi­tectural Antiques.

   It had been hanging on the wall at the former Keg restaurant location at Thurlow and Alberni after mysteriously vanishing from the Colonial in 1972.

   Theatre legend Hugh Pickett said the huge semi-circular stained glass sign (which is 13 feet wide and seven feet high) was originally installed over the entrance to the old theatre.

   "I can remember it very well, because when the theatre was sold, they promised me four pieces of stained glass," Pickett said.

   "The night before it was to be taken out, somebody went in there and took it."

   Two oval stained glass sky-lights featuring the kinemacolor torch logo also turned up at the old Keg. Cohen purchased them as well, and is selling them for $15,000 for the pair. He hasn't put a price tag on the Kinemacolor Theatre sign.

   How they wound up at the Keg is a mystery. Retired architect Bill Dunn helped design the Keg on Thurlow in 1977. He said most of the furnishings, which included elaborate oak bookshelves and oak wall panels, cam' from a 19th-century apothecary (drug-store) in Minneapolis and were purchased at auction in Los Angeles.

   Dunn thinks the stained glass came from the collection of then landlord John Adams, but has no idea how Adams obtained it. He thinks the restaurant furnishings may have cost about $100,000 in 1977.

   The Keg moved to a bigger location across the street last fall, but most of the furnishings were left behind. A carpenter hap­pened by when a demolition crew was ripping out the oak walls and some stained glass, which was going to b: thrown out.

   He asked if he could have it, and contacted Cohen, who bought a couple of stained-glass windows and a garage filled with century-old oak panels

Cohen then went down to the old Keg to poke around He spotted the Kinemacolor Theatre sign, bought it, and assembled a crew of six to take it down off the wall (he estimates it weighs 600 to 700 pounds.)

   "It was stuck right up o the top of the ceiling," he said. I walked to the top of a 17 foot ladder, and I was standing knocking a metal pin out to release the window."

   The Kinemacolor sign is one of the few remnants of Vancouver's silent movie era, when theatres had colourful name like the Cameraphone, the Bijou and the Maple Leaf. A couple old the­atres still remain from the era, like the Pantages on Hastings street and the Edison now the Paramount in New Westminster, but finding an original sign is nothing short of miraculous.

   In fact, English kinemacolor expert Luke McKerna has nev­er heard of a kinemacolor stained glass sign. He thinks it may have been commissioned by the the­atre owner, who probably thought that having the only colour movies in town would be a gold mine.

   Kinemacolor was invented by English cinematographer George Albert Smith, and marketed by American entrepreneur Charles Urban. Film was run through a projector at 32 frames per sec­ond, twice the normal speed, and then filtered through red and green coloured lenses to produce "the world's wonders in nature's colours."

   Vancouver's Kinemacolor The­atre was located in the Van Horne building, which was built in 1889. It opened with a program of Wild Birds of Asia, Doctor's Blind Child, The Note in a Shirt, Two of a Kind, and Niagara Falls, which a Vancouver World writer dubbed "the finest reel ever put on a screen." A nine-piece orchestra accompanied the short films, and a baritone named George C. Temple "delighted the audience with some of the old songs." Later, the theatre added a $10,000 organ to accompany the silent movies.

   Pickett has fond memories of the theatre when it was called the Colonial. He got his first job there in 1929.

   "I'll tell you something tragic," says Pickett, who turns 88 in a few weeks. "My first job there, I had to go into a room in the basement of the building, which had been condemned by the fire department because it was full of paper. All the old three sheets [movie posters], one sheets, 24 sheets, stills, everything was in that room. I had to take it out in barrels and take it out into the lane and burn it.

   "Can you imagine what it would be worth today? A one sheet of Marlene Dietrich in a picture that she made early on in her career sold for $300,000 at Parke Burnett [gallery] in New York. I had no interest in them then. Good God, now I've had had them all. It was the whole history of the Colonial theatre. It took about three weeks to burn it all"

­   The Kinemacolor Theatre sign isn't the only piece of historic stained glass Cohen has for sale. When Mark James renovated the 1913 Lotus Hotel, he sold Archi­tectural Antiques several finely detailed pieces of stained glass. The old stained glass window from the Lotus bar, for example, is now for sale for $5,500.

   Cohen is now trying to piece together the oak bookcase from the Minneapolis apothecary, which had been disassembled. The centrepiece of the bookcase features carved griffins, mythical beasts that look like lions.

   Cohen might have 30 feet of bookcase by the time he's finished.

Ghosts of Mars Review - 24 August 2001

Carpenter quickly cuts off what's good about Ghosts

After Pam Grier loses her head in a promising opening scene of butchy banter, Ghosts of Mars just gets worse

GHOSTS OF MARS

James "Desolation" Williams (Ice Cube, left) and Jericho 

(Jason Statham) battle evil Martian ghosts.

Starring Natasha Henstridge, Ice Cube, Jason Statham, Pam Grier, Clea Duvall and Joanna Cassidy.
18A. 98 min.

By KATHERINE MONK

  At one point in John Carpenter's latest schlock attack, Ghosts of Mars, the butt-kicking cop played by Natasha Henstridge makes it to safety after a 20-minute battle sequence with blood-thirsty assailants that nearly leaves her headless.

  She has a chance at making it back home in one piece, but instead of hopping on the next ship back to Earth, she tells the remnants of her crew that they have to go back to the battle zone. "We have to," she says in all earnestness. "This is about dominion."

  In other words, this burnt-orange waste dump of a planet teeming with severed heads and monsters pulled from the park­ing lot of a Marilyn Manson con­cert is a place nice enough to call home.

  Personally, I can think of a lot of things more appealing than living in a concrete bunker on the red, red sands of home — where psychotic bludgeoners and body-pierced ghouls roam.

  Then again, this movie is not aimed at me. I have no idea just who Carpenter was trying to reach with this dreary mess of cartoon violence, lame lines and cosmetics abuse, except perhaps the handful of genuine psy­chotics who feel they, too, have been possessed by Martians — but there's little doubt that even the most hardcore Carpenter fan will find Ghosts of Mars a com­plete disappointment.

  The film had promise. Opening with a scene of butchy banter between team leader Braddock (Pam Grier) and Lieutenant Melanie Ballard (Henstridge), I thought I was about to experi­ence another sci-fi kitsch fest in the spirit of Paul Verhoeven's satirical Starship Troopers. No sooner do we arrive at our desti­nation of a small Martian mining colony, however, than we lose Grier, our tough-talking team leader.

  Poof. Gone. Decapitated just like that.

  Things just get worse from there. In one pathetic sequence, we go from Henstridge telling her macho sergeant that "I might sleep with you if you were the last man on Earth ... and we aren't even on Earth," to necking with him in a storage room five min­utes later.

  If that weren't had enough, the only two people who do have any chemistry -Henstridge and Ice Cube, who plays a dangerous criminal named Desolation Williams (aieee! scary!) — save each others' lives several times over, but don't so much as kiss.

  No logic. No motivation. Bad special effects and little more than a thread of a script, Ghosts of Mars makes the old Star Trek look like Blade Runner.

So I guess in the big picture, the premature decapitation sort of fits the movie perfectly. A loose collage of moronic dia­logue, screaming fits as an excuse for acting, and blurry shots of blood spurting from sev­ered limbs, nothing quite sums up the experience of seeing the mindless movie called Ghosts of Mars like someone losing their head in the first few frames.

  Next time, Mr. Carpenter says "cut" — I hope he doesn't mean it literally.

Vancouver Sun Movie Critic

At Granville, Park & Tilford, SilverCity Metropolis, Eagle Ridge, SilverCity Coquitlam, Richmond Centre, SilverCity Riverport, Colossus Langley, Grande Surrey, SilverCity Guildford, Cottonwood Chilli­wack, Grand Abbotsford, Sil­verCity Mission.

Ghosts of Mars Review - 22 August 2001

Carpenter paints Mars blood-red

Director takes his violent dystopian vision to the Red Planet in John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars

Vancouver Sun Article 

by Jamie Portman

  John Carpenter figures it's good for business to be a pessimist. That's because his business is making horror movies which are usually set in the future. Is any director in his right mind going to make a "happy" his horror movie? Obviously not.

Big Daddy Mars (Richard Cetrone) lead his warriors to battle
in John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars.

  "There's no drama in a future Utopia because everybody's happy," explains Carpenter, who at 53 has the aura of a white-maned, mildly eccentric acade­mic.    "There's no conflict at all. So I usually think of situations with futures that are kind of darker than what we have now. Things are going to get worse and into that you put a character that’s either an anti-hero or someone who's resentful against the sys­tem."

  This formula served Carpenter's needs when he set out to write and direct Ghosts of Mars. In the new Screen Gems film opening Friday, he envisages a colonized Mars 175 years into the future and comes up with a hellhole environment in which the (640,000 Earthlings who have settled, on the planet to mine its vast natural I resources are threatened with a dead­ly menace — a long-dormant Martian civilization whose demented warriors are systematically taking over the bod­ies of the human intruders. Carpenter throws a couple of formidable human protagonists into the pot — Canada's Natasha Henstridge as a kick-ass Mars police lieutenant and the hulking Ice Cube as a guy called Desolation who's also the planet's most notorious crim­inal.

  Carpenter, who first made his mark with low-budget shockers such as Assault on Precinct 13 before achieving international fame with Halloween in 1978, has wanted to make a Mars movie for nearly two decades.

  "Throughout our civilized history, Mars has been a symbolic deal to human beings. Mars himself was the god of war, of blood lust, passion, death ... all that kind of good stuff that movies are made of." But for a long time, Carpenter couldn't find a plot idea for the kind of Mars movie he wanted to make. Finally, about three years ago an idea started to jell.

  "I started thinking: maybe we could do a situation where the planet has started to be colonized. I didn't want to do a space-helmet movie." Here, Carpenter pauses to give an imitation

of actors mumbling incoherently behind the glass in their helmets.

(left to right) Desolation Williams (Ice Cube) and
director John Carpenter during filming.

"That just wasn't of any interest to me. But if you have a colony on Mars, what would it be really like? Well, because of the environment and the winds and the sand and the fact that radiation would come down, everything would have to be built like an industrial-age stronghold. High tech wouldn't work. You'd have to live in bunkers. If there was a train on Mars, it would have to be made of iron and really have to withstand that kind of

environment."

  All these elements were incorporat­ed in the screenplay which Carpenter and co-writer Larry Sulkis fashioned. But it turns out that, in his heart, Car­penter really thinks he's made a western. It seems he's had a passion for westerns dating back to his childhood. "I thought: this is the American fron­tier. Now I can make a western. That's primarily what I was interested in."

  He's given a couple of extra twists to the movie. For example, a matriarchal society is in charge of the Earth and its colonies. "I'd never seen that before in a movie," he says proudly. "It's a first." He sees the situation this way: "The Earth is overpopulated in the future ... we have too many people and we've ruined the environment. So perhaps the patriarchy has been upended and the women will run things because they control reproduction."

  The other wrinkle is provided by the hideous Martian ghosts with their painted faces and penchant for impal­ing human heads on spikes. Carpenter got the idea for them one day "at about 2 a.m. and I was having a beer and needed to write something down.

  "These ghosts that are left on Mars, that take us over and turn us into them they're an ancient race, a kind of warlike savage race, so I looked back

on all the warlike savage races, the primitive cultures in order to see what they did. Well, they painted their faces They pierced themselves. They chopped heads off. They sometimes played football with the heads: that was a big deal — to kind of own your enemy. They did all sorts of weird stuff."

  The film is full of flashbacks — a late change to the screenplay. Carpenter says the original script "was written in a linear fashion — and it read dull. So the way to deal with it was to scramble it all up ...."

  Carpenter is the first to admit that the film offers his own personal vision of the Martian landscape. "It's not; realistic Mars. This is a stylized Mars. The colour of Mars is not the kind of colour we have. If you look at the Viking photos, it's pink. Well, I'm not going to do a pink horror movie so we made it a really dark red orange."

Gulliver's Travels in TV Times

In this week's TV Times there's a cover article on the upcoming mini-series 'Gulliver's Travels'.  This mini-series stars Ted Danson as Lemuel Gulliver and has an all-star cast.  It will be shown on NBC and CTV Sunday and Monday. Here is the article:

X-Files in TV Week

This week in TV Week magazine the cover story is on the set of the X-Files. Here is the article.

Langoliers in TV Times

In this week's TV Times there is a cover story on the new Stephen King mini-series 'The Langoliers' that will be shown on ABC and CanWest Global this Sunday and Monday. Here is the article: