Tiefland

Leni Riefenstahl – 1954 – Germany

The tortured history of Tiefland’s production has effectively obscured its merits as a film in its own right.  It is typically described as an anti-climactic last gasp of a dashed career; Leni Riefenstahl’s.  But what if viewed free of all this context, as though without any awareness of how it was made?  Since it was shot in the early 40s, Tiefland (a.k.a. The Lowlands) does feel old-fashioned for a film released in 1954, but no more so than the later films of people like Bresson or Dreyer, who persisted in their formal presentation even though it no longer matched the style of contemporary films.  In this parable, an ode to the supremacy of nature, Riefenstahl herself plays a gypsy woman torn between a dictatorial land-baron and a simple sheepherder who lives alone in the mountains.  The seemingly anti-fascistic theme was seen as apologetic at the time, but since the film was actually produced under the aegis of the Third Reich, it is possible that its plot partially explains the Nazis’ lack of interest in seeing Riefenstahl complete it.  Despite never joining the party and never making a genuine propaganda film for the Nazis, she was imprisoned after the war and then generally blacklisted after being freed.  Her only consolation was receiving back her footage for Tiefland, which she assembled and debuted  in ’54, to mixed reviews.  Nevertheless, the images are haunting, powerful and elemental, making this film a conspicuous bridge between the old mountain films of pre-Hitler Germany and the imminent works of Werner Herzog of the so-called New German Cinema.