Leni Riefenstahl and Tiefland

Tiefland was reportedly Hitler’s favorite opera, but the film is completely cinematic with no music whatsoever, so it wasn’t adapted for that format. Best known for her documentaries Triumph of the Will and Olympia, Tiefland was Leni Riefenstahl’s first (and only) foray into fictional cinema. She displays the tight storytelling (there’s hardly a wasted moment) and innovative camerawork that were both evident in her earlier films. No one does crowds of people like Riefenstahl, and in several scenes with groups of peasants, their movements are as gripping and surprising as the much larger groups in her other films. Tiefland showed what Riefenstahl was capable of when she had complete control over the actors as well as the camera. Watch for the scene where a group of supplicants bow as they ask the Mayoral for water, or the coordinated movements of the audience in the tavern scene, or the men outside the mill during a windstorm.

It’s not clear why Hitler found this story so appealing. It has a strong theme of the hardworking, honest peasants arrayed against the cruel and selfish marquis, who diverts the local water source for his prize bulls, preventing the peasants from growing their crops. We also learn early on that the marquis’ apparent wealth is a sham; he lives in a castle, but is deeply in debt and on the verge of foreclosure unless he can quickly arrange a marriage to a wealthy woman. Riefenstahl herself plays Donna Martha, a traveling dancer who inadvertently finds herself enmeshed in this conflict. In a scene in a tavern, we’re treated to a remarkable…