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Riefenstahl’s
film is a highly crafted work - a work of genius - that most commentators
would agree is also a work of propaganda. In Riefenstahl’s case,
an extraordinary case, it is a work of propaganda for a destructive
racist triumphalism that led to the extreme catastrophe of a world
war.
By running my film backwards winners become, not losers, but coequals. My emphasis
is on physicality, striving, human beauty, and sincere effort, rather than outcome.
There is, as happens when a film is run backwards, some childish comedy, but
also a bewildering fascination with the mechanics a human action, a sense of
awe at its occurrence, and beauty. The original commentary, in German, becomes
- by being run backwards - a universal foreign language, in which no one is over,
or under, privileged to understand. National flags are lowered with humility,
rather than raised with aggrandisement. At the end of events, laurels are returned
- as they are, metaphorically, in life; we go to the grave, without ownership
of anything other than what we have done, rather than what we have won for ourselves.
I offer my film not as an insult to the Olympic spirit, but as a corrective counterbalance
- a voice to be heard amongst the stridency of competitive nationalism and fetishised
body consumerism - body fascism. |
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