About this ebook
The editors view the collection as a three-part framework. The essays in the opening section of the book show that Riefenstahl is still very much alive and well - and controversial - in popular culture. Her films continue to determine the way in which we think about the Nazi period, providing instantly recognizable images and messages that often go unquestioned. We cannot separate these phenomena from Riefenstahl's years of avid self-fashioning. The second section of the book offers treatments of the shifting, mobile relationship between Riefenstahl's stubborn attempts to create and control her personae and her reactions to others' re-appropriations of the meanings of her life and work. Reading the texts and discourses surrounding 'Riefenstahl,' these scholars treat her memoirs - and her repeated assertions about herself - as a springboard into understanding anew how we might approach her films in a productive way. The closing section of the volume comprises essays that go right to the heart of the matter: Riefenstahl's films and photography. The new contexts-theoretical discussions and emerging discourses that animate these essays-include Scarry's treatise on beauty, justice and the global, the problems of history and memory, the place of Riefenstahl's filmmaking technique in contemporary cinema, and her appropriation of German musical traditions.
Fueled by the work of a diverse range of scholars, then, Riefenstahl Screened offers an opportunity to rethink the place of Leni Riefenstahl and her work in contemporary culture and in academic discourse. It insists upon a critical self-examination that maps a topography of how scholars and teachers avail themselves of Riefenstahl's corpus.
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About the author
Neil Christian Pages is Assistant Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the Binghamton University SUNY, where he teaches courses in literary theory, cultural history, and European literature. His publications include essays on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Georg Brandes, and W.G. Sebald. He is currently at work on a manuscript on memorials, public memory and other acts of commemoration, tentatively titled On Commemoration: Memory.Identity.Ideology.
Ingeborg Majer O'Sickey is Associate Professor of German and Women's Studies at Binghamton University SUNY. Her publications include numerous articles on German film as well as the co-edited volumes Triangulated Visions: Women in Recent German Cinema (SUNY Press, 1998) and Subversive Subjects: Reading Marguerite Yourcenar (FDU Press, 2004). Her current book project, Women in Nazi Cinema: Engendering Heimat, Genderizing Nation, is forthcoming in 2006 (Berghahn). Her scholarly and teaching interests in contemporary feminist cultural theories, which she mobilizes in order to read cinematic representations of femininities, meld with her work in German literature and culture.
Mary Rhiel is Associate Professor of German at the University of New Hampshire.In tandem with her interests in German film and colonial narratives, particularly those set in China, she has published on German film and on the problems of biography. Her publications include Re-Viewing Kleist: The Discursive Construction of Authorial Subjectivity in West German Kleist Films (Peter Lang, 1991) and the co-edited volume The Seductions of Biography (Routledge, 1996). She has published on teaching Riefenstahl in the journal Unterrichtspraxis.
