A letter to Kathryn Bigelow on Zero Dark Thirty

A letter to Kathryn Bigelow on Zero Dark Thirty's apology for torture
By peddling the lie that CIA detentions led to Bin Laden's killing, you have become a Leni Riefenstahl-like propagandist of torture
Naomi Wolf
Friday 4 January 2013
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/04/letter-kathryn-bigelow-zero-dark-thirty

The Hurt Locker was a beautiful, brave film; many young women in film were inspired as they watched you become the first woman ever to win an Oscar for directing. But with Zero Dark Thirty, you have attained a different kind of distinction.

Your film Zero Dark Thirty is a huge hit here. But in falsely justifying, in scene after scene, the torture of detainees in "the global war on terror", Zero Dark Thirty is a gorgeously-shot, two-hour ad for keeping intelligence agents who committed crimes against Guantánamo prisoners out of jail. It makes heroes and heroines out of people who committed violent crimes against other people based on their race – something that has historical precedent.

Your film claims, in many scenes, that CIA torture was redeemed by the "information" it "secured", information that, according to your script, led to Bin Laden's capture. This narrative is a form of manufacture of innocence to mask a great crime: what your script blithely calls "the detainee program".

What led to this amoral compromising of your film-making?

Could some of the seduction be financing? It is very hard to get a film without a pro-military message, such as The Hurt Locker, funded and financed. But according to sources in the film industry, the more pro-military your message is, the more kinds of help you currently can get: from personnel, to sets, to technology – a point I made in my argument about the recent militarized Katy Perry video.

It seems implausible that scenes such as those involving two top-secret, futuristic helicopters could be made without Pentagon help, for example. If the film received that kind of undisclosed, in-kind support from the defense department, then that would free up million of dollars for the gigantic ad campaign that a film like this needs to compete to win audience.

This also sets a dangerous precedent: we can be sure, with the "propaganda amendment" of the 2013 NDAA, just signed into law by the president, that the future will hold much more overt corruption of Hollywood and the rest of US pop culture. This amendment legalizes something that has been illegal for decades: the direct funding of pro-government or pro-military messaging in media, without disclosure, aimed at American citizens.

Then, there is the James Frey factor. You claim that your film is "based on real events", and in interviews, you insist that it is a mixture of fact and fiction, "part documentary". "Real", "true", and even "documentary", are big and important words. By claiming such terms, you generate media and sales traction – on a mendacious basis. There are filmmakers who work very hard to produce films that are actually "based on real events": they are called documentarians. Alex Gibney, in Taxi to the Dark Side, and Rory Kennedy, in Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, have both produced true and sourceable documentary films about what your script blithely calls "the detainee program" – that is, the regime of torture to generate false confessions at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib – which your script claims led straight to Bin Laden.

Fine, fellow reporter: produce your sources. Provide your evidence that torture produced lifesaving – or any – worthwhile intelligence.

But you can't present evidence for this claim. Because it does not exist.

Five decades of research, cited in the 2008 documentary The End of America, confirm that torture does not work. Robert Fisk provides another summary of that categorical conclusion. And this 2011 account from Human Rights First rebuts the very premise of Zero Dark Thirty.

Your actors complain about detainees' representation by lawyers – suggesting that these do-gooders in suits endanger the rest of us. I have been to see your "detainee program" firsthand. The prisoners, whom your film describes as being "lawyered up", meet with those lawyers in rooms that are wired for sound; yet, those lawyers can't tell the world what happened to their clients – because the descriptions of the very torture these men endured are classified.

I have seen the room where the military tribunal takes the "testimony" from people swept up in a program that gave $5,000 bounties to desperately poor Afghanis to incentivize their turning-in innocent neighbors. The chairs have shackles to the floor, and are placed in twos, so that one prisoner can be threatened to make him falsely condemn the second.

I have seen the expensive video system in the courtroom where – though Guantánamo spokesmen have told the world's press since its opening that witnesses' accounts are brought in "whenever reasonable" – the monitor on the system has never been turned on once: a monitor that could actually let someone in Pakistan testify to say, "hey, that is the wrong guy". (By the way, you left out the scene where the CIA dude sodomizes the wrong guy: Khaled el-Masri, "the German citizen unfortunate enough to have a similar name to a militant named Khaled al-Masri.")

In a time of darkness in America, you are being feted by Hollywood, and hailed by major media. But to me, the path your career has now taken reminds of no one so much as that other female film pioneer who became, eventually, an apologist for evil: Leni Riefenstahl. Riefenstahl's 1935 Triumph of the Will, which glorified Nazi military power, was a massive hit in Germany. Riefenstahl was the first female film director to be hailed worldwide.

It may seem extreme to make comparison with this other great, but profoundly compromised film-maker, but there are real echoes. When Riefenstahl began to glamorize the National Socialists, in the early 1930s, the Nazis' worst atrocities had not yet begun; yet abusive detention camps had already been opened to house political dissidents beyond the rule of law – the equivalent of today's Guantánamo, Bagram base, and other unnameable CIA "black sites". And Riefenstahl was lionised by the German elites and acclaimed for her propaganda on behalf of Hitler's regime.

But the world changed. The ugliness of what she did could not, over time, be hidden. Americans, too, will wake up and see through Zero Dark Thirty's apologia for the regime's standard lies that this brutality is somehow necessary. When that happens, the same community that now applauds you will recoil.

Like Riefenstahl, you are a great artist. But now you will be remembered forever as torture's handmaiden.

Nazi Film Still Pains Relatives

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/movies/02suss.html

Nazi Film Still Pains Relatives
LARRY ROHTER
March 1, 2010

In the history of the cinema, the German director Veit Harlan occupies an especially ignominious position. It is his name that is attached to “Jew Süss,” perhaps the most notoriously anti-Semitic movie ever made, a box office success in Nazi Germany in 1940 that was so effective that it was made required viewing for all members of the SS.

But what motivated Harlan to write and direct such a film? Was he a Nazi true believer, an opportunistic careerist or just a filmmaker too fearful of retribution to say no to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief? Those are some of the questions that another German director, Felix Moeller, asks in “Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss,” a documentary that opens a two-week engagement Wednesday at Film Forum in Manhattan.

“Harlan may be forgotten, but he was an influential figure, frequently mentioned in Nazi documents and in Goebbels’s diary,” Mr. Moeller said. “That interested me as a historian, but I also wanted to know what the younger generation thinks of this. We think we know everything, but when you ask what your grandfather did on the Eastern Front, what went on in your own family, it’s a different matter, and that story is important to me.”

Mr. Moeller’s film includes some snippets from “Jew Süss,” whose commercial exhibition or sale as a DVD is still prohibited in Germany and several other European countries. Set in the 18th century, it claims to be a dramatization of the true story of how a sinister, cunning Jewish financier, Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, took control of the duchy of Wurttemberg while preying sexually on a pure Aryan maiden, played by Harlan’s wife, Kristina Söderbaum. The bulk of Mr. Moeller’s film, however, consists of interviews with descendants of Veit Harlan, forced to live with his surname and the stigma of “Jew Süss.”

At 70 years’ remove, the movie itself may feel like a bizarre historical relic, but Karen Cooper, the director of Film Forum, said she found Mr. Moeller’s focus on the original movie’s reverberations through three generations of Harlans to be compelling and contemporary.

“This is a film that deals with issues of guilt and responsibility, which makes it every bit as relevant to you and me as to a German audience,” she said by telephone from the Berlin Film Festival, where a new feature film about the actor who played the title role in “Jew Süss,” Ferdinand Marian, was shown this year.

Harlan was married three times, the first time to a Jewish actress who died in a concentration camp during World War II, and he left behind a large family when he died in 1964 at 64. Some of his children and grandchildren wanted nothing to do with his film, Mr. Moeller said, while a few try to defend him.

But many of them are clearly haunted by the actions of their patriarch. “Why did he have to make it so well?” a son, Caspar, says to Mr. Moeller, referring to “Jew Süss.”

Caspar Harlan’s three daughters, on the other hand, seem more baffled than uncomfortable, dismissing the movie as a bourgeois melodrama that is “so cheesy and really banal.”

One of Veit Harlan’s daughters, Susanne Körber, who took her mother’s surname and committed suicide in 1989, converted to Judaism after marrying a Jew whose parents perished in the Holocaust. The film includes footage of their daughter, Jessica Jacoby, trying to reconcile a horrible truth: that one of her grandfathers was complicit in the death of the other.

“As a German and a Jew, I believe it is important to look at this particular part of the past,” Ms. Jacoby, who plans to join Mr. Moeller in New York for the premiere, said in a telephone interview from Berlin. “Younger people have a different relationship to the past. It’s very far away for them, and some don’t even know who Goebbels was. But when I see a film like ‘Jew Süss,’ there’s still a huge amount of anger.”

Mr. Moeller said he also wanted to offer a more accurate portrayal of the German movie world during the Third Reich. Though most people think of Leni Riefenstahl as the leading filmmaker of the Nazi era, because of the renown of “Triumph of the Will” and “Olympia,” that was not actually the case.

“If you want to understand the movies that people actually paid to go and see, Veit Harlan is the one,” said Linda Schulte-Sasse, the author of “Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema” and a professor at Macalester College in Minnesota. “He was the Steven Spielberg or James Cameron of his era, and so you have to imagine ‘Jew Süss’ as a movie with Meryl Streep, Jack Nicholson and Brad Pitt.”

Unlike overt propaganda films like “The Eternal Jew,” a notorious screed, “Jew Süss” was a commercial release, a hit that was seen by more than 20 million and featured some of the top stars of the day. So the issue of Harlan’s motivations has various possible answers, all of which Mr. Moeller’s film ponders without favoring one over another.

Mr. Moeller, 44, came to the “Jew Süss” project with an unusually broad set of skills and qualifications. He has a doctorate in history, has written several articles for scholarly journals on the arts during the Nazi period, served as a historical adviser to feature films, and also directed a pair of other documentaries on German film figures who lived through the Third Reich.

In addition, he is the son of a prominent German director, Margarethe von Trotta, and the stepson of another, Volker Schlöndorff. But that does not mean that he exempts himself from the historical burdens that are the subject of his film.

“You don’t have to dig deep to find these stories in German families,” he said. “The mother of my father was such a fanatical Nazi that, like Magda Goebbels, she committed suicide at the end of the war and used poison to take five of her six children with her. Those dark, unsettling times never leave you alone. My hope is that you learn from our lesson in history.”

A version of this article appeared in print on March 2, 2010, on page C1 of the New York edition.

The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl

The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl
Allen Greenfield

The German documentary "The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl" is a profoundly unsettling three hours at the movies. At the beginning, a voice-over narration tells us that the movie intends to examine Riefenstahl's unique career "without preconception" -- not an easy task, because her work has always been clouded by her reputation as "Hitler's favorite filmmaker." Riefenstahl, whom Pauline Kael once called "one of the dozen or so creative geniuses who have ever worked in the film medium," directed two undeniably brilliant movies, both of them tainted by the circumstances of their making: "Triumph of the Will" (1935), which records the 1934 Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg, was commissioned by Hitler himself; "Olympia" (1938), a two-part documentary about the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, was officially commissioned by the International Olympic Committee but was largely -- and lavishly -- funded by the Third Reich's treasury.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uczv0tCdC6o

A film by Ray Müller
Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003) dancer, actress, photographer, author, propagandist and the most famous female movie director in the world.