Word: leni
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...finally frustrating not to see the essence of their thing, which is a blur. Arthur Penn has some extremely pretty pictures of pole vaulters slowly soaring, but when he cuts a lot of vaults together to form a sort of aerial ballet, we are inevitably reminded that Leni Riefenstahl did the same thing, using divers, 36 years ago. It is disappointing to see a man of Penn's caliber ripping off an old master...
During the war, Leni was cheerful and passively innocent, never bothering to distinguish between Jews and non-Jews. Now she has trouble fathoming why people are angry at her. Leni's lack of understanding is revealed to the reader at third hand by a character called Au., an abbreviation for Böll's imaginary "Author." He is a priggish, humorless drudge who is determined to assemble the life of his living subject through interviews with people who knew...
...last interview is with Leni herself, but by then her story has been told. Why Au. has been compelled to tell it is a riddle that remains after the novel ends...
Junk. Perhaps it has something to do with an obsession of Leni's that prefigures Au.'s method. As a girl in a convent school, Leni learned to worship the orderly function of her organs, and the instruction had the force of an epiphany. Later she undertook her life's work: reproducing, with a child's paintbox and brush, "a cross section of one layer" of a nun's retina-6,000,000 cones and 100 million tiny rods...
does the same for Leni's life...