Josephine Baker

Marlene Dietrich will have to wait a bit, can't wait to post a few Josephine Baker photos, but then josephine was anti-nazi too. And a great dancer and singer, and one of the first true black superstars.

Too bad I can't resist cheating a bit and posting a few photos from her late 20s semi-naked 'Dancing Savage' period, that probably means that this blog will be 'flagged' by Americans so I won't become a trusted future resource for American School kids. Too bad. At least there shouldn't be anything to offend most European readers, not even the younger ones... Well not unless they find my bad writing and none-native grasp of English grammar vaguely offensive.

And Josephine Baker was always much bigger in Europe than in her native country the US. She started her career as a street performer in St. louis, but became an instant succes as an exotic/erotic dancer in Paris in 1925. By the 1930s she was a superstar in France, and during World War II she went underground and worked for La Résistance in Marocco. She was awarded some of the highest French orders after the War.

Amazing woman!











Let's see - Youtube clips! woo hoo!



Well, these are really film clips, just songs, but lovely singing:





And here: first part of an 8 part channel 4 docu, "Chasing a Rainbow, the life of Josephine Baker":



more parts here: http://www.youtube.com/user/mrlopez2681

Leni Riefenstahl

So. Leni Riefenstahl. Leni "I'm completely innoncent. I wasn't a party member. I thought the nazi-thing was some kind of boy-scout organisation" Riefenstahl. Master director and master nazi propagandist.

(I plan to de a series of short visual portraits of female icons from the 30s, and it's propably a bit unfortunate that Riefenstahl is the first one. But I'll probably do famous anti-Nazi Marlene Dietrich next, hopefully that'll even things out.)

The page http://www.dasblauelicht.net has a lot of Riefenstahl information, including posters from her early career as an acress. She mostly acted in German 'mountain'-films, a late 20s/early 30 strange proto-nazi breed of national cinema, which were mostly about good looking young atheltic Germans, climbing German mountain peaks. Weird shit:








Now her propaganda masterpiece "Triumph of the Will", that's a truly scary film. I have a hard time getting through the last part, which has all the really annoying nazi speeches, but the first part and the middle section are completely terrifying. Sometimes it feels almost like someone had travelled to a parallel universe with a camera, a parallel universe where the Third Reich won the war and became this all encompassing global Empire, bigger than The Roman Empire. It's so big, it's so dark, it's so chilling.

Of course you also get the feeling that it wouldn't have lasted that long - if all those ugly stupid semi-bald male nazis had married all those beautiful teutonic maidens, they'd probably have ruined the bloodline because of bad genes, and after a couple of generations they have to kill their own sons according to their own ideals about a master-race. Oh well. It's never easy being an 'über-mensch'.















I've never seen her 2-part "Olympia" sports documentary, but there are some clips on Youtube. Great editing, and nice bodies. You gotta admit that. Looks pretty awesome actually. And it probably has fewer stupid nazi speeches than in "Triumph of the Will", I might get it on DVD one day:



Prologue



Last Diving Sequence:

Dorothea Lange - greatest humanist photographer ever?

"SHORPY - The-100-year Old Photo Blog" has a great collection of old photos in fairly high quality, including some of Dorothea Lange's classics.

Their Lange-collection can be found here, including Lange's own captions. Be sure to check them out, they're in higher quality than those I've posted here.