Power of Context
A Photographs For Music video (and Music For Places) using the controversial photo taken in Konskie Poland in September 12, 1939 showing a distraught Leni Riefenstahl, wearing a military uniform, ostensibly reacting to the execution of civilians after a scuffle with police. But we don't know the full context.
In 1939, photography largely wasn't a popular art, so people weren't street photographers like everyone is now. How can we interpret one frame capture? The camera probably didn't have a motor drive, and the photographer is obviously in an anxious moment in a crowd. According to her memoir, Riefenstahl tried to intervene but a German soldier held her at gunpoint and threatened to shoot her. In her memoir she said she did not realize the victims were Jews.
When I watched the video after rendering it I was unnerved by it. It's a unique moment when you're moved by your own work, particularly the moment when her face emerges from the gray background.
The music has nothing to do with Nazi Germany. It was a cinematic ambient remix I did on the 2046 album, but is interesting in the sense that you can combine fictional content about a fictional world and associate it with a historical moment at the beginning of the invasion of Poland and wondering if history is repeating right in your hometown.
It's interesting that ultimately, her life was a story of personal redemption, so that gives another meaning to the photograph. The music I used seems to be more the soundtrack of 2025 rather than 2005, the year of her death. Ironically, the world of 2046 is when the world is in a New Age, emerging from a dark age.
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