THE NUBA - Leni Riefenstahl

From 1962 till 1977 Leni Riefenstahl had been living as the first white woman with a special permission issued by the Sudanese government in the remote valleys of the central Sudan among the mysterious Nabu tribes, had studied their way of life and recorded it on film in pictures of unusual fascination for eternity. Particularly the circumstance that through the advance of civilization the Nuba's way of life is approaching its irreversible end is giving these picture documents a unique anthropological, ethnological and cultural-historical importance.

Who are the Nuba?

Since the outbreak of the civil war in 1983 there have been living in the central Sudan in the Kordofanian province in the Nuba mountains still between 8,000 and 10,000 Masakin Quisar Nuba of different language groups and far from any civilization out of all Nuba tribes counting about half a million people all together. The Austrian anthropologist S.F. Nadel reported that there should have existed 105 different Nuba languages, not dialects but different languages as there are in Europe.

With these sensational pictures, Leni Riefenstahl raised an everlasting monument to this no warlike people in Africa.(leni-riefenstahl.de)

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Maya Deren American experimental filmmakers and photographer

Maya Deren (April 29, 1917 – October 13, 1961), born Eleanora Derenkowskaia, was one of the most important American experimental filmmakers and entrepreneurial promoters of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer and photographer.

The function of film, Deren believed, like most art forms, was to create an experience; each one of her films would evoke new conclusions, lending her focus to be dynamic and always-evolving.] She combined her interests in dance, Haitian Vodou and subjective psychology in a series of surreal, perceptual, black and white short films. Using editing, multiple exposures, jump cutting, superimposition, slow-motion and other camera techniques to her fullest advantage, Deren creates continued motion through discontinued space, while abandoning the established notions of physical space and time, with the ability to turn her vision into a stream of consciousness.

Perhaps one of the most influential experimental films in American cinema was her collaboration with Alexander Hammid on Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). She continued to make several more films of her own, including At Land (1944), A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945), and Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946)  – writing, producing, directing, editing, and photographing them with help from only one other person, Hella Heyman, as camerawoman. She also appeared in a few of her films but never credited herself as an actress, downplaying her roles as anonymous figures rather than iconic deities.Wikipedia

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