Die Nuba.
About this book
Leni Riefenstahl was one of the most outstanding film directors and documentary photographers of the 20th century. This classic work, whose documentary and artistic merits and contribution to cultural history make it a worthy companion to her equally famous study The Last of the Nuba (which deals with the Mesakin Nuba) was first published in 1976.Although the Nuba of Kau - anthropologists call them the "South East Nuba" - live little more than 100 miles from the gentle and peace-loving Mesakin, they speak a different language and observe different customs and conventions. A wild and passionate people, they are also different from the Mesakin in character and temperament. Their knife-fights, dances of love, and elaborately painted faces and bodies, which appear to be "living Picassos", are unmatched by any surviving primitive race on earth. Leni Riefenstahl does not claim to have captured their entire way of life in this book. She has concentrated on photographing what distinguishes the South East Nuba from other tribes of her acquaintance.Leni Riefenstahl's unforgettable photographic impressions of the life of the People of Kau bear an all too final witness to a primitive tribe which even at the time of her journey was menaced by the advance of industrial civilization and has by now slowly subsided into the mists of time.