If her luck holds, and it always has, the most controversial filmmaker of the last century will celebrate her own centennial with the premiere of her latest, and presumably last, motion picture. On August 22, the release of Impressions Under Water, a 45-minute documentary shot beneath the Indian Ocean, will coincide with the 100th birthday of its remarkable creator. Yet the event will inspire no tribute from the American Film Institute, no highlight reel at the next Academy Awards ceremony, and no commemorative box set of classic hits issued simultaneously on VHS and DVD. Whores and old buildings may gain respectability over time, but the almost defiant longevity of the Nazi director Leni Riefenstahl has yet to improve her bad reputation.
Dancer, actress, photographer, memoirist, and -- the credit line that will be chiseled on her headstone -- director of the Nazis’ infamous Triumph of the Will (1935) and astonishing Olympia (1938), Riefenstahl provides the acid test for the tension between politics and art, truth and beauty. To some, she is a cautionary tale for the ages, a distaff Faust seduced by the most satanic of impresarios. To others, she plays the devil in the tale, a willing executioner of the Third Reich ethos on film, the only authentic genius of the cinema to serve the Nazis in their medium of choice. In the classroom, her art and life offer a uniquely instructive curriculum in how even the most transcendentally gorgeous talent can crash to earth without a moral compass.
Riefenstahl’s epic life in film was fittingly chronicled in an epic motion-picture documentary, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993), made by the director Ray Müller. Attracted but wary, Müller keeps his critical distance, circling around his subject as if she were a Venus’ flytrap ready to spring. The opening shot shows the nonagenarian Riefenstahl floating in crystal-blue ocean waters, the last of the Valkyrie again riding the waves. Still catty about rival actress Marlene Dietrich, still remembering the focal length of every lens she ever used, and still determined to be the only director on the set (she keeps barking orders on camera placement at Müller), Riefenstahl seems as immortal as her films.
Strikingly beautiful and fiercely ambitious, Riefenstahl began a life of performance as an experimental dancer for the theatrical producer Max Reinhardt in the early 1920s. Sidelined by a knee injury and spellbound by the magic of the silent screen, she sent a photograph of herself to Arnold Fanck, creator and chief practitioner of that peculiar Teutonic motion-picture genre, “the mountain film.” Smitten, Fanck cast her as his Aryan ingenue in a series of snow-blind adventures, notably The Sacred Mountain (1926), The White Hell of Piz Palu (1929), and Storm Over Mont Blanc (1930). Game for anything, she risked life and limb scurrying up craggy cliffs and withstanding avalanches touched off by dynamite. Before long, she was directing her own high-altitude melodrama, The Blue Light (1932), in which she played a dappled child of nature who aspired to an ideal of pure beauty but died when the vision was shattered. “It was my own destiny that I had a presentiment of and to which I had given form,” she later reflected in a 1965 interview.
Unbeknownst to Riefenstahl, she had acquired a very special fan. Enchanted by her dance by the sea in The Sacred Mountain, the avid cinephile Adolf Hitler brushed aside the objections of his jealous propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, and commissioned the 32-year-old actress to make a film record of the annual Nazi party congress at Nuremberg.
The documentary she delivered was like nothing seen before, or since. Repellent and riveting, a study in pagan kitsch and industrial-strength totalitarianism, Triumph of the Will bequeathed the iconic images of Nazi Germany: Hitler, soaring above the medieval city and swooping down from the heavens like an eagle, haloed by sunlight as adoring crowds bathe in his divine aura; solemn brownshirts marching in geometric precision; montages of virile German youth in roughneck, homoerotic play; and everywhere, rolling seas of swirling banners and fluttering flags emblazoned with the talismanic swastika. “It reflects the truth that was then, in 1934, history,” Riefenstahl later claimed. “It is therefore a documentary, not a propaganda film.”
Of course, Triumph of the Will is no more a pure documentary than The Blair Witch Project. Choreographing the action, re-enacting scenes, deploying every editing trick in the book and devising new ones of her own, Riefenstahl breathed vibrant visual life into a bare-bones shooting script. Yet the Nuremberg rally was no pseudo-event. On the eve of World War II, watching Triumph of the Will in a kind of appalled admiration, the Hollywood director Frank Capra, charged with making the United States’ own propaganda films, confessed that Riefenstahl’s achievement “scared the hell out of me.”
To this day, Triumph of the Will remains controversial, almost radioactive: A public screening can still spark a picket line in Europe. Practicing a kind of archival quarantine, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum rejected the use of any Riefenstahl footage from its orientation films for visitors on the rise of the Third Reich. (In what seems like a sick joke, a recent DVD edition of Triumph of the Will, from Synapse Films, pledges to donate a portion of its sales to the museum, although I can find no museum official willing to comment on that overture.)
Olympia, Riefenstahl’s two-part documentary on the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, is more palatable, if only because parades of athletes have supplanted battalions of troops. The film critic Pauline Kael considered it one of the “greatest films ever directed by a woman.” Eager to exploit the propaganda windfall of the Olympics and glorify the Third Reich on a global stage, the Nazis placed vast resources at the director’s disposal, and Riefenstahl spent 18 months shaping the raw footage into a 220-minute ballet of movement, where divers defy gravity and runners beat the wind. Not incidentally, the famous still image from the prologue -- a dorsal shot of a nude female athlete, arms uplifted -- is Riefenstahl herself.
Throughout the Berlin Games, the self-styled Master Race presumed a spiritual kinship with the Greek Olympic ideal. As the documentary filmmaker Peter Cohen suggested in The Architecture of Doom (1989), a provocative meditation on the art of the Third Reich, the Nazi ethos might better be understood not as political ideology with an aesthetic expression but as an aesthetic vision with political consequences. Hence, the misty prologue to Olympia wherein the ideal physical types in Greek statuary come to life in the perfectly sculpted forms of runners, discus throwers, and javelin tossers. At least Riefenstahl’s eye for athletic beauty was colorblind. Her cinematic caress of the great African-American track star Jesse Owens belies the Master Race ideology just as Owens’s place at the finish line upended the racial hierarchy of the executive producer seething in the stands.
Although Riefenstahl’s close working relationship with Hitler sparked rumors that the two were lovers (the American tabloids dubbed her “Hitler’s honey”), by all accounts the seduction was ethical, not sexual. In her memoirs, published in Germany in 1987 and translated into English in 1992, Riefenstahl admits that Hitler hypnotized her, but she also claims to have challenged him on his racial policies during their first meeting. Consistently, though, on matters relating to the 12-year Reich, Riefenstahl’s own rhetoric is a smoke screen of selective amnesia and calculated misdirection. Unlike her Triumph of the Will collaborator, Albert Speer, she has never owned up to her complicity and has always played the wide-eyed naif. “What did I do that was political?” she demanded in her 1965 interview.
In American eyes, Riefenstahl’s metamorphosis from a glamorous “girl director” to a dragon lady occurred during a stateside publicity tour for Olympia. In November 1938, soon after she landed in New York, the Nazi pogrom known as Kristallnacht erupted throughout Germany. The Nazis, Riefenstahl declared in press interviews, would never do such a thing. Thereafter, due in no small measure to the activism of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, she was a pariah.
During the war, Riefenstahl mainly kept her head down. Between 1942 and 1945, she devoted herself to an ill-fated project titled Tiefland (Lowlands), ultimately released in 1954, a rural melodrama set in Spain. Like other German productions, slave labor sometimes supplanted the hired help. When “Mediterranean types” were needed, Gypsies were imported from concentration camps.
Despite her prominence in the Third Reich, Riefenstahl was judged a “Nazi sympathizer,” not a war criminal, at her postwar denazification trial. After all, she pointed out repeatedly, she was an apolitical artist who had never formally joined the Nazi Party.
Trying to parlay her quasi-vindication into a full pardon, Riefenstahl set about restoring and reclaiming her films. With lawyers, gall, and money, she eventually managed to obtain personal copyright to her Nazi-era productions by portraying her role in the 1930s as an independent producer, rather than the Third Reich’s in-house talent. Needless to say, many film scholars and documentarians resent paying her tariff. “It is appalling that this legal facade remains intact and that she continues to profit from the role she played in the Nazi propaganda machine,” Sharon Rivo, director of the National Center for Jewish Film, at Brandeis University, recently lamented to me.
Uneasy with issues of copyright and culpability, the academic field of film studies tends to tread carefully around Riefenstahl. “Of course one cannot argue that Riefenstahl’s propaganda is acceptable, but any student of the cinema must try and separate the propaganda from the art,” asserted the film historian Anthony Slide in an introduction to The Films of Leni Riefenstahl, by David B. Hinton. In that book, originally published in 1978 and reissued in 1991, Hinton sought to shed light on Riefenstahl’s canon by filtering out what he called “the distorting prism of the party rally film” and focusing on the “lyrical beauty of her films.” Yet even spectators who gasp at her technique cannot abide compartmentalization when judging a director who “denies her role in history and declares that her endeavors lie outside of time,” the film scholar Eric Rentschler remarked in The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife (1996).
Far and away the most devastating critique of Riefenstahl’s oeuvre -- and to the director the most infuriating -- was launched by the critic Susan Sontag in her oft-cited essay “Fascinating Fascism,” originally published in The New York Times Book Review in 1975. Looking over Riefenstahl’s photography book The Last of the Nuba (1973), Sontag interpreted the color portraits of sinewy Sudanese tribesmen as of a piece with her earlier work, a continuum of a fascist aesthetic built on the cult of the body beautiful. “Riefenstahl seems hardly to have modified the ideas of her Nazi films,” Sontag observed. “Although the Nuba are black, not Aryan, Riefenstahl’s portrait of them evokes some of the larger themes of Nazi ideology: the contrast between the clean and the impure, the incorruptible and the defiled, the physical and the mental, the joyful and the critical.” Sontag added, “To cast Riefenstahl in the role of the individualist-artist, defying philistine bureaucrats and censorship by the patron state ... should seem like nonsense to anyone who has seen Triumph of the Will.” Snarled Riefenstahl in reply: “It’s a mystery to me how such an intelligent woman can talk such rubbish.”
Sontag’s lacerating assault brought Riefenstahl’s inch-by-inch public rehabilitation to a screeching halt. Even feminists (who Sontag noted “would feel a pang at having to sacrifice the one woman who made films that everybody acknowledges to be first-rate”) have been reluctant to claim this brilliant, iron-willed, female Prometheus as a sister under the armband. A movement that celebrates every female filmmaker above the rank of script girl with monographs, conferences, and festivals has been uncharacteristically quiet about Leni Riefenstahl. Hinton’s work remains the only English-language, book-length study in print devoted solely to Riefenstahl’s films.
Perhaps the neglect of Riefenstahl -- as an artist, as opposed to as a case study in demonology -- reflects the difficulty of owning up to the enduring attraction of Nazi aesthetics. Since the 1960s, the main currents of humanistic inquiry have discounted the new-critical notions of immutability and transcendence of art, insisting on the linkage of the personal and the political. Ironically, Riefenstahl, the artist whose career pre-eminently confirms the commingling of art and life, has been auteur non grata precisely because her work has lived beyond its historical moment and ideological context. Whether in the mise-en-scène of Star Wars (1977) or the staging of a heavy-metal rock show, our fascination with her fascism -- our surrender to the absolute beauty of her images -- is unsettling to contemplate.
Riefenstahl, meanwhile, remains committed to what she smugly calls in her memoirs “my comeback.” Not too long ago, at a fin de siècle soiree given by Time magazine, she could be spotted happily chatting with Henry Kissinger. Taking in the scene, a writer for The New Yorker could only comment, “There is no God.” A long-rumored Hollywood biopic is perennially in development, with Madonna and Jodie Foster reportedly interested in the plum role.
Thomas Doherty is an associate professor of film studies at Brandeis University and the author of Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934 (Columbia University Press, 1999).
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