NP? article: Leni Riefenstahl: Ethics of an Auteur

[Doug Millison]

"Brock [...] leaning darkly in above her like any of
the sleek raptors that
decorate fascist architecture." (Vineland, p. 287)

http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i48/48b01001.htm

August 9, 2002
Leni Riefenstahl: Ethics of an Auteur
By THOMAS DOHERTY

[...] 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. [...] 
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." [...] 

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. [...] 

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. [...] 

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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