At 100, Hitler's Filmmaker Sticks to Her Script

[Dave Monroe]

>From Steve Erlanger, "At 100, Hitler's Filmmaker
Sticks to Her Script," NY Times, Saturday, August
24th, 2002 ...

PÖCKING, Germany — As she celebrates her 100th
birthday with friends and a new film, Leni
Riefenstahl, Hitler's favorite mythmaker, is trying to
sell her innocence to yet another generation.

The film, "Impressions Under Water," is beautiful, a
series of screen-saver images of the unpolitical life
under the sea. Vivid, slightly mysterious, ably
edited, it appears to be about very little. From time
to time, in the midst of all that indifferent beauty,
there are jarring shots of Ms. Riefenstahl, petting
rays or staring about.

[...] the film seems further evidence that Ms.
Riefenstahl, an artist of originality and even genius,
was always more about narcissism than Nazism.

She saw opportunities with Hitler and took them,
jump-starting her career. After that, she tried hard
not to look back. As for the rest, and her undeniable
role in helping to make an awkward little man into a
godlike forest-spirit of German resurrection, well,
she continues to plead naïveté or, with age and
morphine for her bad back, simple failure of memory.

She has built up a certain version of her life,
repressing what doesn't fit.

"I don't understand," she said, articulate if shaky
here in her light-filled home south of Munich in the
Bavarian Alps, her clothes neat and her makeup
careful. "I didn't do any harm to anyone. What have I
ever done? I never intended any harm to anyone."

She insists that she was interested only in beauty.
"I'm not interested in politics at all," she says.
"Politics came to me. Other people wanted to put me
into politics."

She was fascinated by Hitler, no question, she says,
and wrote to him in 1932, asking to meet. "I didn't
see a man, erotically attractive," she says. "I saw in
him, and it's important, the person who was able to
offer work to six million unemployed."

When she made her films of Nazi rallies, including
"Triumph of the Will," she says, she was just
following Hitler's orders. "In a two-hour film there's
not a single line of commentary, not a single
anti-Semitic word," she insists. "So for me there is
no propaganda."

[...]

She says "Triumph of the Will," made with full party
support, was simple reportage, made for the party
archives, not prettified. "I only tried to use my
camera to make the best possible photography," she
said.

But the rally was choreographed for her cameras....

Something closer to her real motivation emerges later,
as she muses on how praised "Triumph of the Will" was
before the war, and how reviled afterward....

"If I hadn't done `Triumph of the Will,' " Ms.
Riefenstahl said, "people wouldn't have talked to me
at all."

Was this art in the service of beauty, or of
propaganda? "In the service of an historical
development," she said.

"The Nazis had not the slightest idea what art was
about," she said, sniffing. "They loved kitsch, not
art."

So what is the line between propaganda and art? "Well,
you can use art as a tool for propaganda purposes,"
she finally said. "If that's what you want." 

[...]

To Lutz Kinkel, who has studied her life and the party
archives, this is nonsense.

"She lives in her own world and believes in her own
truth," said Mr. Kinkel, whose doctoral dissertation
on her has just been published. "She has repressed
events and somehow destroyed some part of her memory,"
he said....

[...]

She made a romantic film, "Tiefland," in 1940, using
Gypsies from concentration camps as extras. In April,
she said they all survived the war. But some were
murdered, and when a German Gypsy association, Rom,
started legal action, she issued a statement deploring
Nazi killings of the Roma.

The Frankfurt prosecutor's office chose her birthday,
Thursday, to announce a mandatory investigation into
charges that she has denied the Holocaust, a crime
here.

[...]

Even her stunning photos of the Nuba in Sudan have
been criticized, not unfairly, as displaying a fascist
aesthetic of perfect bodies, noble savages. Fish,
perhaps, seemed safe.

[...]

But even the memoirs now are fading in her memory. She
wishes for a peaceful death — "that will come very
soon, I feel that," she says — and for a good
biographical movie by Jodie Foster, who wants to star
as Leni Riefenstahl. There isn't a script yet, but Ms.
Riefenstahl is still trying to control it.

"I would have liked Jodie Foster to film my memoirs,
but she doesn't want to do the memoirs," Ms.
Riefenstahl said, smiling. "She wants to do the
rumors."

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/24/international/europe/24FPRO.html

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