– George Orwell, “Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali”
In
1974 Susan Sontag wrote a two-part widely read and controversial essay,
“Fascinating Fascism,” that was prompted by the publication of Leni
Riefenstahl’s photographic book about the Nubian people in the Sudan. Although
acknowledging that the images were “ravishing,” Sontag was disturbed about the
“disquieting lies” Riefenstahl was peddling about her life – some were included
in the book’s dust jacket – at a time when her cinematic output was being
de-contextualized at film festivals and museum retrospectives. The former Nazi
propagandist was celebrated by some feminists – especially problematic since
Riefenstahl had never been concerned about the condition of women, only her own
career – and celebrities from Mick Jagger to Andy Warhol who admired her
creativity. Sontag set out to rebuke Riefenstahl’s rewriting of her personal
history, and to define and condemn what she called “fascist aesthetics” arguing
that her early mountain films, her documentaries made during the Third Reich,
which Sontag acknowledged as “superb films,” and the Nuba photographs
constituted a “triptych of fascist visuals.” My purpose is to critique what
Sontag got right and to demonstrate that Ray Müller’s highly praised 1993
documentary,
The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, rather
than clarifying Riefenstahl’s misrepresentations, ends up largely affirming
them.
Critics had had little to
say about how Sontag’s essay exposes the yawning chasm between Riefenstahl’s
mendacities and the truth that have been more fully documented and expanded upon
in the publication of two recent biographies of the Nazi doyenne: Steven Bach’s
Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl (Alfred A Knopf, 2007) and
Jürgen Trimborn’s
Leni Riefenstahl: A Life (Faber & Faber, Inc., 2002
translated by Edna McCown in 2007). By asserting that she was an independent
filmmaker who had to overcome the bureaucratic interferences of Propaganda
Minister, Joseph Goebbels, and that she created a film of “pure history,”
Riefenstahl is disingenuous on several grounds. First, she had the full support
of the Nazi regime which provided her with unlimited resources, and there is no
evidence of any interference from Goebbels. To state that “not a single scene is
staged” is rubbish. Scenes were rehearsed and filmed more than once. When she
made
Olympia, the Nazis wanted the international community to believe
that she produced it independently, but in reality the Nazis commissioned and
financed the film. What she failed to understand, must less acknowledge, was
that it was not possible in a police state for an artist to create and showcase
a work of art unless approved by the authorities unless the artist produced
underground copies (as, for example, the samizdat authors who produced
handwritten manuscripts during the Soviet era) or was willing to accept the
often painful consequences of defying the official Party line.
 |
| film director Ray
Müller |
Riefenstahl misrepresented her relationship with
the Nazi leadership characterizing it as an “acquaintance.” She was a close
friend of Hitler, Goebbels and, unmentioned by Sontag, Julius Streicher, the
most fanatical Nazi and editor of the notorious
Der Stürmer. She had
personal access to Hitler through whom she dealt with skeptics within the Nazi
bureaucracy and secured the best production conditions for her own projects. In
one of the few instances that
The Wonderful, Horrible Life effectively
challenges Riefenstahl’s perception occurs when she states that she had the
“worst kind of relationship” with Goebbels. The voice-over commentator reads
passages from the Propaganda Minister’s diary that clearly indicate a friendship
which Riefenstahl dismisses as “pure fantasy” and becomes indignant at the
suggestion.
 |
| Adolph Hitler and Leni
Riefenstahl |
One of Riefenstahl’s most telling lies was
the one she told about Streicher. She said that she had loathed him. But there
is preserved correspondence to prove that she invited his company and treated
him as a close friend until quite late in the war. Trimborn presents a photo of
them together at the Nuremberg premiere of
Triumph of the Will. At the
conclusion of
The Wonderful, Horrible Life, Riefenstahl became vehement
that not only had she “thrown no atomic bombs”; she had never “spoken an
anti-Semitic word.” During her de-Nazification hearings after the war, in which
she was briefly held under house arrest, she lamented the fate of her Jewish
friends in the film industry while claiming, on the one hand, that she had been
ignorant of the Reich’s racial policies and, on the other, that she had
protested them personally to the Führer. As a result of her testimony that took
place intermittently over four years, she was certified de-Nazified and declared
a “follower” on whom no restrictions were placed in her undertaking creative
work. Had the examiners been aware of documents procured years later by her
biographers the results might have been different. Both Trimborn and Bach cite a
letter first published thirty years ago in a biography of Riefenstahl by Glenn
Infield in which Riefenstahl appeals to her friend, Streicher, for help with, as
she puts it, the “demands made upon me by the Jew, Béla Balázs,” who fled Nazi
Germany given that he was a Communist of Jewish descent. Balázs was
Riefenstahl’s collaborator and co-screenwriter in her directorial debut,
The
Blue Light. She expunged his name from the credits so that a judenrein
(Jew-free) version of the film could be released, and Balázs, hearing of its
success, wrote to her from exile in Moscow to ask for his deferred fee. It was
an easy task for Streicher to deprive him of it. In Müller’s documentary,
Riefenstahl waxes effusively about her “ideal collaboration” with Balázs, but he
makes no effort to set the historical record straight. Nor does he take the
opportunity to question her about her relationship with Streicher.
Her anti-Semitism also emerged during
her trip to America. One of Riefenstahl’s most cherished ambitions was a
Hollywood career like that of Marlene Dietrich, and she clung to this fantasy
tenaciously even after the Kristallnacht pogrom in November, 1938, which
derailed what was supposed to have been a triumphal cross-country American
publicity tour with
Olympia. Upon docking in New York and hearing the
news, she refused to believe it, and dismissed the hostility that greeted her at
nearly every stop as a plot fomented “by the Jewish moneymen,” she told an
interviewer on her return, a comment that is absent in
The Fascinating,
Terrible Life.
In the making of
Tiefland
(Lowlands), Riefenstahl used Nazi racial policies to further her career
which she later misrepresented. Her pet project needed Spanish-looking extras,
so she shipped in some Roma from a concentration camp where they were waiting
for a train to Auschwitz. Müller’s narrator does mention the allegation but it
is not explored. There is nothing to indicate that they were forced labour, of
which she was aware, and not a word is said about the fate of those extras. Her
later claim that she met almost all of them after the war was a flat-out lie
since almost every one of them perished. Müller does not ask her anything about
this period in her life likely fearing that she would sabotage the film or enter
into another litigious libel suit for which she was renowned. Most of this
sequence in the film either shows scenes from
Tiefland or recounts her
difficulties in making it.
There are other dubious statements,
omissions and interpretations in Müller’s film. When Riefenstahl volunteered as
a war correspondent in Poland in 1939, she witnessed what the voice-over
commentator describes as “the brutal ill treatment of Polish civilians” which in
reality was a massacre of Jews. Riefenstahl may have been horrified by these
events but that did not deter her from flying into Danzig and meeting with
Hitler so that she could film Hitler’s march into the city in order to create a
Triumph of the Will redux about Hitler’s invasion of Poland that would
serve as a supreme monument to him. The film was never completed but some of her
footage does appear in a Fritz Hippler (creator of the infamous
The Eternal
Jew) documentary about the invasion of Poland. Perhaps most disappointing in
Müller’s direction is his attempt to get her to make a statement of contrition
at the end of the film. When she was not reminiscing or explaining some
technical difficulty, she would lapse into a self-pitying stance or an
aggressiveness that sometimes veered into temper tantrums; an apology seems like
wishful thinking. Earlier, when shown grisly scenes from the camps, she
initially appears to empathize with the victims but then shifts gears and comes
close to equating her suffering with that of the regime’s victims. Her only
regret about her role during the Third Reich, specifically making
Triumph of
the Will, appears to be the subsequent problems it caused her.
 |
| Triumph of the
Will |
Müller must take some responsibility for not
correcting Riefenstahl’s factual errors, puncturing her narcissism and probing
more rigorously the historical record. He might have accomplished more had he
juxtaposed Riefenstahl’s answers with the narrative voice-over, the technique he
successfully employed in the Goebbels sequence. By failing to hold her to
account, Müller reinforced Riefenstahl’s selectively constructed self-image as
an apolitical artist and contributed to the rehabilitation of her personal
reputation. And yet the film is valuable in that it extensively documents her
incapacity for any kind of self-reflection, her inability to distance herself
from the films she made during the Third Reich and admit that she served an evil
regime. Nonetheless, I agree with Bach when he suggests that the one sequence
that hinted at an unconscious self-revelation occurs when she is at the editing
table reviewing scenes from
Triumph: “Her eyes glittered, and it was not
possible to know if she was lost in admiration for her superb editing skills, or
for the film’s chief actor as he surveyed the eager multitudes massed in
submission to his will, or both.” Regardless, Riefenstahl’s own personal
failings do not sufficiently explain the appeal of her films and her
photography. For that we must return to Sontag’s essay.
Sontag generated the most controversy
in her essay when she referred to Riefenstahl’s artistry, including her Nuba
photographs as embodying “fascist aesthetics.” The photographs, she argues,
celebrate “physical skill and courage and the victory of the stronger over the
weaker…where success in fighting is the ‘main aspiration of a man’s life’…[and
where] women are merely breeders and helpers.” These aesthetics were also
present in the 1970s when fascism was eroticized in such films as
The Night
Porter and
The Damned. But they have greater relevance to art created
in any totalitarian society in which its function is to immortalize its leaders
and doctrines. Subtle differences do exist – fascism exalts physical perfection,
the pinup nude, whereas official Communist art celebrates the asexual chasteness
of the masses – but the main point that Sontag might have emphasized more fully
is that the purpose of art in a police state is to reinforce the worldview of
its particular ideology. She has drawn the most criticism when she focused on
the cult of beauty as the essence of fascist aesthetics. The pursuit of beauty
her critics say is the cornerstone of Western art that goes back to the Greeks.
But they often fail to understand that the Nazis co-opted this tradition to
promote their worldview. They despised avant-garde art because it exposed the
ugliness and injuries of war and the pain of living: this “degenerate” art was
seen as the violence of the Bolsheviks and the Jews against the German people.
German art would only show the beautiful: any physical or emotional imperfection
was to be expunged from art reflecting the official policy toward people who
were physically and mentally unsound. Fascist aesthetics in effect meant
aesthetic cleansing in art – and in life. That the skin colour of the Nuba or
the sprinter Jessie Owens was black was immaterial: they were specimens of
physical beauty. Riefenstahl does not photograph aging or sick Nuba, or film
Caucasian children lining up for autographs from Owens. Violating that taboo
would have demonstrated an independent spirit.
 |
| Leni Riefenstahl in her
nineties |
In the last decade of Riefenstahl’s life – her nineties – as memories of
the Third Reich faded and historical awareness diminished, the director of
cinematic works once regarded as political provocations was now celebrated in
some quarters as a media star, particularly when she possessed a personal
vitality that would have shamed a person twenty years younger. As a result,
Riefenstahl’s version of her life acquired a greater currency and more people
were willing to accept uncritically “the power of the images” without any
understanding of the context in which her films were made. In addition to those
already mentioned, her admirers now included Madonna and Francis Ford Coppola.
George Lucas acknowledged that he freely borrowed from
Triumph for scenes
in his
Star Wars films. Even Steven Spielberg, the director of
Schindler’s List, said more than once that he wanted to meet her. When
Riefenstahl’s autobiography was published in English, she received effusive
accolades in a front page
New York Times Book Review from the feared film
and theatre critic, John Simon, even though her biographer Trimborn considered
the memoir “worthless as an historical document.” Once disdained as persona non
grata, Riefenstahl’s renaissance that had troubled Sontag in the 1970s had by
the 1990s, turned the greatest propagandist of the Third Reich into the
celebrity she always wanted to be.
 |
| artist Ai
Weiwei |
When I recently visited the AGO’s retrospective,
“According to What?," of the wide-ranging creative expression by the Chinese
dissident artist, Ai Weiwei, I could not help thinking about how he and his
artistic output provide a stark contrast to Riefenstahl and her oeuvre. I am not
referring to the mediums they worked in but to their aesthetics and how Weiwei
understood that art, especially in a police state, operated in a political
framework, whereas, Riefenstahl refused to acknowledge this reality, even in
hindsight. Her films were generously funded and appreciated by the Nazi
potentates because they reinforced the message that the Party wanted to
communicate to the German people and the international community. By contrast,
Weiwei’s commitment to individual freedom of expression and human rights and the
conversion of those convictions into his artistic output have resulted in the
demolishing of his studio in Shanghai, a life-threatening brain injury and a
three month detention. Drawing upon his memory of the time he spent
incarcerated, he has produced large-scale dioramas of his treatment that the
world saw in the 2013 Venice Biennale. The rage that provoked this punishment is
an installation entitled “Straight,” made up of thirty-eight tons of rebar
recovered from collapsed school buildings in Sichuan after the earthquake made
by straightening thousands of twisted metal pieces. In the background are the
five thousand names of children who died in large part because of shoddy
construction materials. On display at the AGO, this mammoth piece is a memorial
to those children whose deaths the Communist Party refused to acknowledge much
less mourn or assume its share of responsibility for that human tragedy. We may
admire Riefenstahl’s images but we should never forget in what context they were
created and to what purpose they were deployed. We will have no similar problem
with the creative output of Weiwei.
No comments:
Post a Comment