April 8



USA:

Mistress Of Nazi spin-----BIOGRAPHY


Leni Riefenstahl: A Life

By Jurgen Trimborn Translated from the German

by Edna McCown Douglas & McIntyre----368 pp., $37.95


Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl

By Steven Bach Alfred A. Knopf 400 pp., $38

- - -

At the close of her 1949 de-Nazification hearing, Leni Riefenstahl was
declared a Nazi "follower." The renowned filmmaker was fortunate. Had
members of the postwar tribunal viewed the documents and testimonies
contained within these two well researched biographies, she would likely
have been judged an "offender." That designation carried with it a number
of serious prohibitions and penalties. The label of "follower" carried
none.

Born in Berlin in 1902 into a working class family, Riefenstahl grew up to
be an attractive, athletic and fiercely determined young woman. She sought
public attention as a dancer but a leg injury forced her to consider film
acting. Her screen debut was inauspicious. In his engrossing Leni: The
Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl, Steven Bach reveals that Riefenstahl
first appeared in the box-office sensation Ways to Strength and Beauty, a
blue film in which she played a bare-breasted handmaiden. In 1924, she
vamped her way into a meeting with director Arnold Fanck, father of the
Alpine film. Fanck was soon infatuated with Riefenstahl, and gave her
leading roles in his mountain movies. Shot on frozen slopes and icy
pinnacles, these pictures required strength, endurance and daring of the
actor. Amazingly, Riefenstahl performed all her own stunts. Ever
ambitious, she coaxed Fanck into teaching her directing, camera work and
editing. In 1931, she directed her first film, The Blue Light.

The next year, she heard Adolf Hitler speak at a rally and was entranced.
She wrote to the Fuhrer and was granted an audience. Jurgen Trimborn, in
his well written Leni Riefenstahl: A Life, quotes her words to the Detroit
News: "Hitler is the greatest man who ever lived?He just radiates." Joseph
Goebbels, who kept a detailed diary, noted, "She is the only one of all
the stars who understands us."

Soon, Riefenstahl was hard at work on Triumph of the Will. She would
always claim that she was ordered to make the famous film of the 1933 Nazi
Party rally in Nuremberg, but recently recovered documents prove she was
eager to take on the project. Both the Bach and Trimborn books contain
photos of Riefenstahl with Hitler and his aides before the rally,
choreographing scenes for Triumph of the Will. Shrewdly aware of her
potential to promote Nazism, Hitler provided Riefenstahl with unlimited
resources. She arrived in Nuremberg in August, 1933, with a production
staff of more than 170, including 16 feature-film cameramen, 29 newsreel
cameramen and nine aerial photographers. "It [Triumph of the Will] doesn't
contain a single reconstructed scene," she falsely declared after the war.
Scenes that were spoiled were later reshot on a Berlin set designed by
Albert Speer, where Nazi luminaries re-enacted their speeches for
Riefenstahl's cameras.

She went on to make another well-regarded documentary (Olympia, about the
1936 Summer Olympics) and was involved in later projects, but it is
Triumph of the Will that marked her destiny. Several of its shots are
undeniably striking and have contributed to our visual sense of the Nazi
era. Bach claims "her innovations in shooting and editing ... remain
exemplary for filmmakers seven decades later." Trimborn describes how she
had her film crew shoot "on roller skates so they would be able to capture
with a hand-held camera motion shots that didn't shake." Yet both authors
remind us that by making Triumph of the Will, Riefenstahl readied the path
of a murderous dictator.

In dry but absorbing prose, Trimborn dismantles the falsehoods Riefenstahl
propagated after the war, when she cast herself as an apolitical artiste
exploited by the Nazis. Originally published in Germany in 2002, his book
assumes its readership knows a good deal about the Nazi era. Bach's book
provides historical background and may be more helpful to North American
readers. His prose is lively, propelled by the author's moral indignation.
The book's epigraph from Thomas Mann-- "Art is moral in that it awakens"
-- leads us to question Riefenstahl's achievement.

Her culpability goes far beyond the films themselves. Both Trimborn and
Bach recount several instances of anti- Semitism. In a radio interview she
gave on Nov. 3, 1932, Riefenstahl said, "As long as the Jews are film
critics, I will never have a success. But watch out, when Hitler takes the
rudder everything will change."

In preparation for the making of Triumph of the Will, Riefenstahl
recruited the best German cameramen. When one, Emil Schunemann, declined,
as he put it, "out of principle," Riefenstahl wrote the Ministry of
Propaganda claiming Schunemann's stance amounted to "a boycott against the
Furher." As Trimborn observes, "She must have been aware that such a
denunciation would seriously endanger those thus charged."

Her most heinous act occurred in September, 1940, during the shooting of
Tiefland, a Riefenstahl film Bach calls "a kitsch curiosity ? failed
melodrama." In need of Spanish-looking extras for the movie, Riefenstahl
requisitioned Sinti and Roma (gypsies) from Maxglan, an internment camp.
When the extras' work was done, they were shipped back to the holding camp
and soon after to Auschwitz, where the majority were gassed. Riefenstahl
always maintained she had no part to play in this. In 1982, Nina Gladitz,
a documentary filmmaker, located a few extras who had miraculously
survived the death camp; they reported that Riefenstahl had come to
Maxglan to cast them for her film. As Trimborn notes, "The director's
well-known perfectionism, which dictated that she control even the
smallest detail, suggests that Riefenstahl would have gone to Maxglan
personally rather than leave the selection of extras to someone else."

A one-woman PR agency after the war, Riefenstahl denied everything ("Of
what am I guilty?"). Where the evidence was irrefutable, she displayed not
a shred of remorse. As Bach eloquently puts it, "self-reproach was as
foreign to her nature as self-scrutiny."

Then why the continuing interest in such a repellent personality? Part of
it has

to do with Riefenstahl's vigour and longevity. (She released her final
film a few weeks before her 100th birthday.) Arguably, she was a
successful female in a male-dominated art form, and in the early 1970s was
championed by American feminists. They seem to have missed the irony of a
woman promoting a fascist ideology that was deeply misogynistic.
Riefenstahl's life and work raise questions concerning the relationship
between art and morality. Must art be ethical? Is Triumph of the Will art
or brilliant propaganda?

Riefenstahl will no doubt continue to fascinate. Both Madonna and Jodi
Foster approached her to produce and star in a film of her life.
(Riefenstahl claimed Foster was not good-looking enough. She thought
Sharon Stone would be more suitable.) Andy Warhol and Mick Jagger had
themselves photographed with her. George Lucas acknowledged the technical
debt Star Wars owes to Triumph of the Will.

But not everyone was charmed by Riefenstahl. Trimborn reports that when
Charlie Chaplin first saw Triumph, he laughed so hard he literally fell
off his chair. For him, the spectacle of the strutting, pompous Furher
playing to the slavish masses was ridiculous, and he set off to make his
parody: The Great Dictator.

Riefenstahl put forward an edited version of her life, and we tend to
remember her documentaries for their iconic shots. Recently, I sat through
Triumph of the Will in its two-hour entirety; like Chaplin, I found its
aggrandizement of power ludicrous. But it is impossible to laugh now,
viewing the film, as we must, through images of Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen
and Dachau.

(source: National Post-Kenneth Sherman's book-length poem, Black River,
is published by Porcupine's Quill)