Riefenstahl’s Last Triumph

In 1925 Leni Riefenstahl walked up to Luis Trenker, star of German mountain movies, and said, “I’m going to be in your next picture.” She was a dancer, not an actress — and not a mountain climber, as the amused star pointed out. “I can do it if I make up my mind to,” she asserted. As soon as Trenker’s director, Arnold Fanck, saw her photo, he wrote a starring role for her in his next film. She was 23.

For the past 20 years, Riefenstahl has gone scuba diving in some beautiful waters, preparing a video feature she hopes to complete next year. She has just returned to her Munich home from a dive in the Maldives. “Underwater films are either scientific, like Jacques Cousteau’s,” she says, “or sensational, like the Hollywood shark films. But there are none like this one we plan.” Then, her strong voice lowering, she says, “There will be no commentary.” Guided below by Riefenstahl, like Dante by Beatrice, viewers will merely behold and be awed. They might also be awed by the charisma of this incorrigible, indefatigable picturemaker. She is 91.

Who has had a life like Riefenstahl’s? Whose films were so brilliant, yet achieved under such a cloud? And who has paid for political naivete with so long and rancorous an exile?

In the ’30s she won the tyrant trifecta. Stalin sent her a note praising her film Olympia. Mussolini asked her to make a documentary about the Pontine marshes. And Hitler was her patron for three documentaries about his party, especially Triumph of the Will, which helped define Nazi swagger.

“Hitler did not play such an important role in my life,” she says today. “I made one film for him, which had three parts, and out of that the press wove a legend.” Wove a horror story. A half-century after shooting her last feature, Riefenstahl is still the world’s most controversial director; her name summons the conflicts of defiant artistry and compromised morality. Thus the U.S. publication of Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir (St. Martin’s Press; $35) and the U.S. premiere of Ray Muller’s documentary The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (at the New York Film Festival) are vital artistic events.

She starred in seven Fanck adventures, climbing mountains barefoot, enduring avalanches, crossing deep crevasses on a rickety ladder, radiating alpine glamour. She directed and starred in two innocent, ravishingly visualized fiction features, The Blue Light (1932) and Tiefland (shot during World War II but not completed until 1954). Early in the Hitler regime she assembled two short films about Nazi functions and officials. But it is her feature documentaries that even today make her noted and notorious. Triumph of the Will (1935), a record of the sixth Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg, starred Adolf Hitler. The two-part Olympia (1938), a record of the 1936 Berlin Games, starred Jesse Owens, the black American runner.

For these films, Riefenstahl deserves to be classed with D.W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein and Orson Welles as one of the cinema’s great innovator artists. She created whole genres. Triumph was newsreel raised to romantic myth. The subject was hardly unique: totalitarian parades could be seen then in Moscow or today in Beijing. Granted, Hitler had star quality, and Albert Speer’s architecture had a loopy grandiosity worthy of a Busby Berkeley set. But the film’s pulse, accelerating from stately to feverish, is in Riefenstahl’s masterly editing. She needed no narration to tell you what to think or feel; her images and editing were persuasive enough.

All televised sport is indebted to Olympia; it pioneered such techniques as cameras in balloons, in ditches, on a track racing with the sprinters, underwater as divers slice into the Olympic pool. More important, the film personalized the athletes: the glint of confidence on Owens’ face, the exhaustion of the marathoners as each painful step leads toward the stadium. In a way, Riefenstahl’s achievements in Triumph and Olympia are more impressive than those of fiction-film directors. They had a script; she had only miles of footage (250 miles for Olympia) to be scanned and scissored into art. She did it, controlling every frame of both films herself.

What she could not control was her legend. She was charged with being Hitler’s or Goebbels’ mistress; Budd Schulberg, in the Saturday Evening Post, leeringly called her a “Nazi pinup girl.” Triumph, released a decade before the revelation of the Nazi death camps, was seen as an all-too-knowing preview of Treblinka. When leftist historians weren’t forcing cancellations of her lectures, they were scorning Triumph as “sheer tedium” and seeing fascism within every muscular body in Olympia or in her later, luscious photographs of Nuba tribesmen. In the late ’60s when a Riefenstahl retrospective was proposed at a leading U.S. cultural institution, the head of the film department replied that if he were to meet the director, he would “cut her nipples off.”

Many fine filmmakers have worked under dictatorships: Roberto Rossellini and Luchino Visconti in fascist Italy; Douglas Sirk and G.W. Pabst in the Third Reich; Eisenstein (profitably, then pathetically) for Stalin. U.S. directors, with no official prodding, often made racist films. D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation was rabidly anti-Negro, and many ’30s and ’40s films used horrendous ethnic stereotypes.

But the shadow of Riefenstahl’s brief flourishing under Hitler was so long and dark that, as she says, “for 50 years I have not been able to do what I passionately want to do: make films.” Veit Harlan, who directed the epochally odious Jew Suss, was back making German films by 1950. Yet through boycott and bad luck, Riefenstahl, never charged with anti-Semitism, has not completed a film since the war.

There are several reasons for this punishment. One is that Triumph was just too good a movie, too potent and mesmerizing. Another is that her visual style — heroic, sensuous, attuned to the mists and myths of nature — was never in critical fashion. Finally, she was a woman, a beautiful woman. When she was seen with Hitler, their photos made the world’s front pages. And the image stuck.

To hear Riefenstahl talk, what counted was not the men in her past but the man in her. “I have a man’s way of thinking but a woman’s way of feeling,” she says. “To my advantage, I have a great organizing talent. I can do a cost estimate, tell camera people what to do, organize film material. But this wish to be creative excludes many things. My view is very narrow,” she explains, raising her hands in front of her face like the sides of the camera frame. Her vision was acute within that frame but myopic outside it, in the real Welt, where other Germans noticed things were going evil. If blinkered, though, she was not unique among artists in Germany, Japan or the Soviet Union.

If her book denies some things, it remembers all — helpful if you are forever on display and on trial. In vivid detail (Mussolini looks “like a Caruso in uniform”), the book unfolds with the archetypal figures and engorged emotions of silent films (“You must be my mistress,” Goebbels implores; “I need you — without you my life is a torment!”). A fascinating political and personal history, the book could make an enthralling movie.

And it has. Muller’s documentary is a galloping, galvanizing three hours in the company of a supremely dogged adventurer. “Her enthusiasm is so intense,” Muller says. “It is a quality I wish more filmmakers of this generation shared.” For his camera, Riefenstahl tirelessly revisited the sites of her triumphs and debacles, defended her life, argued with the first man in 60 years to try to direct her. “When the subject was art, diving, things she likes,” he recalls, “she was charming, interesting, a wonderful person. But she is still a ’30s diva, after all, and not accustomed to being crossed. By the second day, I was asking prickly questions, and she was having choleric fits.”

Unsurprisingly, Riefenstahl refuses to see this Wonderful Horrible Life. “I cried, and they filmed it,” she says. “He was brutal.” But perhaps this woman whose best hours were spent looking at film could look at this one. It adapts her supple camera style and keen editing eye to an amazing subject. It could be the last great Leni Riefenstahl film.