-Caveat Lector- >From http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,482-379192,00.html
Opinion August 10, 2002 A genius of film forever in the frame with the Nazis ben macintyre In 1926, Adolf Hitler watched a silent film entitled The Sacred Mountain, one of the mystical Teutonic mountain epics then in vogue. He was particularly captivated by a scene in which a striking young actress named Leni Riefenstahl performed an airy seaside dance, a sort of Aryan Beauty and the Beach. Eight years later, he asked the 32-year-old Riefenstahl, by then an acclaimed and accomplished film-maker in her own right, to make a movie of the Nazi Party�s annual mass rally at Nuremberg. �I am not looking for a newsreel,� Hitler reportedly told her, �but an artistic document.� He got what he wanted: the greatest work of art to emerge from Nazism, a fascinating fascist masterpiece of propaganda, a creation of the highest art in the service of the basest politics. Riefenstahl�s films are seldom screened now, and never without controversy, but the techniques of cinematography she pioneered have endured, as has Riefenstahl herself, the most troubling artist of the 20th century, and an enduring enigma. On August 22 Leni Riefenstahl will be 100 years old. Her birthday sees the premiere of Impressions Under Water, a 45-minute documentary shot beneath the Indian Ocean, her first film for 50 years. Meanwhile the film-maker will soon get the full bio-epic treatment herself, with Jodi Foster in the title role. None of this attention is likely to make Riefenstahl any easier to understand for, as Ray M�ller showed in his brilliant 1993 documentary film The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, this is a biography of tense internal contradiction: between beauty and truth, aesthetics and politics, art and manipulation. Nazism might have lacked much of its lethal (and enduring) glamour without Riefenstahl, but the art of cinema would have been far poorer. Riefenstahl made two films during the Third Reich � Triumph of the Will, depicting the 1934 Nuremberg rallies, and Olympia, about the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Both were inspired, inspiring and horrible. >From the opening shot of the Fuhrer�s plane descending from the golden heavens, >Triumph of the Will is the ultimate artistic realisation of the Nazi ideal, an iconography of totalitarianism depicted in ways that were then revolutionary, mixing staged with genuine footage. Brownshirts on the march, forming great fiery swastikas in the Nuremberg night with their flaming torches; enraptured young faces, upturned to the light. The effect is both entrancing and repulsive. In Olympia, Riefenstahl�s art is still more remarkable. The New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael judged Riefenstahl �one of the dozen or so creative geniuses who have ever worked in the film medium�. Olympia is a 220-minute elegy to the human athletic form. True, she dwells lovingly on Jesse Owens, black hero of a supposedly inferior race, but finally this is a film about victory, conquest and power, the attempted theft of the Greek Olympic ideal by the would-be Master Race. Its opening sequence includes a shot of the nude athletic form of Riefenstahl herself, arms outstretched to greet the new dawn. That image is one of the most beautiful and powerful in cinema, and one of the most disturbing. Riefenstahl and her defenders insist she pursued beauty only as an aesthetic ideal; but in the hands of the Nazis, the pursuit of beauty was the justification for oppression and murder on a Olympic scale. How far was Riefenstahl complicit in Nazism? She never joined the party, was strongly defended by her many Jewish friends and even claimed to have challenged Hitler�s racist views. She maintained that she had produced pure art, on to which Nazi politics had been grafted. In a similar way Friedrich Nietzsche�s writings were hijacked by Nazism with the connivance of his grisly sister Elisabeth. �What did I do that was political?" Riefenstahl demanded in a 1965 interview, while maintaining that Triumph of the Will is artistic reportage. �It reflects the truth that was then, in 1934, history. It is therefore a documentary, not a propaganda film.� That adamantly maintained naivete is what ultimately condemns Leni Riefenstahl, a vaunted disingenuousness that simply does not chime with the vivid intelligence of her art. Nietzsche had been insane for years by the time his complex thoughts were mangled into simplistic fascism; Riefenstahl�s acute eye and consciousness run through every frame of her evocation of Nazism on film. All art is political; Riefenstahl�s art was unmistakably, emphatically so, but unlike, say, Albert Speer, she has consistently declined to accept the artist�s moral responsibility or apologise for the enormous influence she had within the Nazi project. Indeed, her entire career has arguably been a self- exculpating effort to prove that art and beauty can be forged in a state of pure independence. In her mountain film The Blue Light (1932), Riefenstahl depicted a vision of simple beauty which perishes when that ideal is destroyed. �It was my own destiny,� she later claimed. She spent years photographing Nuba tribesmen in remotest Sudan, yet even here were echoes of Olympia, the idolisation of the human form. �Riefenstahl seems hardly to have modified the ideas of her Nazi films,� wrote Susan Sontag. In the final stage of her life, Riefenstahl sought refuge beneath the Indian Ocean. �Underwater, I am in another world,� she told the writer Gitta Sereny. But whether on the mountain, in the desert or under the ocean, the past pursued her, and rightly. For art can never be divorced from life and politics, and to pretend otherwise is to distort both. Perhaps that moral, more than any amount of cinematic virtuosity, is Riefenstahl�s inadvertent legacy. Contribute to Debate via [EMAIL PROTECTED] Copyright 2002 Times Newspapers Ltd. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A<>E<>R + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Forwarded as information only; no automatic endorsement + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + "Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. 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