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Book
Review
Pioneer of
homoeroticism on film
Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's
director, also made the stunning "Olympia"
LENI: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl.
By Steven Bach.
Illustrated. 386 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $30.
LENI RIEFENSTAHL A Life.
By Jürgen Trimborn. Translated by Edna McCown.
Illustrated. 351 pp. Faber & Faber. $30.
By
Gary N. Reese
In 1996, I
was ready to hop on a jet to Munich, rent a car and drive up
into the mountainous foothills of the Bavarian Alps to Lake
Starnberg where Leni Riefenstahl lived. In semi-retirement.
Semi, because Leni Riefenstahl never stopped working.
She was the
director of Olympia, the most famous sports film of
all time. And most infamously, director of Triumph of the
Will, the greatest propaganda film of all time.
Olympia defined action sports photography. Until Leni
Riefenstahl filmed the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, there wasn't
a camera perspective established for sports. Documentary
directors just set up a camera on a tripod, trying to get an
angle of what spectators would see in the stadium, never
moving their cameras, and that was it. If you watch archival
footage of the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, this is exactly
what you are going to see.
 Without
Leni Riefenstahl we would not see sports the way we see it
today. Her film defined the modern media sports image.
Riefenstahl went for the drama. To achieve this, she had to
devise all kinds of technical innovations for filming. Her
results are still ravishing. Her innovations have long since
been surpassed. But the effort and the concept and its
accomplishment remain remarkable.
I wanted to
interview her. Since we both spoke German, I imagined we
could let it all down and get to the real core of the
matter. At that time, she would have been 94, but still
vigorous. I was working on book on gay sports, and I wanted
to ask her lots of questions, but most specifically how it
was that she made the male body such an exalted sexual image
in sports photography. What was behind that? Was there a
purpose? Prior to her work, this image had existed, but just
in photographs that were cultish. She brought it out into
the popular consciousness. It is pretty amazing to watch in
Olympia.
Most likely,
she would have seen me as just another accuser. She
considered herself a patsy for the German people's support
of the Nazi atrocities. To her credit, she never blamed the
German people for the Nazi catastrophe. She had fed the
Germans the Hitler myth and they ate it like dogs eat dog
food. Yet she was regarded as a sort of media wizard, an
evil genius. A war crimes tribunal in 1952 tried her and
exonerated her. She committed no criminal acts. But she
surely was an instigator.
How could a
person with such gifts be so conflicted, so compromise her
talents to the Nazis, who would force a world catastrophe
and annihilate themselves, along with millions of innocent
people? How could she not see this? And afterwards, how
could she not admit her guilt and role in it?
Don’t wait
for any answers. For the last 55 years of her life, Leni
Riefenstahl had to eat her own dog food. So many denials, so
many lame explanations. Yet, she remains the most
controversial film director in the history of cinema. And
the first great female director of films.
Now, two
books come out simultaneously to document her life. One by
an American, one by a German professor translated into
English. Steven Bach is an American film historian and
writer with considerable credits. His account is the most
readable for Americans. Juergen Trimborn interviewed
Riefenstahl before she died in 2003 at the age of 101, and
has that additional perspective. His book is thorough and
scholarly but somewhat dry to our tastes. Both books
reference so many of the same sources, they almost
crisscross each other. To pick one, I would recommend Bach.
Until now,
the best reference In English for Riefenstahl's life was her
own autobiography published in the U.S. in 1995. But, as
Trimborn points out in his introduction, it is completely
undependable. Turn to the biographies for the actual story
of Leni's life.
"He is beautiful"
First, let's
turn to the film for the homoerotism.
 How
homoerotic? Just watch the opening sequence of Olympia.
It begins with a naked athlete lighting the Olympic torch
before he begins his run to the Olympic stadium.
"Shoot more of him!" Riefenstahl shouted to the
photographers as filming commenced in Delphi in 1936. "Shoot
more of him! Shoot everywhere more of him, he is beautiful!"
There is
something gleaming and new about this, if also manufactured.
The torch relay is not something borrowed from the ancient
Olympic tradition. It was created for the 1936 Berlin
Olympics. The inspiration is German. The Germans
historically have felt themselves as heirs to the ancient
Greeks, and this informs Riefenstahl's film throughout. This
also lays a homoerotic subtext all through Olympia .
The first
torchbearer was not even ethnically Greek; he was the son of
Russian immigrants to Greece. Yet embody the physical
perfection of Olympic ideals he certainly did. Riefenstahl
was so taken that she
paid his way to Berlin, arranged for acting
lessons for him and briefly made him her lover.
There are images that could be called
homoerotic throughout Olympia. This is not a film
like Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (which is
still banned in Germany.) Olympia was not conceived
with a specific political agenda -- other than the same kind
of perspective that U.S. networks employ in filming the
Olympics today (what looks good for the U.S. is good for our
coverage.) The ultimate point here is Nazi racial purity and
Jesse Owens, and how Riefenstahl treated this in her film.
Any archival footage of Owen's winning performances at the
Olympics is surely taken from Riefenstahl's Olympia.
She filmed all of his triumphs and his four gold medals, and
better than anybody else. She made no decisions on filming
athletic performance on the basis of Aryan superiority.
The Nazis,
Hitler especially, didn’t really like the Olympics. Sports
bored them. They thought it was frivolous but could be a
good PR vehicle for their regime. They trusted Riefenstahl
but were not really sure what she thought she was doing. In
particular, she feuded continually with propaganda chief
Josef Goebbels. Riefenstahl saw the Olympics as competition,
triumph, beauty -- filmed on a worldwide stage in a splendor
as never before. She devised a multiple-camera filming of
events that simulated zoom close-ups years before a zoom
camera was invented. She put cameras on the runners in the
marathon. She had little railroad tracks built along the
tracks in the stadium, so that as the runner dashed around
the tracks, a camera could follow them. She dug holes along
the track to film runners at foot level. It was madness, but
it was a brilliant concept. She anticipated film techniques
that Orson Welles would use a few years later for Citizen
Kane.
She was an
obsessive micro-manager of her crew of 300, dashing from one
venue to another, often obstructing sports officials and
competitors. She didn’t really care. In fact, she appeared
to think that filming the Olympics in her concept was more
important than the Olympics themselves.
Riefenstahl's
work ethic was mind-boggling, and her task of making a final
film had proportions on a Wagnerian scale. The Olympics last
two weeks; she ended up with 250 hours of footage. It took
four months just to view the results. And 18 months total to
edit the film down to its final result.
A pariah
The film was
a triumph. Time magazine put her on its cover during
the Berlin Olympics, the first woman so honored up to that
time. Riefenstahl's stock rose highest with the film's
premiere in Paris in 1938. Then she sailed to the U.S. as
the most famous film director in the world. It was to be a
triumphal tour across the country. But Kristallnacht,
the burning and sacking of synagogues across Nazi Germany,
occurred shortly after her arrival in New York City. She
said that the attacks on Jews were not "important." It was
the same kind of denial she used throughout her life. This
killed the tour. When she got to Hollywood, only Walt
Disney, a friend of the Nazis, greeted her and gave her a
tour of his studios. She had become a pariah.
There was
some hypocrisy in this. U.S. film studios did big business
with Nazi Germany; it was their biggest overseas market for
American films before the war. Even MGM could not turn her
away. She came, she signed contracts at MGM but there were
no directing assignments offered. Her film Olympia
shown around the world to acclaim and awards was never
distributed to U.S. theaters.
She returned
to Germany, no Hollywood contract as she had hoped. The war
started and her career as a film director was effectively
over, except to do more Nazi films. Her film Tiefland
is a ridiculous, uncompleted production. It featured herself
as the star, and she was never a convincing actress. Many of
the gypsy extras in the film were later sent to
concentration camps and killed. Riefenstahl denied knowledge
of this, and this is the most clearly damning evidence of
her complicity with the Third Reich’s genocide. In the
1990s, she was charged with Holocaust Denial, a very serious
crime in Germany. She settled out of court, with a
half-hearted public apology.
For the
remaining 55 years of her life, she made a few films that
were pretty but not really important. She was the most
famous film director in the world who didn’t make any films
of merit.
Riefenstahl
recreated herself. Several times over. For one, she became
the oldest deep-sea diver in the world, and a deep-sea
photographer. She specialized in beautiful filmic images.
She made numerous trips to Africa, to the Sudan.
She was
rigorously heterosexual in her personal life. But I would
argue she had a gay sensibility, even if she unwittingly
practiced it as gays were sent to concentration camps. She
embodied qualities I find quintessentially gay: irony,
physical beauty and resistance.
First, there is irony, and its ability to
separate the moral from the aesthetic in art; then, beauty,
and a deep appreciation of its physical appearances even
when it may be superficial; and finally, resistance, and the
stubbornness to insist on one’s personally defined identity
as legitimate. She spent most of her life arguing with the
world to accept her on her own terms.
Both of the books regard these qualities as
masking a massive deception; they clamor for a second
reexamination of Riefenstahl's career and her place in 20th
century cinema and history.
The first re-examination began, interestingly
enough, in the United States about 30 years ago. There is a
logic to this; the U.S. is one country where people maintain
that art can be apolitical. In Europe it is the opposite.
The U.S. became the incubator for a new perspective on the
director: Riefenstahl the person, the Nazi propagandist, was
separated from Riefenstahl the cinematic pioneer and
artistic genius. Now, her accomplishments could be evaluated
in a context divorced from the politics.
Bach and Trimborn agree that this
reexamination can only take place in a vacuum -- where human
experience and the creative impulses that enliven it are
sucked out, and where the art is only evaluated on the basis
of its pyrotechnics. These are very engaging arguments to
reexamine the reexamination. Neither succeeds ultimately in
redefining Riefenstahl, or encompassing her artistic legacy.
At the close, their books peter out. It looks like
Riefenstahl has won. She seems to be saying: “You thought
you knew me, but you don’t know me.”
We expect a great artist to reflect our basic
human values and affirm this in their work. Riefenstahl,
except in Olympia, viewed apolitically, absolutely
does not do this. Yet, her accomplishments continue to
dazzle and perplex us. Is this bewitching chimera or great
art?
But the books raise her profile in the U.S. I
expect a biopic will soon be made on her life. Actresses,
particularly Americans, are already prepared to kill for the
part. From the grave, Leni Riefenstahl must be chuckling.
That would be her triumph of the will.
More about Leni Riefenstahl:
The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni
Riefenstahl
(1993): Chosen by Time magazine as one of the 10
best documentary films of the 20th century, this 3-hour
overview (first released in Germany as Die Macht der
Bilder -- "The Power of Images") is the best
introduction to the filmmaker. Ray Mueller, an unknown at
the time, took on the project after it had been turned down
by numerous big-name directors. His will isn't a match for
Riefenstahl's, but he does keep the film on track -- she
rages at him at points, dictates to the cameramen how they
should film her and how her face should be properly lit.
There are many clips from the famous films, and a remarkable
sequence with Riefenstahl and two of her cameramen from the
1936 Olympics touring the stadium in Berlin and reminiscing.
Still, no apology, no real acknowledgement of her role as
the Nazi propagandist. Trimborn dismisses the film as
another example of a "failed dialogue." If so, his dialogue
with Riefenstahl for his own book research must also be
viewed as a failure.
Leni
Riefenstahl: A Memoir
(1995 U.S. translation of Memoiren): This is for
the die-hard Leni fans -- 650 pages of autobiography and so
much of it untrue. One must read it with an eye for color,
flair, history, and not be too concerned about accuracy. It
is the best way to get inside the woman's head; this is her
story as she wished it to be told. In the New York Times,
the acerbic critic John Simon reviewed it, calling
Riefenstahl "one of the supreme artists of cinema, the
greatest woman film maker ever," and the book without "a
single unspellbinding page." It's a great read. Trimborn is
correct in calling it "completely unreliable" as an
historical document.
Susan Sontag,
"Fascinating
Fascism." (New
York Review of Books,
February 6, 1975)
An alternative view of Riefenstahl by the most intellectual
of American writers. Sontag celebrates Riefenstahl’s talent
as perhaps the best photographer in the world. In the last
chapter of his book, Bach calls her wrong on one point.
"Nobody making films today alludes to Riefenstahl," and that
is correct only if you forget many important U.S. film
directors today and every sports photographer alive,
according to Bach.
And then
there are the movies:
The three that are most important are: Das blaue
Licht (The Blue Light) 1932 -- the
"mountain-drama" that got Hitler's attention even before he
assumed power; Der Triumph des Willens (Triumph
of the Will) 1935; and Olympia
1938, her masterpiece and the film she wanted to be
remembered for.
(Gary N. Reese has researched and written on
issues of sports, sexual orientation and gender identity for
more than 15 years. His work has appeared in the
Advocate magazine, the New York Times, the
Village Voice, the Texas Triangle, Bay
Windows, the Bay Area Reporter and other
mainstream and gay publications. He is a medalist at the Gay
Games 1990 in Vancouver and 1994 in New York City. He lives
in Houston and works in the field of information technology.
He can be contacted at
garyreesenet@netscape.net )
April 5,
2007 |
