Commentary: Riefenstahl fades out

At the very first Cannes Film Festival, in the spring of 1938, the judges had to decide between two films for the inaugural Golden Palm award -- Walt Disney's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" and Leni Riefenstahl's "Olympia."

Both films were revolutionary. "Snow White" was the first full-length animated film, completed over several years despite predictions that no audience would sit still for 90 minutes of animated anything. "Olympia" was Riefenstahl's second and greatest Nazi Party documentary, a technical tour-de-force requiring two years of editing alone, celebrating the athleticism and pageantry of the 1936 Munich Olympics with a beauty that hasn't been seen before or since.

Riefenstahl won the award. It was a hollow victory, of course. She would make some "mountain dramas" during World War II, but after the war she would spend four years in jail, branded a propagandist who was part of Hitler's death machine. She would spend the rest of her life trying to make another film, but no one would dare finance it. Her friendship with Walt Disney, though, would last until the great animator's death in 1966, and as a result he was sometimes labeled a fascist and an anti-Semite himself.

Disney wasn't a fascist and neither was Riefenstahl. When she died last week, at the age of 101, she was still defiantly defending her reputation after 56 years of more or less constant vilification. (Talk about blacklisting! The Hollywood Ten wasn't in the same league. In the New York Times obituary, the authority quoted to prove Riefenstahl's fascism was ... Susan Sontag! Please.)

The truth is more complex. Riefenstahl was a passionate woman of her time who, like millions of other Germans in the thirties, became enamored of Hitler as a man who could make them strong again. There's absolutely no evidence that she ever endorsed murder or ethnic cleansing. Her sin was that, when the Fuhrer took a liking to her, she didn't hate him and she didn't hate the attention.

She was also a Bavarian actress who liked pageantry, costumes and beautiful people -- so she was a sucker for an extravaganza. Hitler's party rallies were Cecil de Mille with hundreds of thousands of free extras. She was a believer in aesthetics and beauty -- both the beauty of the human body itself, as she would show later in her award-winning photographs of the Nuba tribe of the Sudan, and the beauty of panoramas. In retrospect she seems destined to be the chronicler of the rise of the Reich, and in truth we wouldn't know half as much about it if we didn't have these eternal images.

Evidence that she hated Jews is non-existent, and virtually impossible, because anyone working in Bavarian theater and film in the twenties and thirties would be constantly collaborating with Jewish artists. Half her colleagues in Munich were Jewish. When they started emigrating to Hollywood in the thirties, she even tried to discuss it with Hitler, who had become a fan of her films, but he curtly told her he refused to talk about "the Jewish question" because he already knew how she felt about it.

She was a ravishing beauty known as a dancer and a star of "mountain films," which exist only in Switzerland and Bavaria and are a peculiar sort of pastoral genre that didn't last much beyond the fifties. Think Isadora Duncan crossed with Little Bo Peep, and you have some sense of the formula.

She probably would have remained an actress -- she was a dramatic, sensual woman who loved being the center of attention -- had she not decided in 1930, at the age of 28, to write, direct and finance her own project, "The Blue Light," a romantic mystical mountain film that premiered in 1932 and won the silver medal at the Venice Film Biennale. She instantly became an international film "auteur," before the word had even been coined, and the result was that Hitler wanted her, and only her, to film the 1933 Nazi Party congress.

Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels didn't agree with his boss, though -- he didn't want a woman and he didn't want someone outside the ministry doing it -- and so he sabotaged her efforts, leaving her with no resources and forcing her, when summoned by Hitler to report on her progress, to tell him that the shoot was a disaster. Hitler was incensed, dressed down Goebbels, and ordered him to give her every assistance she needed at the next congress in 1934. Goebbels despised her from that day forward. (This would not win her any brownie points with the post-war tribunals, even though being hated by the chief Nazi propagandist would seem to militate against your being a propagandist yourself. It's also ironic that it was the French -- the same French who had given her the Golden Palm for a Nazi film -- who insisted she remain in jail for so long.)

At any rate, "Triumph of the Will" -- her documentary on the 1934 Nazi Party congress in Nuremberg -- was the movie that would change her life, although she could hardly have known it at the time. It's still discussed in film schools, and it's watched by cineastes who have a sort of lurid fascination with the symbolism of fascism. I've always found it to be a grim, sterile, bloodless film, which may explain, ironically, why it's so popular. It's exactly what we think Nazi leaders SHOULD look and sound like.

"Triumph of the Will" is not only a stylized view of Nazi enthusiasm -- a whole country under the thrall of an idea -- but it's filmed as though this political meeting was a religious rite. You get the same feeling in those old black-and-white documentaries about the Kennedy assassination -- they're not just the chronicle of a crime and its aftermath, but they use a minimalist technique, especially in scenes like the funeral cortege, to create the sense of a world standing still at a key moment in history.

The opening type crawl is spare and pristine: "On September 5, 1934, 20 years after the outbreak of the World War, 16 years after Germany's Passion, 19 months after the beginning of the German Rebirth, Adolf Hitler again flew to Nuremberg to review the assembly of his faithful followers."

This is the only exposition in the whole film. The congress is shown without voiceover narration and in many cases without live sound at all. We see Hitler descending through the clouds to the spired medieval city. We see formations of party members moving through the streets in perfect files. We see crowds waving and young boys giving the "Heil" salute. We see all the symbolic panoply of the moment -- the Nazi flags, the iron crosses, the silver gleaming eagle, statues, spires, banners, troops in serried ranks, lined up with their backs to the crowd. We see virile German soldiers pulling log wagons, stoking ovens, cooking sausage in huge vats. We see groups of ladies in festive folk dresses.

We even see all the addresses to the Congress -- in truncated versions, of course -- as the assembled party members sit at rigid attention, ready to give their disciplined but spirited applause. We see Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess, party theoretician Alfred Rosenberg, Reich Press Chief Otto Dietrich, Reich Justice Commissar Hans Frank, Reich Propaganda Minister Goebbels, and other figures from the new Nazi elite, many of them eerily sporting mustaches that look just like Hitler's.

Riefenstahl uses very few actual words from the speeches themselves. She cuts straight to the slogans:

"One People! One Fuhrer! One Reich! Deutschland!"

"Forests and fields, soil and bread for Germany!"

"Sharpen the hammers, axes and spades! We are the corps of the nation!"

"You are not dead! You live! In Germany!"

The only speaker allowed extended screen time -- after he's led the multitude in their various catechisms -- is the Fuhrer himself.

"We want this people to be hard, not soft, and you must steel yourselves for it in your youth!" he thunders to the earnest young faces of the Reich Youth.

"Our party remains as firm as this rock and will not be divided by any force in Germany," he tells his storm troopers, who are obviously his favorites.

And in his concluding speech to the congress, a very determined tight-lipped Hitler grows more and more roused to anger and passion: "When our party had only seven men, it already had two principles. First, it wanted to be a party with a true ideology. And second, it wanted to be the one and only power in Germany. ... All upright Germans will be National Socialists, but only the best National Socialists will be party members! . ... It is our will that this state shall endure for a thousand years. We are happy to know that the future is ours entirely!" Followed by the longest ovation of the whole film.

That this film full of speeches and ceremonies could maintain interest for a full two hours is a tribute to Riefenstahl's talent for shooting and editing. There's not a boring angle or a stock shot in the whole film. She uses cranes, towers, bird's-eye shots, shots from below, shots of boots, shots of belts, shots of the Fuhrer from various "power" positions -- and yet everything seems remote, bizarre, zombie-like. I've watched the film several times and can't shake the impression that it must be partly ironic.

Riefenstahl never claimed this as a defense -- it would have been perhaps too sophisticated an argument, and one that wouldn't have been believed anyway -- but I can't imagine the film creating a convert. It's been used much more often by American and British TV networks and documentarians than by the German media. It's an indictment of itself. Did she know that? I wonder.

The creepiest sequence in the film for me is when Hitler addresses 200,000 men at Zeppelin Field at night. Albert Speer had orchestrated a "sea of flags," with thousands marching with swastika flags, and a "cathedral of lights" (torch bearers) for the moment when Hitler invokes God as the creator of the German people and thunders "The state doesn't order us! We order the state! We created the state!"

Despite the roar of approval, this democratic sentiment rings hollow. Riefenstahl, who scrutinized every frame of every film she ever made, who edited slowly and deliberately and with painstaking precision, had to know this. She had to sense the lie at the heart of the film. Perhaps that's why we can't stop watching it. Perhaps that why it really IS -- perhaps we can say this now that she's dead -- a work of art.

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