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A little background on Riefenstahl. Born in Berlin, she studied ballet before entering the German film industry as an actress and, subsequently, a director. The languid, shimmering pictorialism of her 1932 directorial debut, The Blue Light (to say nothing of Riefenstahl's own physical gorgeousness), caught the eye of Adolf Hitler, who took her under his wing and arranged for her next projects. Chief among them was the infamous Triumph of the Will, her record of the 1934 Nuremberg Nazi Party rally. Though she professed to the contrary, she was declared a Nazi sympathizer by an Allied tribunal after World War II. Obscurity followed. Then, in the 1970s, she suddenly reemerged with batches of artistic photographic essays, dropping by every festival and schmoozing with everyone from Andy Warhol to Mick Jagger. Despite her extraordinary longevity and stamina (her last work, last year's Impressions Under Water, was finished just shy of her centenary birthday), Riefenstahl never outlived the controversy of her insidious associations. Predictably, her death is being met with artistic praise along with moral scorn, both of equal intensity -- ranging from "the passing of a cinematic prodigy" to "good riddance, Nazi hag." Obviously, this is a time when it is virtually impossible to discuss a filmmaker's achievement without discussing her as a human being -- how one judges her status as an artist becomes inevitably colored by what one knows and thinks of Riefenstahl, her personal beliefs and affiliations. Thus, by this line of thought, her movies may be technically masterly, but her association with the Nazi party automatically makes them vile. By questioning this type of thinking, I am by no means letting Riefenstahl off the hook. Despite her frequent, ass-covering mantra that she was always interested only in film, not politics (as if the two were not inseparable), her professed naiveté of the evil nature of Hitler and the Nazi regime strikes me as very suspect, and her later attempts at redemption in the eyes of the media as not free of calculated opportunism. (For a much more in-depth look at the subject, check out Susan Sontag's brilliant 1975 essay, Fascinating Fascism.) From what I have seen of her work (the already mentioned pictures, 1936's Olympia, her 1973 book of photographs of an African tribe), Riefenstahl comes off as a sophisticated visualist with a penchant for hollow beauty. She has an eye, as they say, yet her elevation of (Nordic) physical prowess is all sinew and geometry, completely cut off from human qualities. In other words, the perfect director to enshrine Nazism. And what is Triumph of the Will if not the most ecstatic enshrinement of a personality in the history of cinema? The film's infatuation with Hitler (the camera shoots him in glowing, low angles, like a panting mistress) and its fetishization of the Nazi mystique (the uniforms, the parades and the goose-stepping marches) are ruthlessly orchestrated to put the squeeze on the viewer -- to eliminate any shred of doubt that what you are watching is indeed the most beautiful spectacle on earth. As Robin Wood put it, it is not just a film "about" fascism, but truly a fascist film. Both in style and theme, it adheres to the Nazi ideals -- it may be a lot of things, but art is not one of them. The most acceptable thing that can be said about it is that it provides us with an important document, a frighteningly vivid "before" to be answered by the "afters" of Alain Resnais' Night and Fog (1955) and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985).
Riefenstahl would act defensively about the film through the rest of her life, and who am I to say for sure whether
she was sincere or cynical? (The fact that she had total freedom to do what she wanted with her cameras does
cast a dark shadow on her comments, though.) The point is that her brand of cinema, deny it or not, lent itself
all too easily to unthinking aestheticism, to "beauty" divorced from meaning and feeling, and, more disturbingly,
to sinister manipulation. That's why her work is still studied, and still loathed.
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