The Fredösphere

My friends like to tease me about being "in love" with Leni Riefenstahl.  I've wondered about this fascinating, repelling woman for a long time, she who remains the only woman in the very top rank of movie directors.  I watched a bit of Triumph of the Will a few years ago, and I expect soon to see Olympia, with its athletes filmed against the sky like Greek gods slipping the surly bonds of earth.

This woman's life is a mess.  Other Nazi art is dismissed as kitsch (indeed, that's the very word Riefenstahl used) but Riefenstahl alone of all the Nazis deserves respect as an artist.  Is her art hopelessly entangled with the Nazis?  Can any of it be rescued from its creator?  I turned to The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl in the hope finally of sorting it out.

For each filming location, she had the wit to see what was needed and the will to make it happen.  She demanded and (usually) got access, whether it was turning a flag pole into a camera mount during the Nuremberg rally, or digging a trench next to the pole vaulters.  She spent months training a large crew of cameramen, then months more editing the miles of film they shot.  I don't recall any other description of an artist's effort that impressed on me the effort involved in breaking artistic ground.

Hard working people are usually "lucky," but not in this case.  I was prepared to cut Riefenstahl some slack on the charge of unfairness -- she asks what difference there is between herself and Sergei Eisenstein, for example.  I do not doubt Hollywood is perennially populated by amoral little Riefenstahls who will never make Nazi films only because they will never be asked.  (Does she ever wonder what her life would have been like if she had been born in the U. S.?)  However, over the course of the film, her tendency to lie about her past is exposed, and one gives up on her.  Perhaps the only trait that saves her from complete condemnation is a failure to exhibit full repentance.  She's ultimately not quite dishonest enough, or simply too lacking in political skills, to fake it.

Eventually, she attempted something of a comeback by publishing photos of muscular Nuba wrestlers of Sudan.  Finally, Riefenstahl on a subject that has nothing to do with Nazis!  Or does it?  Susan Sontag wrote a famous analysis.  Here's more on the Great German Art Exhibitions, the now notorious exhibition of Entartete Kunst ("Degenerate Art"), and another documentary on Nazi art (not just architecture) called Architecture of Doom.

Why open yourself to exhausting semantic arguments over whether Riefenstahl's aesthetic is fascist?  This gives her an opportunity to argue she was never a party member, and then we're off on a long discussion of disputed historical records.  Why not focus on the specifics of what makes her art problematic:  a pervy fascination with male forms characterized by what the French call schlongeur (or would if they spoke a language a lot like French, only even weirder).  Entartete Kunst, indeed.