SOURCE: Sklar, Robert. “The Devil's Director.” Cineaste 20, no. 3 (1993): 18-21.

[In the following essay, Sklar asserts that Riefenstahl's pretenses to artistic filmmaking are at the core of the ongoing controversy surrounding her work.]

The man who directed the first Nazi fiction feature, S. A. Man Brand (1933), found steady work as a filmmaker in postwar West Germany. The director of Baptism of Fire (1940), a documentary celebrating the Luftwaffe's aerial triumph over Poland, also made films after World War II. The man who directed the notoriously anti-Semitic Jud Süss (1940) twice went on trial after the war for crimes against humanity, but won acquittal and resumed his career—along with just about every other German director who made films during the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945.

The director of Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938), on the other hand, still vital and vibrant in her ninety-second year, has not made a film for half a century. However often she found exoneration—through mandatory “denazification” proceedings after the war and innumerable libel suits over the decades—she remains forever accused.

The first three filmmakers—Franz Seitz, Hans Bertram, and Veit Harlan, for the record—are forgotten flotsam of the thousand year Reich. The fourth, Leni Riefenstahl, remains at the center of what may be the most significant controversy in the hundred year history of cinema: the question of a filmmaker's responsibility for the crimes committed in the name of political ideologies their work has glorified.

The Trial of Leni Riefenstahl is back in session. Sensing perhaps that age may someday take its toll, Riefenstahl has offered herself for scrutiny again in print and on film. Her autobiography, Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir, published in Germany in 1987 and in Britain in 1992 under the title The Sieve of Time, appears in the United States simultaneously with a three-hour biographical documentary, The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (titled originally in German Die Macht der Bilder, or The Power of Images).

Whether or not the law courts have absolved her, the court of public opinion awaits Riefenstahl's confession. At the end of his film, director Ray Müller gathers sixty years of the world's fear, awe, and outrage into a diffident proposal. “I feel,” he tells the vigilant nonagenarian, “that people are expecting an expression of guilt from you.”

“What am I guilty of?” Riefenstahl performs her self-defense with an air of guileless conviction that belies the obvious: she has said these words a thousand times, and they will never persuade those who accuse her.

“I can and do regret making the film of the 1934 Party Congress, Triumph of the Will,” she says, leaving the impression that what she regrets is the lifetime of trouble it brought her. “But no words of anti-Semitism ever passed my lips. Nor did I write any. I was never anti-Semitic and I never joined the Nazi party. So what am I guilty of? Tell me that. I didn't drop any atom bombs. I didn't denounce anyone. So where does my guilt lie?”

Good question, Leni Riefenstahl. With all the millions of words that have been spent on your case, even those who abhor you aren't always cogent why. You were ambitious. You shielded yourself from unpalatable horrors. Afterward, you lied. You were not abject. You were really a fascist after all. For this you were denied the chance to pursue your profession for half a century? If this is what you're guilty of, you're no different from nearly every other adult German during the Third Reich.

But the issue of your ‘guilt’ doesn't lie in these base but all too mundane motives and behaviors. By your own assertion, you were different. You were an artist. To your defenders, your talent absolves you: dealt a bad hand, you redeemed yourself through art. To your accusers, your responsibility also rests precisely here: granted the gift of genius, you were obligated to refuse its use in the service of evil.

If only you had been a hack like Seitz and company, we could forget if not forgive you. But you made those films, those arty monsters, and they have left us—defenders and accusers alike—in a philosophical swirl over artistry and its obligations. We can't agree, and you're not helping, and it has cost you a filmmaking career.

At this late date, can an additional 656 pages of autobiographical text and 182 minutes of original film footage, interviews, and documents clarify the muddle? Both works tread the usual chronological path through Riefenstahl's life (though only about one-third of her book covers the period through the making of Olympia, while the film devotes two-thirds of its time to that era).

Born to a bourgeois family in Berlin, she became a dancer and performed solo recitals in the early 1920s. By chance, she claims, she saw one of director Arnold Fanck's ‘mountain’ films and was enthralled by its mingling of mysticism and athleticism in a melodrama of mountain climbing in the high Alps. She became Fanck's leading actress and appeared in seven films in the genre. In 1932 she made her directorial debut and also starred in her own mountain film, The Blue Light.

It is odd how complacent Riefenstahl's many critics have been toward her self-obsession, self-promotion, and self-valuation. Her demonic aura so floods our vision that we fail to apprehend her work in any context—other than Nazism, of course. Was she of any significance as a dancer in relation, say, to Isadora Duncan or the Germany Mary Wigman? Was she of any importance as an actress, except as a kind of Pearl White of the German Alps? How does The Blue Light compare with the work of another first-time woman director, Leontine Sagan, whose Mädchen in Uniform (1931) was banned by the Nazis (Sagan left Germany for Britain).

Riefenstahl's own idea of a counterlife seems to be that of Marlene Dietrich. She writes of becoming an intimate of Josef von Sternberg when the American director was in Berlin making The Blue Angel. “You're very good,” he said, according to her account. “I could make you into a big star. Come to Hollywood with me!” Until the last minute, says Riefenstahl, it wasn't clear whether she or Dietrich was going, and she records her later regret at saying no (it was all because of some boyfriend).

No, she was not to be Eliza Doolittle to Sternberg's Professor Higgins, as Dietrich is said to have described herself. Her destiny was to become a female Faust to Adolf Hitler's Mephistopheles. Drawn to a political rally in early 1932, she heard the future Fuehrer's voice for the first time. “That very same instant I had an almost apocalyptic vision that I was never able to forget,” she writes. “It seems as if the earth's surface were spreading out in front of me, like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, spewing out an enormous jet of water, so powerful that it touched the sky and shook the earth.”

She was impressed. Better yet, he was, too, of her. He had seen her mystical dances in her first mountain film, Fanck's The Holy Mountain (1926). The English language voice-over in Müller's film characterizes his attraction this way: “It is precisely these roles which created the image of Riefenstahl that Hitler so admired: the heroic superwoman. The queen of the mountains enthroned high among the peaks beyond the reach of the masses. An idol. A myth. Larger than life. In other words, exactly what Hitler himself so much wanted to be, but so conspicuously lacked the artistic talent to achieve.”

In other words, he needed her. Needed what she could do for him. Needed her spin. It's a nice notion, and it perfectly comports with the Riefenstahl myth: her resistance, Goebbel's enmity, the party's interference, her final acquiescence to the Fuehrer's entreaties, when she is assured that she is not making propaganda but is only recording the facts with complete freedom to do as she wishes.

“Hitler had not understood how unhappy his project would make me,” she writes. “My most passionate desire was to work as an actress. This documentary would be a burden—very far from the temptation that it was so often made out to be in later years.” She is not speaking here of Triumph of the Will, but about the other Nazi party rally film she made, Victory of Faith (Sieg des Glaubens), in 1933. Through the postwar years it has been considered a lost film, but some footage is included in Müller's documentary. “It's just a few shots I put together,” Riefenstahl disparages the project when Müller questions her about it. “It has nothing to do with my technique.”

The Victory of Faith footage makes for one of the most surprising and memorable sequences in Müller's film. A certain lack of precision, one might say disorder, seems to mark both the events and the filmmaking. “The Nazis had not yet learned to march like Nazis,” says the voice-over. “Hitler and Riefenstahl were still trying to get it right.” More than that, the Fuehrer was not yet undividedly the Fuehrer. Standing next to Hitler as he reviews his scurrying, confused troops is Ernst Röhm, head of the SA (Sturmabteilung, or Storm Troopers). It looks for all the world like a joint command.

Hitler took care of the hierarchy problem by ordering Röhm's execution in June 1934. Riefenstahl's job was the image problem. The result was Triumph of the Will. “Hitler didn't want a political film, he wanted an artistic film,” she says to Müller. “Whether it was about politics or vegetables or fruit, I couldn't give a damn.”

Here we have the crux of the Riefenstahl Question. Triumph of the Will is not like Edward Weston's photographs of green peppers. Every shot was planned, every image calculated, to depict Hitler as the totally adored supreme leader. Riefenstahl tells Müller that the film was not propaganda because there was no voice-over commentary and no posed shots. One could say that a voice-over was not necessary because the entire film consisted of posed shots.

Triumph of the Will is “the best propaganda film of all time,” according to the Müller film's English voice-over. Certainly it's the most notorious propaganda film of all time, but if the claim of “best” has any merit—someone should subject it to a more thorough test—then it wins against a very thin field. There are remarkable shots and sequences in the film, to be sure, but don't judge it by its highlights clips. The full-length film is often dull and tiresome: its point, indeed, may be to stun viewers into somnambulistic adherence through a predominant style of repetition and bombast.

It seems incredible the length to which some of Riefenstahl's defenders—particularly among film scholars in the United States—have gone to endorse her self-proclaimed status as a great artist, regrettably ignorant of politics in her tireless quest for esthetic perfection. The answer perhaps lies in a laudable desire to protect creative persons from political persecution, however unsavory their work. A case might be made for Riefenstahl in spite of herself, rather than the case that has been made, which buys into her every self-aggrandizing claim.

Riefenstahl's defenders reach a point of absurdity when they compare her with Sergei Eiseinstein. It's somewhat disingenuous to link the two names as great film artists who were also propagandists for murderous regimes, when Riefenstahl denies that her works are propaganda at all. Eisenstein and other Soviet filmmakers require reassessment over the same issues of political responsibility to which Riefenstahl should be held. But that similarity does not qualify her films to be mentioned in the same sentence with The Battleship Potemkin among the masterpieces of film history.

Words like ‘best,’ ‘great,’ and ‘art’ ought to be resisted when discussing Leni Riefenstahl, just to avoid the cant and obfuscation which have become synonymous with her name. Give her the credit (and blame) that she deserves: she was a pioneer of what might be called mass cinematography, a producer and planner of film spectacles that required dozens of cameras, feats of coordination and logistics, and complex organization of footage for editing. Her films are mixtures of the remarkable—such as the diving scenes in Olympia, which involved splicing reverse action footage into the sequence to heighten the uncanny effect—and the commonplace.

Much cogitation has gone into the question, as the Müller voice-over puts it, to what extent her films are “expressions of the fascist spirit.” The answer is, of course they were—but so were a lot of other forms of artistic expression throughout Europe and the United States during the interwar years, when mass politics, mass culture, and the reaction against them circulated into a volatile mix.

“What is Leni Riefenstahl's sin?,” her autobiography quotes a British defender. “That Hitler admired her?” Indeed we might accept this as the source of her sin, except that she was the one who first admired him. The best that can be said of Riefenstahl is that she had a remarkable capacity for tunnel vision. In 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, she volunteered to make films of combat. Sent to Poland, she was photographed, she writes, with an expression of horror as a gun was pointed at her by a German soldier angry at her protesting brutal treatment of captured Poles. This picture is not among the illustrations in her memoir, but it does appear in Müller's film.

She immediately broke off filming the war and retreated to the Alps, spending the remainder of the war years making an atavistic revival of the mountain genre, Tiefland, completed around 1945 but not released until 1954. This project fostered yet another controversy, when she was accused after the war of having requisitioned gypsies from a Nazi concentration camp to appear as extras in her film. Riefenstahl's defense was that the gypsies were in a refugee camp, not a death camp. The English voice-over in Müller's documentary, however, refers to a “gypsy concentration camp.”

The postwar section of Riefenstahl's autobiography brings a tone of lamentation along with her aggressive defensiveness. Besides the slander and betrayal she describes as her everyday travail, she pictures herself as suffering from constant debilitating illnesses, for which frequent injections provide occasional relief. This semi-invalid figure, however, is confounded by her own tales of trekking through Africa, living with the Nuba tribe, and taking up scuba-diving in her seventies by convincing authorities that she was twenty years younger. Among the beguiling scenes in Müller's film are shots of Riefenstahl dancing with the Nuba—the first appearance of the footage she and her companion filmed among the African tribe, in addition to the photographs she published as books—and underwater shots of her alongside a giant stingray.

The imperious, decisive Riefenstahl of the documentary marks an intriguing contrast to her literary self-portrait as an unworldly, obsessive artist, more acted upon by the world than acting in it. As Müller and Riefenstahl are being filmed on the Nuremberg site of the 1934 Nazi party rally, he brings up the 1933 party rally film, Victory of Faith. Riefenstahl becomes flustered and angry as she realizes that Müller knows more about that film than she has conceded through, as one historian has put it, her usual “mixture of excellent arguments, omissions of fact, and highly inaccurate statements.” She grabs Müller by the arm, shakes him, and swears (the British term “bloody” in the English subtitles doesn't do justice to the word for American ears). This is the Riefenstahl we should remember.