SOURCE: von Dassanowsky, Robert. “‘Wherever You May Run, You Cannot Escape Him’: Leni Riefenstahl's Self-Reflection and Romantic Transcendence of Nazism in Tiefland.” Camera Obscura, no. 35 (May 1995): 106-29.

[In the following essay, von Dassanowsky offers a critical reading of Riefenstahl's Tiefland within the context of feminist film theory, arguing that Tiefland expresses a pre-feminist consciousness and a rejection of Nazism.]

The discussion over the always-provocative topic of Leni Riefenstahl, tainted genius, has become topical to cinematic and cultural study yet again with the publication of Riefenstahl's autobiography in German in 1987 and the subsequent release of the English translation. Additionally, a new documentary on the auteur by Ray Müller, Die Macht der Bilder Leni Riefenstahls known as The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl¹ in the English-speaking world, premiered in the US at the New York Film Festival in 1993. The other recent effort to reassess Riefenstahl for popular consumption is the interview by Stephen Schiff in Vanity Fair, which presents her as a reborn diva, despite hefty critique of her association with Hitler as Nazi Germany's prime filmmaker.² Schiff's suggestion that she was a highly talented and opportunistic aesthete, whose long life and contributions to the art will come to overshadow her political naivete in aiding Nazism, may seem like a revisionist stance on the filmmaker which buys into her own claims, but it is hardly that. Most of the widely diverse reportage on Riefenstahl manages to suggest this point. Attempts, however, at cogent analysis of her work are still scarce: David Hinton and Renata Berg-Pan's comprehensive reviews of Riefenstahl's career;³ B. Ruby Rich's investigation of the relevance of German Romantic painting to Riefenstahl's visions;⁴ Cooper C. Graham's Olympia study;⁵ Martin Loiperdinger's Triumph des Willens study;⁶ Gisela von Wysocki and Eric Rentschler's Bergfilm and Das blaue Licht examinations;⁷ Linda Schulte-Sasse's semiotic tracing of Das blaue Licht and Tiefland to German bourgeois tragedy;⁸ Thomas Elsaesser's article on Riefenstahl and art cinema;⁹ Helma Sanders-Brahms's essay, “Tyrannenmord.”¹⁰

Ray Müller's documentary, arriving as feminists are ever more vociferously arguing about Riefenstahl's place as a major female artist,¹¹ offers little that is new, but it does stress the question that has been an undercurrent of many recent discussions on the filmmaker: what does the fact that Riefenstahl is a woman have to do with her continuous and overwhelming image as unrepentant Nazi agent? Richard Corliss, writing a review of the Müller documentary in Time magazine, pointedly makes this the center of his critique, asking more directly than others have in the past, why can Riefenstahl not escape her Nazi legend?¹² Certainly Riefenstahl's political taint is not unique. Other artists tolerated or supported European fascism and continued their stardom in the postwar era: Céline, Roberto Rossellini, Salvador Dali, G. W. Pabst, Douglas Sirk, Richard Strauss, Herbert von Karajan, Gottfried Benn, Ernst Jünger, and Gustaf Gründgens, among others. Even Veit Harlan, the director of the anti-Semitic Jud Süss, who worked closely with Propaganda Minister Goebbels and whose films were “more in tune with the political interests of the Nazi government”¹³ than most, was able to revive his career in the 1950s. Fritz Hippler, creator of the most vicious Nazi propaganda film, Der ewige Jude, was apparently “denazified” in 1951 and employed by the US Army as a translator.¹⁴

The absence of women in this list is glaringly obvious. It is a fact that cannot be denied in even the most contrived arguments on talent, fame, and political favoritism that male directors, actors, and writers continued to work in postwar Germany and Europe, whereas the end of the Reich was also the career fade-out for many female cinema artists of equal popularity: the director Riefenstahl, but also such popular German-language icons as Zarah Leander, Lilian Harvey, Marika Rökk, Lil Dagover, and Veit Harlan's wife, Kristina Söderbaum.¹⁵ David Gunston's 1960 article,¹⁶ Michel Delahaye's 1965 Cahiers du Cinema interview,¹⁷ and Kevin Brownlow's 1966 discussion¹⁸ were the first to acknowledge the value of Riefenstahl's work, her opportunism in the service of her artistic vision, and most importantly, her unusual success in a male dominated field made all the more hostile to women in a fascist order. Corliss is even more blunt: “There are several reasons for [Riefenstahl's] punishment: One is that Triumph is too good a movie. … Another is that her visual style—heroic, sensuous, attuned to the mists and myths of nature—was never in critical fashion. Finally, she was a woman, a beautiful woman.”¹⁹

Despite the photographs of Riefenstahl with Hitler and Goebbels which intentionally impart the most odious patriarchal image of woman as man's possession, as man's servant, the filmmaker has maintained her rejection of the Nazi regime once it curtailed her personal and artistic freedoms. Her refusal to give the media what it would like from her, a repentant figure who damns her art and blames a femme fatale hubris, has helped solidify the image of her as Budd Schulberg's “Nazi pinup-girl”²⁰ and Hitler's symbolic mistress, but repentance would hardly have reestablished her cinematic career. Given the ease with which male artists associated with fascism or Stalinism have reinvented themselves, such apologia would play into the patriarchal understanding that Riefenstahl is nothing but a dangerous aberration, that women have no place in artistic creation, and worse, that evil fosters female ambition to beget more evil.

Considering the ongoing interest in Riefenstahl and the most recent attempts by academics to find something in her work that would satisfy her critics or release her from cinematic exile, it is inexplicable that Riefenstahl's final dramatic film, Tiefland²¹ (completed in 1953) has only received direct attention in Berg-Pan's early plot analysis, Schulte-Sasse's semiotic matrix, and in the eloquent essay by feminist filmmaker Sanders-Brahms who asks: “wie kommt es, daβ fünfzig Jahre später—die Berührungsangst vor diesem Film immer noch so groβ ist, daβ die Weigerung, ihn überhaupt nur anzusehen, bei deutschen Intellektuellen zum guten Ton gehört?” (“How is it possible that after fifty years the fear of dealing with this film is still so great that just the refusal to view it is considered a correct attitude for German intellectuals?”)²² Certainly here is a film feminists ought to examine in discussing Riefenstahl's eventual consideration of the female and the female artist in patriarchal society. It is the only dramatic film of Riefenstahl's career other than Das blaue Licht (The Blue Light),²³ and the only one made during the Third Reich. As a project which Riefenstahl has defended as an attempt to escape making a propaganda or war film,²⁴ it should be considered as much a work of “inner emigration” as that of the writers who remained in Nazi Germany and who came to reject the Reich.

I will attempt to elaborate here on Sanders-Brahms's brief essay, which hints that Tiefland is Riefenstahl's cinematic rejection of Hitler: “ein Film über eine Rebellion. Ein Film über den Tyrannenmord” (“A film about a rebellion. A film about the murder of a tyrant”). I will examine what directly influenced Riefenstahl to make Tiefland, exactly how the self-reflexive and anti-authoritarian elements of the film are presented, and why this film opposes previous notions of Riefenstahl's alleged fascist aesthetic. No new approach toward, or rehabilitation of, Riefenstahl's well-discussed pre-Tiefland films is intended. Rather, I am interested in Riefenstahl's ability to change as other male fascist-era artists have, to reflect, to confront, and to distance herself from the ideology that rooted her earlier work. From the self-conscious role of Riefenstahl as gypsy-dancer seduced by a powerfully evil nobleman, to the pre-feminist re-vision of the heroic man, Riefenstahl's Tiefland reenacts her association with Hitler and also her rejection of him. Like Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will),²⁵ which captured National Socialism placing itself into German history as instant dogma, so Riefenstahl, aware of her inescapable role as Nazi insider, scripts in Tiefland a desired resolution far from the dictates of reality.

Riefenstahl originally considered Tiefland a likely follow-up to her first directorial effort, Das blaue Licht (1932), but Sieg des Glaubens (1933),²⁶Triumph des Willens (1935), and Olympia (1938)²⁷ delayed this possible project. The film adaptation of the Eugen d'Albert (1864-1932) opera, Tiefland,²⁸ with libretto by Rudolph Lothar (based on the 1896 Spanish play Terra Baixa by Angel Guimera) was reconsidered in 1939 when her highly stylized adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist's drama, Penthesilea (1808) was deemed too costly a project.²⁹ Due to the escalating war, Goebbels insisted on nationalistic material or pure entertainment film. Since Penthesilea would fall into neither category and Riefenstahl predicted that Tiefland, “a romantic and harmless opera of the highlands”³⁰ would only take a few months to film, it became her new project. Nevertheless, since Tiefland was not considered valuable for propaganda purposes it was given none of the financial support Riefenstahl requested. The antagonism between Goebbels and Riefenstahl, apparently begun during the filming of Triumph des Willens, had only increased. Resenting Riefenstahl's easy access to Hitler and her independent film company, which was not completely under the Propaganda Ministry control, he had continually interfered with her 1936 Berlin Olympics project, Olympia.³¹

The most compelling reason for Riefenstahl to make Tiefland was as a form of escape. Following the success of Triumph des Willens, Riefenstahl found that she had become useful to Hitler's personal propaganda notions and would have to remain available with her cinematic services. Since Triumph ignored the Wehrmacht, Hitler insisted that additional footage be shot. Riefenstahl compromised with a separate fifteen-minute short, Tag der Freiheit.³² The subsequent difficulty of maintaining her vision in the Olympia film made Riefenstahl realize that she would have little control over her own projects despite Hitler's promises. Her open break with Goebbels and the National Socialist ideology came in the form of her obsession with Jesse Owens, her highlighting of the individual efforts (decathlon, marathon race, equestrians, etc.) over celebration of the masses or mass athletic events, and her showcasing of “successful male and female athletes of all races, nations, and colors … in a Germany which was then singularly undemocratic.”³³ Additionally, she delayed the editing of the film to keep Goebbels from using it as propaganda and destroying her multicultural vision.³⁴ Thomas Elsaesser maintains that the director's work never fit into the concepts of Nazi cinema,³⁵ a claim supported by the contradictory messages of Riefenstahl's post-Triumph work. Even the planned Penthesilea film, which initially seems to present heroic themes appropriate to the style of Nazi “Blood and Soil” literature and art, ultimately does not celebrate the warrior image but condemns it. The strong female figure, the importance of human emotion and love, and the disaster brought about by warrior codes in this Kleist drama could never be used to extol phallocratic militarism. Yet although Riefenstahl may have soured on Nazism, she still could not include its very embodiment in her rejection as late as 1940: “I admire Hitler, but he is surrounded by a bunch of criminals and we are going to lose the war.”³⁶

Sent to the Polish front to film newsreels, Riefenstahl witnessed Nazi brutality against Polish civilians firsthand in the village of Konsky. Riefenstahl claims that her protests were answered with pointed guns by the German soldiers responsible for the massacre of thirty Polish prisoners.³⁷ Protesting this action first to General Walther von Reichenau and then to Hitler, Riefenstahl filmed no war footage and quietly resigned her position as war correspondent. Amazingly, she admits in her biography that although she rejected the war, it was not until 1944 that she “cooled” on Hitler as a person.³⁸ That year brought the Stauffenberg attempt on Hitler's life and the death of Riefenstahl's brother, who had been sent to the Russian Front after having criticized the war effort and having bought meat on the black market. The film she had been making shows that Riefenstahl had mistrusted Hitler and the fascist regime for more complex reasons and for a much longer time.

Tiefland became Riefenstahl's “inner emigration” from the hostility of the Nazi inner circle, the shock of the war, and her slow disillusionment with Hitler. She first welcomed the project as a brief respite from current events and as an alternative to the assignment of a propaganda film or war coverage. Only as the project became increasingly protracted, with endless filming in Spain, the Austrian Alps, the Dolomites, and at the Barrandov Studios in Prague, did she use the film as a permanent refuge from Nazi Germany, until production was finally ended in 1944. Tiefland was subsequently confiscated by the French government and returned, with footage missing, to Riefenstahl after her several years in detention camps and her final clearance by French courts.

The 1954 German premiere of Tiefland received little attention from the public but some critics applauded its artistic and technical quality.³⁹ Jean Cocteau, president of the Cannes Film Festival jury at the time, was so impressed by the film he requested the West German government enter it in the Festival, a request immediately declined by Bonn. Cocteau nevertheless screened the film at Cannes to much interest and appreciation. Riefenstahl was unhappy with the final cutting of the film, and blaming the missing footage for the film's abrupt ending, she quickly withdrew the work from circulation.⁴⁰Tiefland has since either been ignored completely in discussion of Riefenstahl's oeuvre, or else it has been attacked as an example of Riefenstahl's anachronistic⁴¹ or egocentric⁴² filmmaking at its worst. Much of this criticism is aimed at Riefenstahl's starring role, the result of her apparent inability to find a suitable actress to portray Martha.⁴³ Riefenstahl has also criticized what she sees as her own stilted acting in the film as being without guidance and the result of her personal hardships and depression during the filming.⁴⁴ The sole interest in Tiefland today appears to be the lingering controversy generated by a German magazine, Revue, in 1949, which claimed that Riefenstahl used Gypsy inmates from concentration camps as extras and mistreated them during the filming. A Munich court found Riefenstahl innocent of the charges that same year, but she has had to repeatedly defend herself against renewed charges based on the original libelous assertion.

With the discussions arising from Riefenstahl's recent autobiography, it is amazing that Tiefland is still considered a “melodramatic trifle.”⁴⁵ Even more surprising is the fact that those feminists who now embrace Riefenstahl as a significant female artist, one that had the misfortune of founding her creative birth in the service of a genocidal phallocracy, have also continued to ignore Riefenstahl's most personal film.⁴⁶Tiefland offers not only the filmmaker's examination of her own culpability vis-à-vis Nazism but expresses a pre-feminist consciousness that places her acceptance of fascist militarism and male dominance in Triumph des Willens in a new and revealing perspective.

Even as Riefenstahl's promotion of Hitler in Triumph generates a palette of fascist imagery, her Romanticism, like her appreciation of the body cult cannot be used to reduce her entire output to an example of a specific fascist aesthetic. Essentially a Bergfilm (mountain film) maker and a nature-mystic, Riefenstahl gave Hitler's set pieces the needed emotional association with German tradition and culture. As B. Ruby Rich, who finds German Romantic painting influential in Triumph, understands: “the principles of Romanticism [were] subjugated to the Nazi ideology by means of specifically Romantic pictorial devices.”⁴⁷ The concept of the nature-bound outsider as prophet, so prevalent in Riefenstahl's work, is also to be found throughout the German Romantic literary canon, in the works of Novalis, Tieck, Goethe, von Eichendorff, and Hölderlin, where it is anything but reactionary or authoritarian. Furthermore, Eric Rentschler has shown that the celebration of mountain purity in Arnold Fanck's Alpine epics of the 1920s and 1930s, and in Das blaue Licht, does not after all, aim to provide “proto-Nazi sentiments” of “Führer-worship.”⁴⁸ The Romantic Bergfilm genre has been reworked and adapted in popular German cinema from its birth in the early Weimar Republic through the West-German Heimatfilm (homeland film).⁴⁹ Renschler also believes that Das blaue Licht “crosses borders and defies fixities”⁵⁰ in its ideological and technical adaptation of the Bergfilm. I feel that Tiefland, in turn, should be seen to cross and defy the filmmaker's previous concepts and conventions, most importantly in the use of her established Romantic vocabulary to subvert and counter a paradigmatic authoritarian order.

Despite their similar function as erotic stimulus to the male characters, the social outsiders portrayed by Riefenstahl in Das blaue Licht and Tiefland are distinctly different from each other. The mountain girl Junta in Licht is destroyed by the materialism of the villagers and is a male fantasy image, a martyr, a “mythical essence.”⁵¹ Her mimosa-like nature, her aesthetic-spiritual understanding of the blue crystals, and her final transformation into an icon, denotes a vague messianic image. The character of Martha in Tiefland is first a very human opportunist with no lofty qualities or notions. Her eventual desire to help those oppressed by her “Führer” speaks of sympathy and humanism not martyrdom or utopianism. Similarly, Tiefland's concept of transcendence is a simplistic and personal one, not the occult manifesto of Das blaue Licht. Indeed, Renata Berg-Pan finds Tiefland to be weak because “Riefenstahl no longer had the same relationship to the topic which had compelled her to take it up in 1934. She had outgrown the emotional bonds attaching her to the theme.”⁵² In his 1972 BBC interview with Riefenstahl, Keith Dewhurst dispels Riefenstahl's early mysticism with Tiefland, marking it as “the first time in one of her films [that] she tells a story with a social message—poor peasants against a rich landlord.”⁵³ What Riefenstahl presents of herself and her art in Hitler's Germany via Tiefland ultimately makes it as important as any film of her career.

Tiefland opens with a visual/musical poem of the beauty of nature and the tranquility of the mountains. The long shots emphasize space and freedom, a nature-worship more reminiscent of Fanck's early Bergfilm, than of the mountain images in Das blaue Licht, where filtered daylight suggests a haunted twilight setting. Here, the view is clear and bright, offered without sophisticated technical manipulation. The isolated human inhabitant of Tiefland's mountains is Pedro the shepherd (Franz Eichberger), whose hut we enter. The camera lingers on his sleeping face and body. Riefenstahl's appreciation of the male form has repeatedly been integrated by critics into an overall fascist aesthetic in Triumph and Olympia because of the Nazi body cult.⁵⁴ But given the gentle nature of Pedro who fights only to protect the weak and is shy of both men and women, this idolization of the male body can hardly be considered an element of fascist warrior aesthetics;⁵⁵ it is exactly the opposite. Riefenstahl here eroticizes the gentle and innocent man as antidote to the Nazi's fierce, elitist, and patriarchal ideal.⁵⁶ Indeed, Tiefland is Riefenstahl's summary of her particular dualist cinematic scopophilia since she incorporates not only female desire for the male form but also her ability to offer the “woman as image, man as bearer of the look.”⁵⁷

Pedro is awakened by his dog warning him of a wolf threatening the sheep. Berg-Pan has commented on this symbolism of innocence versus violence in the confrontation between wolf and sheep: “One wonders how the director and the Nazi authorities reconciled such action with Germany's own attacks on largely defenseless neighbors.”⁵⁸ Riefenstahl's understanding of what transpired in Konsky must have had an effect in the planning of this scene; its emphasis is unambiguous and it foreshadows the climax of the film. The director also considered the war and the Reich lost, and perhaps believed that there would be no need to show a completed version to the Nazi authorities. It would indeed be impossible to interpret the sheep as “good Germans” attacked by evil, since National Socialist propaganda would have no use for an image of a weak and docile Volk. Pedro fights the wolf with his bare hands as they roll down the hill in mortal struggle. Having strangled the wolf, Pedro washes his wounds in the river and gently bathes the injured paw of his dog.

Like Junta in Das blaue Licht and the torch-bearer from Mount Olympus in the prologue to Olympia, Pedro descends the mountain as the pure, nature-bound, and mystically empowered force. He passes through arid fields where tired peasants beg the Marquez's representative to let the river, undammed by the Marquez, flow back to their drought-stricken land. The overseer rejects their plea and informs them that the Marquez needs the water for his bulls. In the village, Pedro passes a covered gypsy wagon in which Martha (Riefenstahl) ties her shoes in preparation for her dance. She is, as Berg-Pan understands her, a symbol for the “mediation between the corruption of the plains and the innocence of the mountains.”⁵⁹ Following Romantic tenets, the village or “valley” of Tiefland, like the town in Das blaue Licht, represents the corruption of civilization set in contrast to the purity of nature and the mountains. The film replays the basic “narrative” pattern of Riefenstahl's other previous work as well: urban Nuremberg is made orderly and joyous by a Hitler descending from the clouds in Triumph; the Babel of nations unites in peaceful order as the flame is passed from the gods to Hitler's stadium in Olympia. But in Tiefland, the director shifts the symbolism of her character types and the “plot” resolution. Here the established authoritarian leader and his order are negated by a nature-bound outsider, one who wants no part in the society, to bring about freedom and possible prosperity.

Although Sanders-Brahms believes that Riefenstahl understood the opera to echo her own situation, she does not mention that Riefenstahl increased the self-reflexive quality of the film by altering the original opera plot to present Martha as succumbing willingly to seduction by the evil Marquez.⁶⁰ Nor does she detail Martha's opportunism in order to become an admired and respected lady. Berg-Pan originally sets up the basis for such autobiographical analysis but does not pursue this line of inquiry. She is convinced that the scene in which the Marquez (Bernhard Minetti) enters the inn to witness Martha's dancing has fascist overtones: “the master Don Sebastian peremptorily stomps into the inn, is immediately greeted by the peasants with bowed heads and other forms of self-humiliation, and as the master, is welcomed by a woman who can entertain him. He has the power to take her, and she submits without question.”⁶¹ In presenting Martha and her dance to the observant Marquez, director Riefenstahl assumes the male gaze to objectify and eroticize her own image, prompting one male critic to comment on the film's “undulating bosoms.”⁶² But the gaze is from the point of view of the boorish male peasants who paw her and of the Marquez Don Sebastian, the powerful, abusive leader. Despite Riefenstahl's awareness of her own photogenic beauty, she would be, by the filming of Tiefland, more conscious of the subservient female role in Nazi society and her own problems as female artist in Nazi political circles than earlier in her career. Oppressive male dominance is one of the guiding themes of the film, therefore Riefenstahl must connect the traditional male figures with an objectifying male gaze. She later subverts this gaze by the actions of Martha and with the non-traditional male figure of Pedro.

The erotic tension between the Marquez and Martha is undeniable, but Martha is attracted to him not because of his “viciousness,”⁶³ but rather because she misunderstands him to be both powerful and kind; when he discovers she has been beaten by her gypsy companion, he promises no one will hurt her again. The Marquez throws the gypsy out onto the street along with a bag of coins and returns to dress Martha as a noblewoman. Martha accepts this as Riefenstahl accepted Hitler, naively avoiding the obvious or wishing only to see the self-serving aspect she desires to see—a powerful man who will give her an important and protected existence. Indeed, Riefenstahl's opportunism on behalf of her art and fame governed her early life. She has stated that she would have replaced Hitler with Stalin but for her preference of working in German and in Germany. This is camouflaged reasoning given her outspoken admiration for the German leader. Yet without any sense of irony, the director claims she considered Goebbels a “Mephisto” figure and “[ein] gefärlicher Mann” (a dangerous man) because he would have served Stalin if the situation had allowed it.⁶⁴ As Martha dances for the Marquez (and his guitar accompaniment) to become his pampered mistress, so Riefenstahl filmed for Hitler (and his ideology) to become a renowned artist. Berg-Pan separates the “innocent” Martha from Riefenstahl as her dream alter-ego, but Martha is hardly innocent, and the director/actress's identification with Martha, the talented opportunist dancer is sad and self-critical rather than ideal or dreamlike.

The capitalist support of authoritarian rule is introduced in the figure of Donna Amelia (Maria Koppenhöffer), a vain, calculating woman, the daughter of the Mayor of Roccabruna (Karl Skraup), who is goaded on by her father to become the wife of the Marquez for a sizeable amount of money.⁶⁵ The Marquez requires her finances to resolve his debts and Donna Amelia is therefore treated as a possession to be bartered by her father and as an object of financial desire by the Marquez. She readily accepts subservience to a man she hates for the sake of a title and to please her father. Riefenstahl, who celebrated the patriarchy in Triumph, creates powerful allegories of male domination and abuse of women in Tiefland. The class differences between Martha, Donna Amelia, and the servant women are revealed as irrelevant under the equal abuse and oppression by men. Women are excluded from active involvement in the sociopolitical hierarchy in Tiefland and suffer in what Monique Wittig would come to understand as the oppressed “class” of women.⁶⁶

The image of Pedro on the mountain, the thinking, protecting man surrounded by gentle beasts is mirrored by his welcome in the cellar of the Marquez's castle, where he is surrounded by the giggling cast of servant girls who feed him, flirt with him, and gain as little attention from him as he gives his sheep. In dark opposition to Pedro, the Marquez dotes on his bulls and denies his male peasants, as he would unruly animals. The sheep/woman symbolism is restated in the triangle of Pedro-Martha-Marquez. Pedro's battle with the wolf over the fate of his sheep at the start of the film sets up the final conflict in which Pedro duels with the Marquez over Martha. He even calls the Marquez the “wolf.” The authoritarian figure who ought to represent order is instead equated with a wild animal that kills and steals.

The comparison of the Marquez's desire to conquer Martha sexually with the shy virginity of Pedro and his love for Martha, creates a fascinating pre-feminist indictment against the male warrior persona as a root of sexual dysfunction between man and woman. Although women are equated with weak, producing animals, the final shot does throw the woman/sheep equation into a critical light. Martha, saved from the Marquez by Pedro, walks with him back to nature, into the rainbow-graced mountains. They are the idealized couple, escaping urban decadence and male dominance. Martha carries her own belongings; she is neither being served as object of desire, nor is she a servant to Pedro. Berg-Pan finds this pairing of a “now sophisticated lady, accustomed to being served, well dressed and handsome at all times, and Pedro, the naive shepherd”⁶⁷ to be unlikely, but the pairing exists as an allegory, albeit a Romantically framed one, of female liberation and male enlightenment. Far from any fascist imagery, the shot of the couple walking into the mountains is, more than anything else, reminiscent of Socialist Realist sculpture, which places the two sexes side-by-side, equally important and powerful. It is an image quite different from the singular male figure, the male-centered family grouping (with the female figure physically dominated by the male), or the woman-as-mother image in National Socialist visual iconography.⁶⁸ More importantly, this equalizing, peaceful image of the couple walking up into the mountains offers a kind of reversal of the prologue to Olympia, in which ancient statuary come to life on a mountain (Olympus) and proceed downward. The male and female figures are not only separate, but the male (warrior) nudes visually supplant the female dancers and lead the progression to the male torchbearer who takes the viewer down and into the authoritarian lowlands of Nazi Germany—which Riefenstahl hopes to transcend both symbolically and emotionally in Tiefland.

A number of elements in the film enforce Riefenstahl's use of the relationship between Martha and the Marquez to represent her Nazi experience. As she accepts her position in the castle and gives herself to the Marquez, Martha's gypsy dresses, the costume of (other) ethnicity and her art are replaced by the those of a noblewoman. These elitist outfits are uniforms which connect her to the ruling order and label her a possession of the Marquez. In her most masculine dress of the film, which in military-like regimentation mimics the Marquez's suit, Martha implores the Marquez to communicate with the draught-stricken peasants. His preceding ride through the town with Martha, who witnesses his reception as Riefenstahl witnessed Hitler's for the camera, and his arrogant consideration of the peasant's requests (complete with Hitler-like poses and gestures) quote Hitler's tour of Nuremberg in the early segments of Triumph des Willens. Unlike those moments, however, the poor crowds of Tiefland do not welcome or cheer their “Führer” but curse him in anger and misery. Martha, like Riefenstahl who has admitted as much, is possessed by the leader she has agreed to serve and perform for, and is shocked by a sudden cruelty which contradicts his generous behavior to her.⁶⁹ One must also consider that Bernhard Minetti's Marquez bears a strong physical resemblance to Goebbels. Like the Propaganda Minister, the Marquez is known for his sexual dalliances,⁷⁰ and his abuse of Martha mimics Goebbels's alleged verbal assaults on Riefenstahl.⁷¹ The director may have at least partially patterned her villain on Goebbels because of her open anger against him and because she could not or would not attack Hitler directly. Given these traits, the Marquez-Martha relationship might also suggest an early personal involvement with Goebbels that the director does not acknowledge.

Martha attempts to aid the peasants by giving them a necklace presented to her by the Marquez. The possibility of breaking abusive control is, however, hindered by unquestioned values of class and honor: after punishing his wife for accepting the gift, a miller returns the necklace to the castle. The Marquez's physical and psychological abuse of Martha causes her to run away from him into the mountains, where she collapses and is nursed by Pedro, who falls in love with her. Having been brought back to the castle, Martha receives an ominous warning from the old servant woman, Josefa (Frieda Richard): “Wohin du auch läufst, du kannst ihm nicht entkommen. Er holt dich wieder zurück” (“Wherever you may run, you cannot escape him. He will take you back”). Considering Riefenstahl's post-Konsky attempt to escape the war, official film projects, and Hitler's increasingly hostile inner circle, this quote is the most concrete cinematic statement by the filmmaker on the Faustian relationship she accepted in supporting Hitler through her work, of her fear and of her desire to distance herself from the regime after 1940. It has also proven to be a premonition of Riefenstahl's inability to free herself from Hitler's shadow since 1945.

Berg-Pan finds Martha to be continually attracted by the Marquez's sadistic possessiveness,⁷² although she makes no attempt at explaining Martha's masochism. If one recalls that Martha had been beaten by her former companion, her acceptance of such an abusive dynamic may come from her ignorance. Considering Martha's flight into the mountains, her endurance of the Marquez's violence is not due to sexual attraction—Susan Sontag's sadomasochistic rape metaphor of Hitler and the ecstatic crowds in Triumph⁷³ notwithstanding—but is due to fear, especially since she is told there is no escape. Does then Martha's wide-eyed silence at the Marquez's ranting convey Riefenstahl's growing fear of, or enlightenment about, the Nazi regime? Or does she suggest that her artistic opportunism replicates the attitude of the Germans under Nazism: a numb tolerance of disaster following the fading victories?

An important force in the intrigues involving Martha and the Mayor's daughter is the Marquez's administrator, Camillo (Aribert Wäscher). As Linda Schulte-Sasse suggests in her charting of Tiefland's German Enlightenment drama types, he is a stock figure from eighteenth-century bourgeois tragedy. As conspiring aide-de-camp to the leader, Camillo's traits recall Hitler's seconds-in-command, those Riefenstahl considered to be a “bunch of criminals”⁷⁴: he has the girth and voluptuary nature of Hermann Goering as well as the manipulative, spiteful behavior of Joseph Goebbels. Camillo persuades Donna Amelia to pay off the Marquez's debts, openly disregards Martha's presence, undermines her credibility with the Marquez, and ultimately convinces him to marry Martha off to an unknowing shepherd, Pedro, so that she may remain an accessible mistress after the Marquez weds Donna Amelia.

The final third of the film delivers Riefenstahl's Romantic regression into nature and her projected transcendence of evil and corruption. Riefenstahl laments her political taint through Martha's guilt for having allowed herself to be sexually exploited by the evil leader. Martha confesses her impure status to Pedro, who expects his new bride to be an innocent like himself. The equation of Martha's sexual involvement with the Marquez and Riefenstahl's artistic support of Hitler is qualified by the fact that Martha, a gypsy dancer who specializes in erotic movements, collects money at taverns, and travels with a man who beats her, would hardly be a sexually inexperienced woman. Yet it is her relationship with the Marquez that is pointedly presented as the loss of her virginity.

Berg-Pan calls attention to what she sees as a less-than-credible dichotomy in Martha, who is erotic and powerful as well as innocent and victimized, and considers this to be Riefenstahl's fantasy self.⁷⁵ But Martha is not Junta of Das blaue Licht, the mythic creature who represents spiritual values destroyed by greed. Martha is the Riefenstahl who finds herself desiring escape from her own pact with evil. Thus the emphasis on the sophisticated gypsy's relationship with the Marquez as her actual “defilement” is necessarily unrealistic because it is a political metaphor. It is also unrealistic because Riefenstahl's Martha is patterned on her own dualistic self-image of a sexually experienced and independent woman who nevertheless managed to present herself in the patriarchal image of a graceful and subservient lady in Nazi propaganda photos. The simplistic plot of the original libretto cannot sustain these added character dimensions. Riefenstahl also removed the opera's climactic moment in which Martha begs Pedro to kill her because she has been another man's lover first.⁷⁶ Instead, she emphasizes Martha's (and her own) continued goodness despite her association with evil.

The night storm which interrupts the Marquez and Donna Amelia's wedding feast in a typical Romantic reflection of an agitated emotional state, suggests the Marquez's sexual desire for Martha—whom he intends to bed on his wedding night—and foreshadows the havoc to come. The Marquez's attempt to (re)possess Martha is met with physical defence from Pedro. Having lost the duel with knives, the Marquez is blocked from escape by the peasants and Pedro strangles him as he did the wolf. Leaving the dead leader and the now free peasants behind, Martha and Pedro walk into the mountains and a new life together.

The film is alternately banal and enthralling because Riefenstahl has taken a simplistic tale of black and white, of good and evil, and created disturbing shades of grey at its center, in the character of Martha. This certainly creates a more realistic female character, but one that is at odds with the style of the tale. Martha is a three-dimensional figure carrying Riefenstahl's autobiographical knowledge in a film populated by types. Yet the tale of the types, the simplistic romance, dominates the ending of the film. Riefenstahl's Martha rises blissfully into the happy end because the director/writer/actress who previously assembled visions of Hitler's Germany to serve as a script for the regime's self-image, has with Tiefland, scripted her own escape from a pact with evil and a prominence gone sour. Through Martha, she does not relinquish her equality with men but leaves behind a leader and a society she previously celebrated. Riefenstahl/Martha transcends into a natural world without politics, war, or even human beings, aside from the man of her fantasy: attractive, gentle, and good, he is a non-warrior who does not seek to control her and appears to defer to her knowledge and experience.

Susan Sontag has denied Riefenstahl the ability to change either her mind or her cinematic style. Similarly, when discussing Riefenstahl's Nuba books, Sontag would have us believe that because Riefenstahl comments on the role of Nuba women as “breeders and helpers”⁷⁷ she accepts this role for all women and has therefore not altered her fascist beliefs since Triumph.⁷⁸ Equally absurd is Wilhelm Bittorf's suggestion that a lingering desire for black SS uniforms can be found in Riefenstahl's photo-studies of Nuba males.⁷⁹ Even without footnotes on Goebbels, Jesse Owens, the individual versus the collective, and the Konsky incident, the use of her cinema codes in Olympia and Tiefland demonstrates that Riefenstahl had changed both her mind and much of her ideology.

Examining Tiefland against Sontag's definition of fascist aesthetics in film offers the most direct illustration of Riefenstahl's development. While Riefenstahl's earlier films, from Das blaue Licht to certain aspects of Olympia, manage to “endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude,”⁸⁰ glorifying surrender and glamorizing death, Tiefland explodes these fascist ideals. Gone is the self-sacrificing, fascist-friendly mysticism of Das blaue Licht and the grandiose celebration of the documentary films. What surfaces is parody and criticism of such previous notions. Servitude imprisons Martha and the peasantry, who come to hate their “Führer.” Egomania and grandiosity offer these people nothing and ultimately destroy the elite. The very center of the story, the heroine, is a non-Aryan, a gypsy. What remains, even in the naive Romantic finale, reaches beyond most postwar dominant film: a strong, independent female at odds with patriarchal roles and images; a male devoid of machismo beyond his desire to defend and, perhaps because Riefenstahl's Martha seems somewhat older than Pedro,⁸¹ one who appears to be very conscious of the dominant quality of the woman he walks with into the new dawn. Tiefland is the subversion of what has been understood to be Riefenstahl's fascist aesthetics, or more precisely, her mystical idealism that fed into Nazi ideology. The operatic structure and fairy-tale transcendence of the film continue to give us Riefenstahl the idealist, but this is a healthier Romanticism, one encouraging hope and enlightenment in desperation and remorse, rather than mystical longings for utopia.

“Nobody making films today alludes to Riefenstahl”⁸² wrote Sontag in 1974. Naturally, the stigma surrounding the filmmaker has made reference as difficult as dispassionate analysis. Yet significant recognition has been given by important French and Italian filmmakers who praised and encouraged Riefenstahl in the 1950s,⁸³ by American cineastes who noted her contribution to the art and technology of film at the Telluride Film Festival in 1974, and by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, mainstream directors who often pay critical homage to her work in their popular art.⁸⁴ Beyond cinema, Thomas Elsaesser finds Riefenstahl's documentary style to be central to television.⁸⁵ Nevertheless, the general perpetuation of Riefenstahl's unique isolation is something feminist critics cannot ignore. Sontag labels Riefenstahl as the beautiful outsider in her films and in her life; Rich sees her as the token amazon; Schulte-Sasse as a self-fetishist. In fascism she could be nothing else and in the seemingly liberal-democratic world, such status has less to do with her role as former fascist creative artist—there were many, largely rehabilitated without qualm—but with the continued patriarchal nature of our world. The fascist “longings” that Sontag and others see in appreciating Riefenstahl are to be found in a socioculture that would prefer to label Riefenstahl as anything but an artist, and not in the cinematic documents of a talented woman who made an artistic pact with Hitler and then attempted to escape it. Sanders-Brahms refreshingly dares to speculate that Riefenstahl “das Ende der Nazis wünschte, es mit ihrer Arbeit möglicherweise herbeiführen helfen wollte” (“wished the end of the Nazis and possibly wanted to help bring this about with her work”).⁸⁶

Although Riefenstahl has always stipulated exactly what she knew or did not know of Nazi genocide, Tiefland suggests she knew enough, and that she also suspected the ultimate fate of her own opportunism. Her break with Hitler and National Socialism occurred because as a woman, she came to comprehend the oppression and destruction of fascism from a pre-feminist viewpoint. Yet in her memoirs Riefenstahl still wonders why she insisted on completing the film amid personal tragedy, illness, and the collapse of Germany.⁸⁷ Sensitive to analyses of her work undertaken for the sake of accusation, she trivializes her own visions and impulses, whether it is the enthusiastic lens capturing a messianic Hitler floating above the crowds or the need to resolve her disillusionment with fascism. Tiefland is Riefenstahl's most personal cinematic statement, the result of a film oeuvre tied to the rise and fall of the Third Reich. It implies a perception that Riefenstahl's critics have failed to elicit from the filmmaker herself: namely that the warrior order she celebrated at Nuremberg would ultimately condemn her and those who would consider Riefenstahl and her post-Triumph films as a model.

Notes

1. A 1993 international co-production of Omega/Nomad/ZDF/Channel 4.

2. Stephen Schiff, “Leni's Olympia,” Vanity Fair September 1992: 251-296.

3. David Hinton, The Films of Leni Riefenstahl (Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1978); Renata Berg-Pan, Leni Riefenstahl (Boston: Twayne, 1980).

4. B. Ruby Rich, “Leni Riefenstahl: The Deceptive Myth,” Sexual Stratagems: The World of Women in Film, ed. Patricia Erens (New York: Horizon, 1979): 202-209.

5. Cooper C. Graham, Leni Riefenstahl and “Olympia” (Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1986).

6. Martin Loiperdinger, Der Parteitagsfilm “Triumph des Willens” von Leni Riefenstahl: Rituale der Mobilmachung (Opladen: Leske and Budrich, 1987).

7. Gisela von Wysocki, “Die Berge und die Patriarchen: Leni Riefenstahl,” Die Fröste der Freiheit: Aufbruchsphantasien (Frankfurt: Syndikat, 1980): 70-85; Eric Rentschler, “Fatal Attractions: Leni Riefenstahl's The Blue Light,” October 48 (Spring 1989): 46-68; Eric Rentschler, “Mountains and Modernity: Relocating the Bergfilm,” New German Critique 51 (1990): 137-161.

8. Linda Schulte-Sasse, “Leni Riefenstahl's Feature Films and the Question of a Fascist Aesthetic,” Framing the Past: The Historiography of German Cinema and Television, ed. Bruce A. Murray and Christopher J. Wickham (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992): 140-166.

9. Thomas Elsaesser, “Leni Riefenstahl: The Body Beautiful, Art Cinema and Fascist Aesthetics,” Women in Film: A Sight and Sound Reader, eds. Pam Cook and Phillip Dodd (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1993): 186-197.

10. Helma Sanders-Brahms, “Tyrannenmord: Tiefland von Leni Riefenstahl,” Das Dunkle zwischen den Bildern: Essays, Porträts, Kritiken, ed. Norbert Grob (Frankfurt: Verlag der Autoren, 1992): 245-251.

11. The first attempts of feminist acceptance of Riefenstahl were documented by Susan Sontag who details the 1973 New York Film Festival poster created by a feminist artist promoting Leni Riefenstahl along with Agnès Varda and Shirley Clarke. “Fascinating Fascism,” Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1980): 84. Not all feminists have moved towards an acceptance of Riefenstahl. Germans tend to remain unconvinced of her role in women's art. Sigrid Vagt considers Das blaue Licht to be the propaganda for totalitarian social polarization and idealization of the female. “Das blaue Licht: Logik des Entweder-oder,” Frauen und Film 14 (1977): 28. Helge Heberle finds Riefenstahl's art to be hopelessly inseparable from its Nazi ideology. See, “Notizen zur Riefenstahl-Rezeption,” Frauen und Film 14 (1977): 29-34. Nevertheless, Louise Heck-Rabi in Women Filmmakers: A Critical Reception (Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1984), Ally Acker in “Leni Riefenstahl,” Reel Women: Pioneers of the Cinema, 1896 to the Present (New York: Continuum, 1991): 298-303, and B. Ruby Rich all reject the “myths and emotionalism” (Rich 202) surrounding Riefenstahl and her work which has previously inhibited any real cinematic analysis or feminist discussion of her art.

12. Richard Corliss, “Riefenstahl's Last Triumph,” Time 18 October 1993: 91-92.

13. Berg-Pan 164.

14. David Stewart Hull, Film in the Third Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973) 174.

15. The recent publication of the autobiographies of Marika Rökk and Kristina Söderbaum, which deal with their exile from cinema in the postwar era, has not escaped German criticism. See, “Unendliche Geschichte,” Der Spiegel 43 (1993): 259-260.

16. David Gunston, “Leni Riefenstahl,” Film Quarterly 14.1 (Fall 1960): 4-19.

17. Michel Delahaye, “Leni Riefenstahl,” Interviews with Film Directors, ed. Andrew Sarris (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1968): 387-402.

18. Kevin Brownlow, “Leni Riefenstahl” Film Winter 1966: 14-19.

19. Corliss 92.

20. Budd B. Schulberg, “Nazi Pin-up Girl: Hitler's No. 1 Movie Actress,” Saturday Evening Post 30 March 1946: 11-41.

21. Tiefland, dir. Leni Riefenstahl, perf. Leni Riefenstahl, Franz Eichberger, Bernhard Minetti, Aribert Wäscher, Maria Koppenhöfer, and Karl Skraup, Leni Riefenstahl Produktion/Tobis, 1954.

22. Sanders-Brahms 245.

23. Das blaue Licht, dir. Leni Riefenstahl, perf. Leni Riefenstahl, Mathias Wieman, Max Holzboer, Benni Führer, and Martha Maire, Leni Riefenstahl Studio Films, 1932.

24. Leni Riefenstahl, Memoiren (München: Knaus, 1987): 354. This work has also been translated as: A Memoir (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993). Henry Jaworsky (Heinz von Jaworsky), Riefenstahl's cinematographer on Das blaue Licht and Olympia, who continued his career in Europe and the US after 1945, believes Riefenstahl deliberately stretched Tiefland for seven years to avoid working on Party propaganda and dealing with the war. See, “Henry Jaworsky Interviewed by Gordon Hitchens, Kirk Bond, and John Hanhardt,” Film Culture 56 (Spring 1973): 150.

25. Triumph des Willens, dir. Leni Riefenstahl, camera, Sepp Allgeier, et al, Leni Riefenstahl Studio Films, 1935.

26. Sieg des Glaubens, dir. Leni Riefenstahl, camera, Sepp Allgeier, et al, German Ministry of Propaganda, 1933.

27. Olympia (Part 1: Fest der Völker; Part 2: Fest der Schönheit), dir. Leni Riefenstahl, camera, Hans Ertl, et al, Olympia Film, 1938.

28. Sanders-Brahms underscores the anti-elitist and anti-exploitation theme of the opera by noting that it has been a staple in Eastern Bloc opera houses (246).

29. Riefenstahl, Memoiren 354. Max Reinhardt once considered Riefenstahl for the part of the Amazon queen in his own production of Kleist's Penthesilea (Schiff 291). Riefenstahl's very complete 1939 outline for the planned project and her production notes have been translated into English and published as “Why I Am Filming Penthesilea,” trans. John Hanhardt, Film Culture 56 (Spring 1973): 192-215.

30. Delahaye 399.

31. Leni Riefenstahl, “One of Hitler's Favorites,” interview with Dan Rather, 60 Minutes, CBS, 31 August 1980.

32. Tag der Freiheit, dir. Leni Riefenstahl, camera, Willy Zielke, et al, Leni Riefenstahl Studio Film, 1935.

33. Berg-Pan 145.

34. Riefenstahl claims that Goebbels demanded she dismiss some of her staff, edit out the Black athletes from the footage, and ultimately intended to take possession of her film on the pretense that she had incurred a deficit of 80 Marks at the Filmkreditbank. Hitler ultimately acted on her complaints and removed Riefenstahl from Propaganda Ministry control, placing her under the administration of Rudolf Hess. Memoiren 278-280.

35. Elsaesser 194.

36. Riefenstahl, 60 Minutes.

37. Riefenstahl, Memoiren 349-352. Riefenstahl does not claim they were Jews, as was previously reported by David Gunston in Film Quarterly (18). Her note of congratulation to Hitler upon his invasion of France and entry into Paris in 1940 has often been used as proof of Riefenstahl's undying loyalty to Hitler. It should instead be understood as an act of opportunism. Such a congratulatory message would maintain friendly relations with an all-powerful mentor who might have distanced himself from her since the Konsky incident, leaving her to the increasingly hostile inner circle lead by her nemesis, Joseph Goebbels.

38. Riefenstahl, Memoiren 395.

39. See Frankfurter Allgemeine 28 April 1954, and Filmwoche 6 February 1954.

40. Berg-Pan 166.

41. See Geoffrey Donaldson qtd. in Gunston (18). Sanders-Brahms believes that Riefenstahl's expressionistic intensity may not suit popular taste (251).

42. Joe Hembus and Christa Bandmann, Klassiker des deutschen Tonfilms 1930-1960 (München: Goldmann, 1980): 241.

43. Riefenstahl, Memoiren 525.

44. See Berg-Pan 166 and Riefenstahl, Memoiren 525. Although G. W. Pabst and Veit Harlan had directed some secondary scenes for the film, neither directed Riefenstahl nor did they receive any credit. Berg-Pan believes neither wanted to be mentioned because Riefenstahl's status had become increasingly problematic after her criticism of the Polish campaign and with Goebbels's increase in power during the war (165).

45. Schiff 295.

46. Mary C. Gentile in Film Feminisms: Theory and Practice (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985) lists Riefenstahl in the roster of women filmmakers (Dulac, Arzner, Lupino, Deren) who represent an “alternate film tradition” and the “oppositional cultural practice” to the male dominated film art (4).

47. Rich 207.

48. Sontag 76. Sontag bases her discussion of Riefenstahl on Siegfried Kracauer's condemnation of the Bergfilm and the filmmaker in From Caligari to Hitler (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1947). Tiefland had not yet been released at the publication of Kracauer's study.

49. Rentschler believes Das blaue Licht to be Riefenstahl's attempt to strengthen the female role in the Bergfilm genre. He also considers that Riefenstahl learned well the sexual objectification of women in film and offers, in the character of Junta, a consummate crafting of male fantasy. The film is perhaps also a premonition of Riefenstahl's life in Hitler's Germany: “A woman stars in and directs her own fantasy of self destruction, creating a film about the fateful sacrifice of a woman for the sake of a community, a martyr role” (160).

50. Rentschler 158.

51. Rentschler 160.

52. Berg-Pan 165.

53. Leni Riefenstahl, interview with Keith Dewhurst, Review, 23 June 1972, BBC transcript, 26.

54. See Klaus Theweleit, Männerphantasien: Frauen, Fluten, Körper, Geschichte, Band 1 (Frankfurt: Roter Stern, 1977) and Männerphantasien: Männerkörper—zur Psychoanalyse des Weiβen Terrors, Band 2 (Frankfurt: Roter Stern, 1977) for a study of the homoerotic nature of German militarism and its artistic representation. Udo Pini's excellent photo-journalistic look at the body cult in Nazi Germany, Leibeskult und Liebeskitsch: Erotik im Dritten Reich (München: Klinkhardt und Biermann, 1992) arrives at a similar conclusion.

55. Sanders-Brahms sees Pedro as a near-caricature of Rousseau's natural man. She also compares his pose with a lamb over his shoulder to “kitsch” pictures of Jesus Christ (247).

56. Riefenstahl attempts the female opposition to André Bazin's theory of erotic film, “one that is capable of provoking the audience to desire the heroine sexually and of keeping that desire alive” (Gentile 55). Gentile understands Bazin's theory as aimed toward a male or male-identifying female audience. Riefenstahl's appreciation of the male form is central to her film aesthetic, thus she may serve the female audience even as she imitates the male gaze. Both Eric Rentschler and Gisela von Wysocki consider Riefenstahl expert at creating images stimulating male desire.

57. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Feminism and Film Theory, ed. Constance Penley (New York: Routledge, 1988): 62.

58. Berg-Pan 169.

59. Berg-Pan 170.

60. In the original libretto, the Marquez finds the gypsy “Marta” starving by the roadside and later forces her to yield to him. See Ricardo Mezzanote, et al, eds., The Simon and Schuster Book of the Opera: 1597 to the Present (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985): 335.

61. Berg-Pan 171.

62. Berg-Pan 175.

63. Berg-Pan 171.

64. Both Stalin and Mussolini presented Riefenstahl with film offers. (Riefenstahl, Memoiren 187).

65. Hitler relied on German industrialists and wealthy Junkers to finance his rise to power and later allowed capital to remain in private hands using the threat of intervention to produce cooperation. See David Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany, 1933-1939 (New York: Norton, 1980): 51.

66. See Ann Rosalind Jones's discussion of Wittig (80ff) in “Inscribing Femininity: French Theories of the Feminine,” Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Gayle Green and Coppélia Kahn (London: Routledge, 1988).

67. Berg-Pan 173.

68. An excellent example of the male-dominated Nazi art and egalitarian Socialist Realism can be seen in the German and Soviet pavilions at the 1937 International Exposition in Paris. Both structures are equally pompous and neo-Classical. The German pavilion designed by Albert Speer features Josef Thorak's 23-foot tableau of “Family” (with the female figure dominated by the male) and the all-male “Comradeship.” The Soviet pavilion of B. M. Iofan features a male/female couple equally tall and triumphant in their display of the hammer and sickle. See Peter Adam, Art of the Third Reich (New York: Abrams, 1992): 242-247.

69. Riefenstahl writes of her upset and shame upon her 1942 return to Germany from the Dolomites to find Jews wearing yellow stars (Memoiren 395). Despite this and her experience at Konsky, Riefenstahl claims she knew nothing of the death camps until her Allied imprisonment. All her Jewish acquaintances (Béla Balàzs, Manfred George, Stefan Lorant) had left Germany. She records that Hitler was in a trance-like state during her visit in 1944, and that she was repelled by his tirade against the Russians and his lack of interest in the destruction of German cities (Memoiren 395-397).

70. The extramarital affairs of Joseph Goebbels were known in Nazi Germany and have been widely recorded.

71. Riefenstahl, Memoiren 265-267; 269-270. Berg-Pan 44.

72. Berg-Pan 173.

73. Sontag 102.

74. Riefenstahl, 60 Minutes.

75. Berg-Pan 171-172.

76. Berg-Pan 173.

77. Sontag 70.

78. Sontag has also accused Riefenstahl of lying about making Sieg des Glaubens and Tag der Freiheit, when in fact Riefenstahl has mentioned these films in interviews dating back to 1960 (77-78; 81).

79. Wilhelm Bittorf, “Blut und Hoden,” Der Spiegel 44 (1976): 228-230.

80. Sontag 91.

81. Hembus and Bandmann, who are no fans of the film or the director, consider Riefenstahl at age 40 to have been too old to play the part! (241). None of the personal and technical difficulties Riefenstahl experienced during the filming of Tiefland appear to have adversely affected what is a convincing, if somewhat restrained performance and a luminous presence. The older female lead adds to the iconoclastic message of the film and the unusual relationship between the characters of Martha and Pedro. Sanders-Brahms praises Riefenstahl's look in the film as Garboesque (251).

82. Sontag 95.

83. Jean Cocteau, Brigitte Bardot, Jean Marais, Vittorio de Sica, Caesare Zavatini, and Anna Magnani all intended to work with Riefenstahl in unrealized film projects during the 1950s. See Riefenstahl, Memoiren 512-515 and Berg-Pan 183-185.

84. The spectacle of Riefenstahl's Triumph des Willens is quoted in Lucas's Star Wars (1977), Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). The black and white pseudodocumentary style of Spielberg's treatment of the Holocaust, Schindler's List (1993) appears to be both homage to Riefenstahl's style and condemnation of Triumph's substance. It is an anti-Triumph des Willens, offering sweeping Riefenstahlian shots of the masses and impressive individual visages of those hated by Hitler's Reich. Spielberg's close-up shots of the Ghetto Jews calling out their names to be added to Schindler's factory detail is a clear quote from Scene 5 of Triumph: close-ups of the workers of the Reich Labor Service calling out the various regions of Germany assembled for inspection by Hitler and Reich Labor Service Leader, Konstantin Hierl. Whereas the men of Triumph identify themselves by region, ritualistically supporting Nazi concepts of race, geopolitics, and the anonymous mass, Spielberg's version enforces the importance of, and battle for, the individual in a genocidal order.

85. Elsaesser 187; 194.

86. Sanders-Brahms 250.

87. Riefenstahl, Memoiren 400.

My thanks to Sasha Torres and Teresa Jillson for their insightful suggestions, and to Peter Bondanella for including the genesis of this article in the “European Cinemas/European Societies 1895-1995: Conference to Celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the Cinema” at Indiana University, Bloomington.