SOURCE: Elsaesser, Thomas. “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman.” Sight and Sound 3, no. 2 (February 1993): 15-18.

[In the following review of The Sieve of Time, Elsaesser explores Riefenstahl's film career within the context of German cinema during the 1930s.]

Leni Riefenstahl at 90: photographed by Helmut Newton in a pair of rainbow-coloured leggings, stiletto heels, a fur-trim coat, leaning against a sports car parked on a gravelled driveway. The clash of associations, the campy bad taste, the sheer improbability of this apparition (fronting an interview with Riefenstahl in Vanity Fair, September 1992) is suitably disconcerting. Is this nonagenarian femme fatale still worshipping at the fountain of youth, or is this a pose to make her part as the fluttering butterfly of the Third Reich more credible? Either way, the butterfly Riefenstahl is clearly made of steel: a specimen from a period that does not seem to diminish in scale as it recedes in time. For this incommensurability alone, the autobiography of the director of Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938)—two films that have come, rightly or wrongly, to epitomise Nazi narcissism—merits attention, even without the tediously irrelevant but apparently still lucrative frisson of how intimate she has been with the Führer.

From someone who has always professed her ignorance of the concentration camps, or of Gestapo terror acts, the title of The Sieve of Time is, to say the least, an odd choice. Self-critical irony or haughty defiance? The phrase seems to have been inspired by a line from Albert Einstein: “one must take comfort in the fact that time has a sieve, through which most trivia run off into the sea of oblivion”. If media interest in Riefenstahl's autobiography has focused on her personal ties with Nazi leaders, the book seems to have been written partly to redress the balance, to give more space to her life after 1945 (the Nazi era takes up less than 200 pages), and to record her formative period in the 20s, as a dancer, briefly with Max Reinhardt, then as a movie star in Arnold Fanck's The Holy Mountain (1927) and her own The Blue Light (1932).

Riefenstahl is the first to admit that she is no great writer; but she has an acute mind, and always knew how to capitalise on her considerable charm. The films, on the other hand, have always been controversial. And a number of key points emerge from the decades of debate:

• —In Riefenstahl's work we can see the continuity of Weimar cinema (especially Fritz Lang) with Nazi cinema. This thesis is based on the similarity of certain recurrent visual motifs (wild landscapes, dramatic skies, heroic bodies), shared genres such as the mountain film, to which Riefenstahl contributed as actor and director, and finally, a monumentalism which Siegfried Kracauer, apropos of The Nibelungen and Metropolis, has identified as the “mass ornament”: a dehumanising, quasi-military, strictly hierarchical and patterned representation of crowds (originally borrowed, as Lotte Eisner has shown, by Lubitsch, Lang and others from Reinhardt's theatre spectacles of the 1910s).
• —Riefenstahl is responsible for two masterpieces, which, while politically abhorrent or at any rate highly suspect, nonetheless continue to be aesthetically impressive, indeed brilliant textbook examples of how to make a stirring film out of a tedious event (a political party conference), and how to create a four-hour narrative of drama, human interest and suspense out of a two-week sports meeting.
• —The reason we keep coming back to these films (and to their director) is because they have become prototypes of genres which to this day are central, if not to the cinema, then to the aesthetics of television. The coverage of presidential elections, political summits, the staging of the Olympic Games can all be traced back to Riefenstahl's invention of the ‘photo-opportunity’ which is Triumph of the Will. More critically, Riefenstahl's films are associated with the Nazi recognition that reality is an event which happens in order to be filmed.
• —Taking these points together, it can be shown that Riefenstahl's career as an actor in the mountain films, as a film-maker of political documentaries, and as a photographer of vanishing African tribes is all of a piece, illustrating some of the quintessential features of fascist aesthetics and its visual imagination. This imagination continues to be fascinating to this day, because the kind of image-making it implies—which not only shows an abiding tendency to abstract the human figure and body from its historical and social inscription, but treats it as an empty sign or icon—means that the human figure can serve as a support for any kind of message, propaganda or advertising, all of which instrumentalise the body.

If this, broadly speaking, is the received wisdom on Riefenstahl the film-maker, does the autobiography contain anything which might help us settle the ‘controversy’? The answer on the whole is: no. Riefenstahl once again defends herself vigorously against her critics, chronicling the innumerable law suits and libel cases she has fought since 1945, and citing testimonies, documents, affidavits in her favour. The most poignant case is perhaps that against Erwin Leiser's Deutschland Erwache!, for using footage from Triumph of the Will as if it were documentary, and intercutting it with shots of concentration camps. Since her reputation rests on the skillful juxtaposition of material, and since to this day she adamantly insists on her film of the Nazi party rally being “a pure record of what happened”, her position is doubly ironic: a fact that entirely escapes her. The most politically damaging allegation she got the courts to clear her from was that she had used as extras in Tiefland (finally released in 1954) a family of gypsies she knew was destined for a death camp.

While none of this may cut much ice in Riefenstahl's favour, more inadvertently and only obliquely, The Sieve of Time does shed some light on what made her ‘tick’, and to this reader at least suggests some thoughts which imply a slightly different interpretation of her career. First, there is the importance of dance to her world view. From her earliest, father-defying passion for the Laban school of modern dance to her conception of herself as a self-expressive film-artist, a consistent line runs through her life which seems to focus on the body as total expressive fact. This needs to be seen historically. Not only was Ausdruckstanz something of an upper-middle-class craze in the 1910s and 20s (the Isadora Duncan phenomenon), but Riefenstahl also shared in its wider cultural significance as part of a German youth movement (the Wandervögel) which was progressive in inspiration, libertarian, and whose Freikörperkultur (free body culture) has to be seen in the context of Wilhelmine collars, corsets and covered piano legs. As was the case with so many other movements to do with the body and sport in the 20s, the Nazis were able to co-opt some of the dance movement's adherents during the 30s, until “self-discipline and ecstasy” (as one critic called it) became one of the central attractions of Nazi aesthetics.

It seems clear that Riefenstahl remained faithful to her early ideals in this respect, and not only as far as the outdoor life of skiing, hiking, swimming and diving is concerned. For instance, the autobiography leaves no doubt that she enjoyed sex, and liked talking about it—at a time when this was not fashionable. Not only did she have many affairs—with her cameraman, her fellow-actors, men she met almost anywhere and fancied—but film-making was evidently for her a very erotic and sexualised activity. On the set of The Holy Mountain, for instance, she played off Fanck against star Luis Trenker, keenly aware of the older man's sexual torment when she favoured Trenker.

Another telling episode occurs in 1932, when Riefenstahl starred in Fanck's S.O.S. Iceberg, produced by Paul Kohner. A dual-language, German-American co-production (the American version was directed by Tay Garnett and produced by Carl Laemmle at Universal), it was shot in Greenland by a team made up of a film crew and a scientific expedition (the latter, one gathers was necessary in order to get permission to film among the Eskimos, whom the Danish government wanted to protect from disease). Sandwiched between her first meeting with Hitler at Wilhelmshaven and his visit to her Berlin studio to look at photographs (and disapprove of some Käthe Kollwitz charcoal drawings on her wall), the Greenland trip takes in an escaped polar bear, a switch of lovers (from Hans Scheeberger to Hans Ertl), and a rescue by Ernst Udet, the stunt pilot in Fanck's films, of one of the scientists, Dr Sorge, whose boat smashed when a huge iceberg began to ‘calve’. There exists an account by Sorge himself (Mit Flugzeug, Faltboot und Filmkamera in den Eisfjorden Grönlands, Berlin 1933), which focuses on the research part of the expedition. Where Sorge mentions Riefenstahl, he complements her story, down to the details of her urinary problems and the fact that she not only kept a portrait of Hitler in a sealskin frame by her bed, but kept quoting—to jibes from the scientists—from her bedtime reading, Hitler's Mein Kampf.

What I think is significant about this episode is that Riefenstahl's pan-eroticism and nature worship was matched by a very down-to-earth, ‘modern’ appreciation of her own sexuality, which had little of the repressive, prudish atmosphere that surrounded Hitler. But it also tells something about the film-making milieu to which she belonged. It was Fanck, himself a curious mixture of the arctic explorer-scientist and autodidact film-technology freak, who taught Riefenstahl film-directing. The glimpses one gets of the milieu of mountaineering and movie-making are as intriguing as they are brief: Fanck, an independent producer, funded by UFA's American rival, Universal, with a crew partly on loan from UFA's prestigious but maverick Kulturfilm production unit, and made up partly of Fanck's First World War airforce cronies, with the troublesome Luis Trenker itching to make his own films; and Riefenstahl taking a rowing boat to sunbathe on an iceberg with one of the cameramen.

A CAMERAWOMAN'S FILM

Fanck was at heart a still photographer, forever experimenting with different lenses, exposure times and developing baths. Influenced by the Renger-Patsch tradition of the New Realism, he wanted to bring to his movies of mountain, ice and snow the textures and tonalities of the photographic print: using slow motion, backlighting, contrasts in scale and strong separation of background and foreground. None of this was lost on Riefenstahl when she came to shoot Triumph of the Will, and it may have some bearing on the argument of how ‘inept’ it is as a piece of film-making. Rather, I would argue that it strikes one as a camera(wo)man's film, introducing a certain photographic aesthetic into the hitherto shunned areas of crowds, power and politics. If Triumph of the Will is the triumph of form over substance, this is partly because it is a box of photographer's tricks, blended with point-of-view editing techniques picked from feature film-makers, squirrelled away like a film-school graduate, and then flamboyantly, impetuously shown off on a commission (affidavits to the contrary notwithstanding) she could not refuse. It is this ‘experimental’ dimension which to this day makes some documentary film-makers her most ardent fans, professing to have ‘learnt from her’. But these film-makers also know that when helping themselves from Triumph of the Will, a little goes a long way, for part of the potency of the film is that, in its genre, it goes too far—but on a road television documentary has often travelled since.

Fanck also put Riefenstahl in touch with Harry Sokal, the Jewish producer who backed her financially and logistically for The Blue Light, giving her the opportunity to found her own production company, a fact which was very important to her not only after 1945, when she argued in her defense that neither Triumph of the Will nor Olympia were ‘official’ Nazi films, commissioned and financed by the party.

The salient question, in a way, is not the extent to which Triumph of the Will has or has not influenced documentary film-makers (there are tributes not only from Grierson but also from Paul Rotha), but what kind of causal link—and therefore responsibility—can be established from this film to the Nazi newsreel tradition, and the countless documentaries and propaganda films made in the 30s and 40s. From a film-historical point of view, the malleability of the material through editing is less remarkable than the contribution made to the editing by the sound montage and Herbert Windt's score, sound obviously being the technology in which to be experimental in the 30s. It is here that Riefenstahl did something original: putting staged tableaux to movement, music and vocals. Hence the point Riefenstahl expends many pages refuting—that there was re-staging and re-shooting on Triumph of the Will, as mentioned in Albert Speer's Inside the Third Reich—is something of a red herring. Speer, who acknowledges the difficulties Riefenstahl had, as an independent-minded woman, with the party hierarchy, confesses, somewhat disingenuously, to being shocked when Streicher, Rosenberg and Frank agree to re-takes in the studio. Hess, “with his special brand of ardour, turned precisely to the spot where Hitler would have been sitting, snapped to attention and cried: ‘Mein Führer, I welcome you in the name of the Party Congress’. He did it all so convincingly that from that point on I was no longer sure of the genuineness of his feelings”. Riefenstahl herself mentions the many re-shoots necessary for Olympia, mainly in connection with the stormy love affair she had with the American decathlon winner, Glenn Morris, which apparently made her miss some crucial heats in the competition.

Since Triumph of the Will and Olympia have to this day remained, for an international public at least, the best-known films the Nazi cinema produced, the fact that Riefenstahl directed both of them weighs against her when she protests her lack of interest in politics or propaganda. However, from a film-historical perspective, the films may not belong together as logically as is usually asserted. Olympia is stylistically quite different from Triumph of the Will. Yet even if one emphasises stylistic similarities (low-angle shots of erect bodies against an empty sky, and so on) there remain substantial differences in terms of function. While Triumph of the Will was made mainly in order to bind the leaderless SA to the Party, after the Röhm putsch and the ‘night of the long knives’, Olympia was a compromise project, negotiated between the regime and the Olympic Committee, which aimed to give to the world an image of the games as supra-individual and supra-national, a celebration of youth in communal competition. That these representations are carefully ‘constructed’ is evident, but this in itself hardly differs from the construction of the nation on the nine-o'-clock news. What is more indicative is the use the games, and Riefenstahl's film-making, seem to have been put to—namely to front another enterprise altogether, that of allowing the Nazis their first experiments with television, and the live transmission of events. The new technology and its potential preoccupied the various ministries involved much more than the ideological content of Olympia.

Two issues come into play here—one is that the Nazis, while keeping a tight rein on film production, did not consider film to be their main propaganda medium. As far as the audiovisual media were concerned, it was radio that interested them, and its penetration into the home and potential as a public address and alarm system were as significant as what was broadcast. During the war, simultaneous broadcasting and the emphasis on ‘live-ness’ became a crucial part of the morale-boosting, mass-mobilising function of the media. For these objectives, film was too slow a medium. One might even argue that the Nazi film industry was developed as an entertainment industry, for the films and stars acted as inducements to bring spectators to the newsreels. None of the technological or media-political considerations seems to have occurred to Riefenstahl: the memoirs make no mention of the presence of television cameras at the games.

EROTICISED RELATIONSHIPS

There is perhaps a more important reason why it did not strike her. The way the cinema developed in Germany was not at all in the direction of Riefenstahl's own idea of cinema. In the 30s and 40s, UFA, Terra and Tobis—the three major production companies—were run by and large as studios churning out films designed to make money. While they were broadly in line with the regime, they continued a genre cinema already well established in the 20s whose mainstays were melodramas and comedies, musicals and bio-pics—genres whose formulas were often copied directly from Warner Bros or MGM prototypes. Where politics massively operated in the Nazi cinema was in the realm of personnel politics (the compliance of UFA in Hitler's racial policy is well documented) and in the style and content of the newsreel.

Not only was Riefenstahl an ‘independent’ producer/film-maker in a film business increasingly centralised and industrialised, but—as already indicated—hers was in inspiration an art and experimental cinema. While her films, as well as Fanck's, were released through UFA, UFA was not their production company: on the contrary, Fanck refers to himself as the “Freiburg School”, and had little but contempt for studio-bound film-making as practised in Neu-Babelsberg or Munich. Riefenstahl was less radical, but she too was committed to the outdoor view of cinema. Riefenstahl's aversion to being identified with propaganda, newsreel and commissioned films has, it seems to me, more to do with her self-image as a film-artist than with any attempt at political whitewash.

The question the memoirs prompt, then, when viewed from the point of view of film industry and film politics, is how did Riefenstahl fit into the Nazi cinema, as opposed to echoing motifs or tendencies of other Nazi films? The answer seems to be, not very well. For one of the puzzling aspects of her career is why she made only these two films, if she was so important to the regime. The one other film she worked on throughout the 30s and 40s was Tiefland, and what she documents about this project is a tale of failures and disappointments, of outright official betrayal.

It is here that Riefenstahl's paranoia is most noticeable. Perhaps in order to explain to herself the lack of support she received as a film-maker, she builds up Goebbels as her arch foe, though whether this tortured and highly eroticised relationship explains anything about her film-making career is less clear. It does demonstrate the fact that Riefenstahl was not very adept either tactically or analytically, revealing once again her tendency to personalise and sexualise whatever happened to her. In fact, Goebbels brings out the melodramatist and pulp novelist in her: “He said, looking round the dark, deserted street: ‘We can't stay here, you'll be drenched’. I glanced at my small Mercedes parked in front of the building … There was only one thing on my mind: nobody must see us … As we turned into the forest I saw him produce a gun from his raincoat pocket and thrust it into the glove compartment. Noticing my alarm, he smiled. ‘I never go anywhere without a weapon’ … He grabbed my breast and tried to force himself on me. I had to wrestle my way out of his arms … Besides himself with rage, he held me against the wall and tried to kiss me. His eyes were wide open, and his face completely distorted”.

CULT OF THE BODY BEAUTIFUL

To be fair, Riefenstahl knew there was a thin line between being the Führer's favourite film-maker and ending in disgrace, so there may have been a grain of truth in the paranoia, a sense of real terror, when trying to dodge not only Goebbels' grasping hands, but film commissions from the Party. Riefenstahl knew that these things could go horribly wrong, as they did in the case of her friend and cameraman, Willy Zielke. Zielke was commissioned by the Reichsbahn to make a film celebrating the German railway's centenary, giving the story of the inventors and developments from the steam engine to the diesel locomotive. In The Steel Animal, “Zielke had turned this difficult material into a thrilling picture. His locomotive looked like a living monster. The headlights were its eyes, the instruments its brain, the piston its joints, and the oil dripping from the moving pistons looked like blood … When the officials saw the movie, they were so horrified—according to Zielke—that they left the room speechless”. The film was not only not shown, the railway board had the prints destroyed. Riefenstahl tried to intercede, and arranged for Goebbels to see a print. He thought it showed talent, but found it too abstract for the public: “It could be a Bolshevist film”. “But that's no reason to destroy the film”, replied Riefenstahl. “I'm sorry, but the decision is entirely up to the Reichsbahn, which has financed the film”. More than the film was destroyed: Zielke's sanity suffered, and he was interned in a mental hospital, apparently blaming Riefenstahl for his committal.

Beyond the human element, the episode also shows that there were a number of nonfiction film-makers who tried to continue the more experimental and formal film-making of the 20s, like Walter Ruttmann's, influenced by Eisenstein and Russian film—an art cinema, in other words, with which Riefenstahl had a great affinity. With the beginning of the war, and the gearing of the industry into a more overt propaganda and morale-boosting machine, directors like Riefenstahl saw their opportunities for making films dwindle, and Riefenstahl herself became more and more marginalised compared to directors who, like top managers or the captains of industry, put themselves in the service of the regime. Directors like Veit Harlan and Wolfgang Liebeneiner, Karl Ritter, Gustav Ucicky and Josef von Baky fitted this industrial strategy completely, and had the same cynical attitude to keeping production going at any price (as with Harlan's Kolberg) as Speer had in the armament industries. It may be Riefenstahl's vague knowledge of this that made her so sensitive about the accusation of using gypsies from the concentration camp, for while the use of forced labour might have been possible for a major production, it adds insult to injury where the mostly aborted Tiefland project was concerned. However, she never seemed to realise that her cult of the body beautiful had become a blasphemy in a Germany where bodies were labour power to be worked to death in munitions factories or rocket test sites; this in turn made her incapable of seeing those who could not forgive her as anything other than personal enemies, motivated by spite and “human nastiness”.

Although it would be plainly absurd to suggest that Riefenstahl was a pawn of the Nazi regime, there is a sense in which she had little control over what became of her career, which was effectively finished before the outbreak of the war. The memoirs both know this and disavow this knowledge. How, then, can one understand Riefenstahl's “I only live for what is beautiful” other than as the desperate plea of someone who could never see herself in relation to any kind of history, or in any kind of social or political context, and who was therefore incapable of humour, wit or irony, but also incapable of recognition, reflection, remorse? The world view that inspired all her actions is certainly older than Nazism and goes deeper: the contrasts between nature and civilisation, between the simplicity of physical strength and the complications of social existence. Even the basic untruth of her position, namely that in order to glorify and romanticise unspoilt nature and simplicity, she had to deploy all the technological acquisition of civilisation, as well as participate in a state apparatus of Byzantine deviousness, is not of itself what makes her a Nazi: to that extent, Riefenstahl may have been a fellow-traveller and a beneficiary, but nothing like as brazenly as many a Party-member (which she was not) officially rehabilitated during the 50s and allowed to enjoy top positions in West German government, industry and the judiciary. Having survived so long would appear to have been a mixed blessing for her, since it traps her into perpetually having to downplay the brief period in her long life which alone still makes her news; yet the limelight also blocks her life from being looked at more kindly or more dispassionately. It is because she is still around that fingers will be pointed at her and, in turn, fans or ardent admirers will step into the breach.

TRAGIC DIMENSION

Does it mean there is necessarily a tragic dimension to Riefenstahl's life? Perhaps not, but there are nonetheless ironies that make one pause, for she seems to have borne the brunt of public shame more openly and more frequently than the real culprits of the regime, most of whom, as far as film-making goes, were quite happily reintegrated into the industry. After 1945, the vast majority of them found work, even Veit Harlan, whose Kolberg and Jud Süss did not even split opinion between admirers and detractors the way Riefenstahl's films had always done. No, it was not the exposed nature of her films that put paid to her film-making career, but the fact that she was not ‘one of us’, that she had never really belonged in the first place. She was, it seems, as much an outsider to the film industry during the Third Reich as she was to be in the Federal Republic.

It is doubtful whether Riefenstahl fully understood even the film-historical side of the history in which she briefly played such a prominent part, for the memoirs give no clue to it. Yet it is difficult to take such a balanced view of Riefenstahl's memoirs or too charitable a view of her historical role. Compared to the aristocratic unrepentance displayed by another vieille dame indigne from Hitler's entourage, in Syberberg's Confessions of Winifred Wagner, the irritation provoked by The Sieve of Time comes less from Riefenstahl's apolitical aestheticism than from her sympathy-seeking. Shocked by the Holocaust as she now seems, and no doubt also aware of some dimensions of this story she does not touch on, she constantly buttonholes the reader, as if to absolve herself from a knowledge for which there could be no forgiveness, while evidently preferring the verdict of irredeemable naivety to that of culpable ignorance. Film history may not be able to help her out of this impasse, even where it can recognise that such an impasse exists.