Personalities of the Twenty First Century

Personalities of the Twenty – First Century: Leni Riefenstahl

“They kept asking me over and over again whether I was having a romance with Hitler. ‘Are you Hitler's girlfriend?’ I laughed and answered the same way each time: ‘No, those are false rumours. I only made documentaries for him...’”

— Leni Riefenstahl, about her US tour in 1938, in her book A Memoir

THE BEGINNING OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RIEFENSTAHL AND HITLER

In 1932, Riefenstahl produced her own work called "The Blue Light". This film won the Silver Medal at the Venice Film Festival. In the film, Riefenstahl played a peasant girl who protected a glowing mountain grotto. The film attracted the attention of Hitler, who after his appointed to chancellor in January 1933, appointed Riefenstahl to be "Film Expert to the National Socialist Party".

Hitler is said to have believed that the image Riefenstahl created for herself in "The Blue Light" epitomised the ultimate German woman. May 1932, Riefenstahl met Hitler for the first time. The would-be artist Hitler had admired The Blue Light, and was interested in meeting an acclaimed artist who already had an international reputation. After his election as chancellor in January 1933, Hitler immediately gave Riefenstahl the job of filming the annual NSDAP conference in Nuremberg.

At the time, Hitler was keen to improve the public image of the NSDAP. During the social polarisation under the Weimar Republic, Hitler’s shock troops had terrorised the streets and gained a reputation for their brutality. In the “new Germany” of 1933, Hitler moved immediately against the workers’ movement. All political parties and unions were banned, the press was censored, and a brutal dictatorship reigned.

Now Hitler sought to portray himself as statesman and invent a historical continuity for his party based on a completely distorted portrayal of German history. For her part, Riefenstahl was prepared to assist. No doubt, there was an element of personal infatuation on her part with the figure of Hitler, but such infatuation was bound up with definite political conceptions. In one newspaper interview she declared: “To me Hitler is the greatest man who ever lived. He is really faultless, so simple yet so filled with manly power... He is really beautiful, he is wise. Radiance streams from him. All the great men of Germany—Friedrich, Nietzsche, Bismarck—have all had faults. Hitler’s followers are not spotless. Only he is pure.” [2]

LENI RIEFENSTAHL FILMS In 1933, Riefenstahl made a short film about the Nazi Party's rally of that year. She was asked to make a much grander film of the 1934 event. This led to probably her most famous film - "Triumph of the Will". The film won awards in both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy but also, ironically, in 1937, it won the Grand Prix in Paris. She asserts that when she first met Hitler, in the early thirties, she had never heard of him. She thought his anti-Semitic rhetoric was just "electioneering" -- nothing serious. For her, "Triumph of the Will" was about "peace" and "creating jobs," and to support that dubious interpretation she points out that Hitler's speeches in the film make no reference to his racial ideology, it doesn't occur to her that this omission undermines her claim to be a scrupulous recorder of history.

Critic Richard Meran Barsam says of the film that it "is cinematically dazzling and ideologically vicious." Hitler becomes, in the film, a larger-than-life figure, almost a divinity, and all other humans are portrayed such that their individuality is lost -- a glorification of the collective. David B. Hinton points out Leni Riefenstahl's use of the telephoto lens to pick up the genuine emotions on the faces she depicts. "The fanaticism evident on the faces was already there, it was not created for the film." Thus, he urges, we should not find Leni Riefenstahl the main culprit in the making of the film. The film is technically brilliant, especially in the editing, and the result is a documentary more aesthetic than literal. The film glorifies the German people -- especially those who "look Aryan" -- and practically deifies the leader, Hitler. It plays on patriotic and nationalistic emotions in its images, music, and structure.

Her next major piece of work was to film the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. Again, this film, called "Olympia", won many international awards.

PROPAGANDIST OR ARTIST?

To her last days, Riefenstahl always disputed the significance of her role in promoting Nazi Germany. In memoirs and interviews, she constantly claimed she was “naïve,” a non-political person who never joined the Nazi party and was only interested in her art, someone who only did what many others did, and so on. In interviews after the war, she asserted that the driving force in her life was the search for “beauty and harmony”—“reality does not interest me.”. Riefenstahl pointed out that both "Triumph of the Will" and "Olympia" were made by her own independent film company and they were not prescribed films by the Nazi regime. Her career clearly shows, however, that far from being just an innocent victim of Nazi political propaganda, she was instrumental in creating a charade of “beauty and harmony” for the most barbaric and reactionary regime in modern history.

The issue of whether Triumph of the Will and Olympia should be classified as 'documentaries' or as 'propaganda films' has been in constant dispute since they were made. They are very different films concerned with completely different subject matters, so I have approached the two films separately. In an interview in 1964, reprinted in A Biographical Dictionary Of The Cinema by David Thomson, Riefenstahl makes clear that she felt Triumph Of The Will was a recording of an event, not a propaganda film: "If you see this film again today you ascertain that it doesn't contain a single reconstructed scene. Everything in it is true. And it contains no tendentious commentary at all. It is history. A pure historical film... it is film-vérité. It reflects the truth that was then in 1934, history. It is therefore a documentary. Not a propaganda film. Oh! I know very well what propaganda is. That consists of recreating events in order to illustrate a thesis, or, in the face of certain events, to let one thing go in order to accentuate another. I found myself, me, at the heart of an event which was the reality of a certain time and a certain place. My film is composed of what stemmed from that."

However, propaganda can take various forms, ranging from overt attempts to influence the public to covert means of persuasion linked with brainwashing - the subjecting of individuals to intensive political indoctrination and the breaking down of a subject's resistance. It is frequently thought of negatively and has become associated with ideas, facts, or allegations deliberately spread to further a cause or to damage an opposing cause. Joseph Goebbels, Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda in Hitler's cabinet, and his work within the Nazi regime is especially infamous. He felt that entertainment was the best propaganda and, as a consequence, 90% of the films produced by Germany had no overt propaganda messages - his aim was to entertain and get people off the streets and away from their homes. He wanted films not to focus on information and facts but on emotion and entertainment. Therefore he was at odds with Hitler's aim regarding Triumph Of The Will.

The film was financed by the Nazi Government, commissioned by Hitler himself, completed with the full co-operation of all involved, with huge resources at her disposal - an unlimited budget, crew of 120 and between 30 and 40 cameras. It stands as a powerful artistic representation of the ideas in Hitler's book Mein Kampf - work, extreme nationalism, belief in corporative state socialism, a private army, a youth cult, the use of propaganda and the submission of all decisions to the supreme leader, i.e. himself. The film, however, reached and influenced far more people than the book ever could.

What was said..: Death does not frighten me. I've known so many peaks and troughs - enough for three life times."

Leni Riefenstahl aged 97.

"Artistically she is a genius, and politically she is a nitwit."

Liam O'Leary, film historian.

"I am one of the millions who thought Hitler had all the answers. We only saw the good things; we did not know about the bad things to come."

"What have I ever done? I never intended harm to anyone. I do not know what I should apologise for. I cannot apologise, for example, for having made the film "Triumph of the Will" - it won the top prize. All my films won prizes."

Leni Riefenstahl

"(Triumph of the Will) was a totally unique and incomparable glorification of the power and beauty of our movement."

Adolf Hitler

AFTER THE WAR

Immediately after the war, Riefenstahl was arrested and held for a short time at a lunatic asylum. She was subject to further investigations between 1948 and 1952, but was eventually declared innocent of any participation in the crimes of the Nazis. Nevertheless, she had problems finding producers willing to finance her films. During the Third Reich, she could stipulate her own conditions regarding the budget and production of her films. In post-war Germany, recovering from the devastation of the war, the sort of massive projects favoured by Riefenstahl were no longer viable. But she was able to make a living, not least because the German government agreed to continue paying her royalties for the showing of her films made under the Nazis.

If you believe her, she's one kind of monster; if you don't, she's another. Her version of her career makes her a tragic figure, an artist seduced into the service of evil by her blind, obsessive dedication to aesthetic principles. She was a victim, she maintains, of her naiveté and misplaced idealism, and has paid a heavy price for her errors: she has been forbidden and hasn’t made a film since the end of the war, and all her films have been banned in modern Germany. Some believed that Riefenstahl was forbidden to return to film making simply because she was female - in an industry dominated by men. Eventually though, well into her 70’s Riefenstahl did return to film making and photography.

REFERENCES http://www.kamera.co.uk/features/leniriefenstahl.html http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/leni_riefenstahl.htm http://womenshistory.about.com/od/riefenstahl/a/riefenstahl.htm http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/sep2003/rief-s15.shtml