Rainer Rother,
Leni Riefenstahl: The Seduction of Genius. trans. Martin H. Bott.
London: Continuum, 2002.
ISBN: 0 8264 6101 8
262pp
US $27.95 (hb)
(Review copy supplied by Continuum Publishing Group)

Rainer Rother’s biography of 100 year-old German dancer, actress, filmmaker and photographer Leni Riefenstahl, is an enlightening account of the life and work of a controversial figure who made her most critically acclaimed work either for, or with the support of, the government of the Third Reich. [1] Two other English biographies precede Rother’s: Glenn Infield’s Leni Riefenstahl: The Fallen Film Goddess (Ty Crowell Co.,1976) and Audrey Salkeld’s A Portrait of Leni Riefenstahl (Pimlico, 1997). Other books on Riefenstahl include Bill Hinton’s The Films of Leni Riefenstahl (Scarecrow Press, 1991) which is structured around her film work, Cooper Graham’s 1986 publication devoted to Olympia, and then there are other books such as Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton University Press, 1947) and Eric Rentschler’s The Ministry of Illusion (Harvard University Press, 1996) which covers the historic period in a broader sense. The benefits of this book written originally in German are the substantial references to German dailies and journals and German texts on Riefenstahl by M. Loiperdinger and E. Rent which are not available in translation, as well as a focus on, and insight into, public opinion regarding Riefenstahl in her homeland.

The title of Rother’s biography points to the obvious contradiction confronted by the author, a contradiction fundamental to the Riefenstahl “legend”: the conflict between artistic application when placed in the services of propaganda. Rother’s tracking of public opinion surrounding this particular case reveals the significance of this artist’s personality. Riefenstahl’s apparently dismissive attitude towards colleagues such as Walter Ruttman and Béla Balázs seem to be at the heart of questions regarding Riefenstahl’s “character”. Furthermore, a tone of frustration can be discerned in Rother’s account of Riefenstahl’s behaviour at various denazification trials, numerous law suit hearings (which Rother refers to as “the famous ‘fifty trials'” (120)) and public appearances, with Rother describing Riefenstahl’s “horrifying self-righteousness”(134) and “egocentrism”(166). This frustration culminates in one of the author’s final comments:

It is difficult to judge whether her attitude arose from a lack of intellectual capacity or whether it was calculated.(180)

What Rother is really asking is: Was the woman stupid? William Cook puts this another way stating that Riefenstahl is “fiercely intelligent but fundamentally unintellectual”[2] Riefenstahl always maintained innocence of the Nazi Party’s activities, a stance at odds with her clear entrée to the Party’s inner circle and utterly convincing reflection of Party ideology in the rally films she made at the Führer’s personal request. But was it a request or a command? One of the issues only touched on in the book is the consequence of refusal in such a case. Secondly, the book refers only briefly to her position as a female director, one of the first to produce such a substantial body of work, and how this influenced public opinion. Rother writes:

Riefenstahl’s case is different from others simply because she was a woman. The way sexist prejudices were mobilized against her in the post-war reaction underlines this point.(122)

The precariousness of her position of authority (the book includes accounts of her ability being challenged by male colleagues), the perception of her role and “need-to-know” status within the upper echelons of power and her susceptibility to lewd gossip such as the accusations of sexual relations with Hitler that emerged post-war, may have all conspired to produce Riefenstahl’s staunch attitude which so worked against her.

Rother’s extensive research indicates that this is an exhaustive account of the interest in, and response to, Riefenstahl before, during and post-war. The book does assume a fair degree of knowledge about surrounding events and personnel (perhaps with a German readership in mind) so that much of the historical detail is relegated to the footnotes. The four “incidents” that would haunt Riefenstahl into old age are treated in great detail. Two incidents relate to her use of “bullying” tactics in dealing with colleagues. Emil Schünemann refused to work on Triumph des willens (Germany 1935) and Riefenstahl reported this to the head of the Reich film department using the Führer’s appointment to give weight to her complaint. And while making Tiefland (West Germany/Austria, 1940/1954), she used her connections with the Führer to have cameraman Albert Benitz requisitioned from a Terra Film company production to finish her feature film, leading to the costly abandonment of the Terra project. The other two incidents refer to Riefenstahl’s knowledge of Nazi atrocities at the time of her work within the Reich’s administrative and financial system, something she always denied. Riefenstahl’s attempt at war-reportage ended after she witnessed German soldiers brutalising Polish civilians in the town of Konskie. What actually occurred was a massacre. What she saw and how she responded to it have been the subject of many trials. A later incident – and possibly the most damning – involves her use of gypsies from a concentration camp as extras in Tiefland. The most recent investigation into Riefenstahl began on her 100th birthday after the Roma and Sinti gypsy organisation, Verein Roma, took out a lawsuit against the director in response to recent comments made by her in relation to this episode. [3] Her denial of any responsibility here marks a significant point in her refusal to “come to terms with the past”(127), a refusal that Rother argues amounts to “a provocation”.(124)

An incredibly detailed account of the “massacre at Konskie” incident suggests that Rother believes the intricacies of the law may uncover some answer regarding Riefenstahl’s “guilt”. But the author’s most convincing arguments occur when comparing the profile of Riefenstahl across the decades with the conscience of the German public, illustrating how the director can be seen as a kind of meter, a “symbolic figure”. The author shows how public opinion surrounding Riefenstahl reflects degrees of guilt, anger and finger-pointing (immediately post-war), followed later by understanding or even disinterest and a critical reappraisal of her work beginning with Wolf Donner’s analysis of Olympia (Germany 1938) in 1972. These two major phases in her public profile inform Rother’s book and are summarised toward the end (178-182). Rother does claim that:

The underlying injustice is that, although many of Riefenstahl’s colleagues had more to be ashamed of, they did not gradually become stigmatized as she did.(122)

All in all, Rother’s accounts of the legal decisions and public opinion regarding Riefenstahl constitute an exhaustive body of evidence that neither praises nor vilifies the director, but keeps a very even keel. This is in contrast to a surprising amount of current writing on Riefenstahl. [4]

Rother’s book actually begins with a balanced and insightful account and analysis of Riefenstahl’s work, from her early career as a modern dancer through to the four major films she made with the support of the Third Reich; Sieg des glaubens (Victory of faith 1933), Triumph des willens (Triumph of the will, 1935), Olympia (1938) and Tiefland (The Lowlands 1940/54). As the Programme Director for Cinema and Curator of Exhibitions at the German Historical Museum in Berlin, Rother’s accounts of the original are releases of the films enlightening given the variations that are currently available on video. That much of Riefenstahl’s film material was confiscated at the end of WWII has complicated such issues to a large degree.

Riefenstahl performed her first public solo concert in 1923 at 21 years of age in the fashionable style of expressive dance, a style that idealised original, intuitive movement.

It is impossible to know the substance of her dances during this time, but while Rother states that her dancing “had nothing to do with codified step sequences”(14), the Mary Wigman comparisons, the female solo format of her performances and her flowing white dresses in the style of Isadora Duncan suggest strong stylistic influences. Riefenstahl’s manipulation of reviews of her performances in her autobiographical account of her dance career is focused on by Rother. But deleting negative passages and emphasising positive is common practice among artists and agents, so it is hard to see a link between this and Riefenstahl’s later inconsistencies regarding her career as a Nazi filmmaker. These facts are, however, interesting in relation to Rother’s claim that Riefenstahl has been keen to establish her stardom prior to Hitler’s interest in her career.

The insight into Riefenstahl’s early career as a dancer informs Rother’s analysis of Riefenstahl’s work. For example, the terms “rhythm” and “expression” are used consistently across the discussions of her dance and film work. In describing the final diving sequence in Olympia Rother writes:

the high divers are also choreographed the scenes aim to create graphic moments and attempt to create something independent and new – a kind of ‘ballet’ – from the succession of individual images Here, if not before in this film, her training as a dancer made itself felt.(88)

Descriptions of a rhythmic, symphonic form with “enhanced expressivity”(52-3) in Triumph des willens is another instance where Rother finds Riefenstahl’s background in dance relevant to her film aesthetics.

The coverage of Riefenstahl’s involvement in Arnold Fanck’s Bergfilms (mountain films) also informs the authors re-viewing of her films. The fitness she must have achieved dancing every third day over an eight-month period would have stood her in good stead for playing the lead in several Fanck films. This peculiar German film genre placed gruelling demands on the cast who were expected to ski, mountain-climb and suffer freezing temperatures for days on end. As Rother points out, the Bergfilm genre operated outside contemporary, popular systems and way beyond studio sets, providing Riefenstahl with an alternative film production model that allowed for maximum artistic freedom.(32) Riefenstahl’s first film, Das blaue licht (The blue light 1932) was a low-budget, partly self-funded effort which was co-created with Béla Balázs. (Riefenstahl later reduced Balázs’ role to “collaboration on the script”).(32-3) With her following film projects, Riefenstahl continued to work outside mainstream film production channels mainly due to support from the Nazi Party, an arrangement that ironically gave her the chance to develop as an auteur. Fanck’s films also provided Riefenstahl witha model that emphasised visuals over story-telling. Rother is dismissive, however, of Siegfried Kracauer’s comparison of the cloud formations in a Fanck film with the cloud masses shot from a plane window at the beginning of Triumph des willens, stating that as “motifs” there is “a conspicuous absence of any specific relationship”. (64-5)

Regarding Riefenstahl’s two fiction films in which the director also starred, Rother finds continuity in the figure of the female outsider. This role for Riefenstahl actually begins in the Fanck film,  Der heilige berg (The Holy Mountain, Germany 1926), with the character of Diotima and continues in Das blaue licht with the role of Junta. Both are independent women in control of their destinies; active, physically able and beautiful. Rother reads the latter film biographically; Junta’s character asserting herself against the village crowd and her lover, even to death, a parallel to Riefenstahl’s own maintenance of creative control throughout her long career. Rother also emphasises that storytelling was not Riefenstahl’s forte; her manipulation of images based on the structures of legend was where her strength as a filmmaker lay. The motif of the female outsider continues in Tiefland, with Riefenstahl acting again after six years. However Rother sees none of the independent spirit of the earlier characters. The author does, however, recount an interpretation of Tiefland that appeared in the 1990s which saw the film as anti-Nazi, a biographical reading with the evil male protagonist as an incarnation of Hitler. Rother is critical of this interpretation finding no evidence outside the film for such sentiments from Riefenstahl.

In discussing Riefenstahl’s Rally films, Rother sees Sieg des glaubens as a modest experiment, pretty much in line with Riefenstahl’s opinion of the film. Riefenstahl worked on the film at extremely short notice and under the disapproval of the Film division of the Party’s national propaganda administration. This disapproval, and the slanderous accusations made against her by her male colleagues, ended with the success of this her first Rally film. With Triumph des willens, Rother believes that Riefenstahl really took control, marking a departure from previous Rally films in that “the topicality of the event was subordinated to the ‘forming’ of the material” (51-2) That is, the director’s creative vision came to dominate production, supporting Rother’s claim for Riefenstahl’s “auteur” status. The centralization of Hitler in Triumph des willens is analysed at length and constitutes another “body of evidence” regarding Riefenstahl’s skills deployed in the service of deifying the Nazi leader. Rother draws on Steve Neale’s influential argument that feature film editing techniques are used by Riefenstahl to place the Fuhrer in a direct and personal relation with members of the German public. [5] Rother argues that the steady rhythm, consistent angles and continuity of eye line matches in the editing of Hitler’s reception by the public upon landing in Nuremberg for the Rally establishes “virtual eye contact” between the Fuhrer and his supporters.

The argument that the Rally events were staged for Riefenstahl’s film, demolishing any discussion of documentary filmmaking in relation to Triumph des willens, is given credence by Rother’s comments that:

it is perfectly legitimate to discuss the ‘leading role’ played by Hitler, and even to conclude that Riefenstahl effectively had Hitler at her mercy as his director.(66)

If this was not a documentary, a point which Riefenstahl always maintained, Riefenstahl’s role in deifying Hitler becomes much more active. Rother’s two key terms in relation to Riefenstahl’s aesthetic are “stylization” and “spectacle”. The latter term is taken from Neale’s 1979 article and Rother’s discussion of the status of Triumph as documentary has also clearly been influenced by Neale’s account of the same. Beyond Riefenstahl’s claims that it was merely documentary filmmaking, the evidence of her elaboration on the events themselves is powerful.

Rother tackles this by referencing the tradition of “craftsmanship”, arguing convincingly that Riefenstahl was a “cinematic stylist, whose aim was to give appropriate form to predetermined content” (74), citing the fundamental differences between Riefenstahl’s documentary films and her fiction films. This is supported by Riefenstahl’s own description of her task. The director states that:

the spirit of the action, be it the doctrinal content of a Party rally or the struggle-and-victory motif of an Olympia film, is brought out through the rhythm and expression of every scene.(98)

Rother concludes, some pages later, that Riefenstahl had created a “new form of documentary film”(94) which the press dubbed “heroic reportage”(96), a cinematic stylization of events that was custom-made to perfectly suit her subjects.

The author compares Olympia to the Rally films in terms of explicit or implicit policies of exclusion regarding “the Jews, the Sinti and Romany gypsies, the leftists, the homosexuals, the weak and the sick and many others”.(75) But Rother challenges Susan Sontag’s critique of Olympia as fascist art due to its promotion of “physical perfection”, arguing again that Riefenstahl was merely remaining aesthetically true to the ideology of the event itself. Rother concludes that:

She had found a focus for her abilities which suited her much better than the rituals of the NSDAP After completing the ‘set exercises’, Leni Riefenstahl could finally turn to the free programme.(78)

In Rother’s view, the stylization of the human body as individual or en masse freed from political imperatives gave Riefenstahl the perfect opportunity to apply her skills and talent (and access to considerable funds). The question must then be, why do the Rally films and Olympia share so many aesthetic characteristics given the difference in content cited by the filmmaker herself in the quote above? This observation would seem to challenge the “form follows function” theory.

Tiefland, a project began during the war in 1940 and having its premiere in 1954, is seen as an inferior work within Riefenstahl’s oeuvre. Rother claims that it is “over-stylized” and Riefenstahl herself says that she may have used the project to escape the war. In Rother’s discussion of this film the author makes a rare reference to Riefenstahl’s personal life. Married at 42 to a soldier and divorced 3 years later, and losing her father and brother during the war, Riefenstahl’s private life is almost completely omitted from Leni Riefenstahl: The Seduction of Genius. Rother prefers to concentrate on the actual work and career of Riefenstahl, an approach that certainly gives proper weight to a filmmaker often focused on for very different reasons.

One of Rother’s persistent themes is the relevance of Riefenstahl’s work to contemporary artists. The author finds references to the filmmaker in German dance theatre and music video, cites touring exhibitions of her work, and a proposed film on her life produced by and starring Jodie Foster. Rother’s insistence on the significance of Riefenstahl’s work is supported by hard “evidence”: two awards from the Venice Film Festival (1935 for Triumph des willens and 1938 for Olympia), the Grand Prix for Triumph des willens at the World’s Exhibition in Paris in 1937, support by former collaborator Jean Cocteau when he was president of the Cannes Film Festival in 1955, a retrospective at the Biennale in Venice in 1959 and a life-achievement award from Cinecon film in Los Angeles. The dimensions and scope of Riefenstahl’s life and career is stunning. She travelled to Nuba at 60 beginning a series of trips that produced two books of photographs. She began diving expeditions at 72, and this also produced two books of photographs. Making it to 100 is obviously yet another addition to her list of achievements.

Erin Brannigan,
University of New South Wales, Australia.

Endnotes

[1] See David Stewart Hull, Film in the Third Reich, (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1969) for an account of anti-Semitic policies within the film industry in Germany at the time Riefenstahl was making films.
[2] William Cook, “Shooting Hitler”, New Statesman, February 11, 2002, p.40
[3] Ed Meza, “Riefenstahl still controversial at 100”, Variety, September 9-15, 2002, p.18
[4] See for example: “Triumph of the dull”, Sight and Sound, Sept 2001, 11:9 ,p.60; David Gates, “The bad and the beautiful”; Newsweek, Sept 2, 2002, p.62 and Stuart Liebman,;”Triumph of the will”, Cineaste, New York, Fall 2002, pp.46-7
[5] Steve Neale, “Triumph of the Will: notes on documentary and spectacle”, Screen, 20:1, 1979.

Created on: Wednesday, 25 June 2003 | Last Updated: Wednesday, 25 June 2003