The wonder and the horror

At the time the German filmmaker Ray Muller made his documentary, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, the subject was 90 years old, a spry, intelligent, highly articulate woman who showed traces of her former beauty. She had been a dancer, a famous actress (she recalls how Marlene Dietrich demanded that she leave the set of The Blue Angel — she made Marlene jealous!) and a director.

As a director Leni Riefenstahl was singularly focused and driven, a perfectionist who made other perfectionists look like casual practitioners. We see pages of her working scripts, heavily annotated with camera angles, apertures, filters indicated for each shot. Every shot is planned in advance: this is a professional who left nothing to chance.

In her first project as director, The Blue Light, the available film stock did not capture the exact mood and color she wanted so she asked Agfa to develop a new type of film. For her documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics she started training her large crew of cameramen months ahead of the event. They trained as hard as the athletes. She took them to sporting events so they could practice filming athletes in motion and figure out the best angles. Her main concern, she tells Muller, was to make the documentary “interesting.”

To this end she employed the techniques of feature filmmaking — close-ups to heighten emotional intensity, play of light (in the fencing matches we see the competitors as giant shadows on the wall, crossing swords), perspective. She introduced now commonplace techniques that were unheard of at the time. It was her idea to dig pits alongside the tracks so the camera could shoot the runners and jumpers from below (I thought Orson Welles invented that shot). She fought for permission to dig those pits, though the organizers rejected the idea of placing a camera on a catapult so it could run alongside the runners. The effect of the pole-vaulter twisting his body over the beam, then falling towards the viewer is breathtaking.

For the diving competition she used a three-camera setup and stationed a cameraman in the water to record the divers as they hit the water. Riefenstahl and her crew shot 400 kilometers of film at the 1936 Olympics, and she spent the next two years editing the footage herself. The result of her labors, Olympia, was hailed as a masterpiece.

Throughout Muller’s film Riefenstahl stresses her obsession with detail and her need to get her films done exactly as she envisioned them. She is a filmmaking genius, and that is where the problem lies.

How could such a brilliant control freak be unaware, as she claims to be, of the atrocities that her employer Adolf Hitler was perpetrating?

How could she create propaganda for the Nazis who commissioned her film of the 1934 Nuremberg rally, Triumph of the Will? How can she claim not to be friendly with Hitler (whose mistress she was rumored to be) and the propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, when in his diary Goebbels mentions her presence at the Nazis’ parties? (She vehemently denies this.)

Riefenstahl insists that with Triumph of the Will her intention was not to promote and glorify Hitler and his Third Reich. As with Olympia, she says, her intention was simply to make the film “interesting.” She repeats that she was not a Nazi, she was not anti-Semitic, and she did not know about the death camps. She stayed in Germany, she says, because unlike her colleagues who fled to America, she had plenty of work offers. She may have done her work too well.

Whatever her intentions, Triumph of the Will certainly looks like propaganda. Watching it 75 years after it was made, one gets the impression of a nation that adored its leader and would follow him to the ends of the earth. We are reminded that the ordinary Germans loved Hitler, and this is probably one reason postwar Germans could not forgive Leni Riefenstahl. The way the filmmaker dramatizes the story of a nation rising to meet its destiny is chillingly effective.

You could say that Riefenstahl, who directed mountain movies, was the ideal auteur for this political epic: she made the little mustachioed man seem monumental. You could also say that with her martial discipline and her demand for complete control, she was the ideal fascist director.

Note her testiness when Muller brings up her earlier film of the Nuremberg rally in 1933. She loudly disavows the film: she did not have time to prepare for the shoot, they did not get the images she needed, she had no control over the project. Her problem is not that it was Nazi propaganda; her problem is that it was badly made.

Did she set out to make the Nazis look good, or was she just so good at her work that she couldn’t help it? Was she so engrossed in her projects that she did not notice what was going on in Germany, then the rest of Europe? The postwar tribunal ruled that she was not a Nazi, but the doubts never went away. After Olympia, she’d worked on a feature film called Tiefland. Records show that when the production needed extras, gypsies were trucked in from a concentration camp. How does such a controlling director not know this? How does a director with no links to the Nazi party (as she alleges) get this kind of special treatment? She says she did not use gypsies as extras.

Tiefland was never completed. Leni Riefenstahl never made another feature. After the war she was ostracized and excoriated.

So in the 1960s she reinvented herself. Her stunning photographs of the little-known Nuba tribe of Africa reminded the world of her formidable talent. Inevitably her photographs extolling the beauty and strength of the human body were compared to the images in Olympia; she was called a fascist all over again.

To take those photos she had lived with the Nuba, alone, for many months. She was 60 at the time. Later she returned to the Nuba with a cameraman, her 20-year-old boyfriend. Oddly, the planned documentary on the Nuba was never completed. Muller offers a possible reason: she only had one camera, she did not get all the angles she wanted. Without total control she could not make a movie.

After that she took up diving. Undersea creatures are easier subjects than human; she completed a documentary. Muller’s film shows the 90-year-old Riefenstahl and her 50-year-old boyfriend filming underwater. If she had not been branded a Nazi, Leni Riefenstahl would be a formidable feminist heroine.

For nearly four hours Ray Muller presents the case against Riefenstahl, and she passionately defends herself. If we come away from The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl with a feeling of admiration for the subject, it’s because the force of her personality comes through the screen like a fist.

Muller’s compelling, unsettling film asks many questions. What is the responsibility of the artist? Is art political? Is there a goal higher than beauty? Should art be moral? Is a great artist also required to be a great human being (which pretty much disqualifies the artists we consider great)? Who is the cinema for? Only fools and politicians would claim to have all the answers.