Leni Riefenstahl, 1902 - 2003.

"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, A Memoir, 1995, quoted at the German-Hollywood Connection.

"Artistically, though, her distinction as a trailblazer remained intact, and her influence has gone multimedia. Think of the big events - rallies, US presidential inaugurations, even sporting events - that are essentially huge photo-ops. 'There you have her genius, but also that of Hitler,' says Thomas Elsaesser, professor of film studies at the University of Amsterdam. 'They thought up the idea of an event that exists only to be recorded by the camera, shot and edited so as to give the mass spectator the illusion of being the disembodied, ubiquitous eye of God.' Open a magazine and look at the muscly ads, like those for Calvin Klein fragrances. 'The aesthetics of this heroic vibe were taken from her movies,' says Polish artist Maciej Toporowicz, whose video Obsession juxtaposes Riefenstahl clips with other Nazi-era footage and samples of modern advertising that use what he calls 'fascist iconography.'

"Few movie fans realize how many of Riefenstahl's ideas and images have slipped into recent film. In addition to Verhoeven, George Lucas echoed her in this year's Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones; snippets of Triumph of the Will appeared in Oliver Stone's The Doors; and James Cameron's Titanic took many details from her little-seen 1954 film Tiefland, about a woman who falls under a tyrant's control but eventually finds freedom. 'I was sitting in the theater thinking, "I've seen these scenes somewhere before,"' says film scholar Robert von Dassanowsky. 'Isn't that the hallmark of a truly influential artist, that her work survives and influences, even detached from her name?'"

Jeff Chu in Time, August 26, 2002.

"[W]hat does the fact that Riefenstahl is a woman have to do with her continuous and overwhelming image as unrepentant Nazi agent?... 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.... The absence of women in this list is glaringly obvious."

Robert von Dassanowsky, "'Wherever you may run, you cannot escape him': Leni Riefenstahl's Self-Reflection and Romantic Transcendence of Nazism in Tiefland."

But then again, a year ago, I wrote elsewhere:

Another nasty flare-up from Leni Riefenstahl's past, just days before her 100th birthday. Kate Connolly explains the situation quite well in the Observer.

I can't point you to another Riefenstahl-related piece in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung because faz.net tosses stories into its pay-per-view archive these days almost immediately. But in sum, she gave a television interview on Thursday that Niklas Maak, one of the FAZ's better writers, dissects expertly.

The interviewer was Sandra Maischberger, an award-winning and popular journalist in Germany, who, to sum up Maak's argument, didn't do her job. She didn't ask about the Gypsies forced to act as extras in Riefenstahl's Tiefland, nearly half of whom went on to die in the camps, even as that controversy was brewing. She didn't, in fact, press her on much of anything but did ask, as Maak writes, "one of the oddest questions: 'You and Marlene Dietrich have one thing in common, namely, that you were both unpopular in Germany after the war. She was unpopular because of her propaganda against Germany in America; you were unpopular because you did just the opposite and were even officially seen later as a fellow traveler. What does this mean? That a woman in a higher position can't do anything right?'

"'Well,' answered Leni Riefenstahl benevolently, 'I can understand Marlene's behavior one hundred percent" (as if Marlene Dietrich's emigration to the United States were an irritating but excuseable faux pas). 'It's perfectly understandable that she, who had many Jewish friends, hated everything that had anything to do with National Socialism.' Were there perhaps other reasons? No further questions from Frau Maischberger..."

Maak steers to the following: Maischberger is "for the entertainment industry what Gerhard Schröder is to politics: the prototype of a professional, friendly generation of pragmatists who's nobody's fool and who won't reveal in the least what they're after, what they stand for, what really moves them. A generation that finds everything 'interesting' with a critical distance that becomes a pose."

Maak's argument would have been, well, more interesting, though, if he'd taken into consideration the actual brutal pragmatics of the situation: Had Maischberger fried Riefenstahl on screen, Riefenstahl's company would have fought the broadcast, or, had they suspected Maischberger might have even considered pressing her at all, would never have granted the interview in the first place. In which case, of course, Maischberger should have refused to conduct it.

Posted by dwhudson at September 9, 2003 5:37 AM