Riefenstahl.

Why do biographies so often appear in pairs? Walter Isaacson's life of Einstein is selling briskly, but to hear Michael Dirda tell it in the Washington Post, Jürgen Neffe's is the one to read. Lee Smolin, who goes all out and reads seven more books on Einstein for the New York Review of Books, agrees. And in the same issue of the Review, Ian Buruma is the latest to take on the pair of Leni Riefenstahl biographies:

It is tempting to see a direct link between Fanck's The Holy Mountain and Riefenstahl's quasi documentary of the 1934 Nazi rally in Nuremberg, Triumph of the Will. Of the two authors under review, Steven Bach comes closer to this view. Jürgen Trimborn, a young German film historian, whose book is more earnest and less amusing, but well worth reading, is almost painfully nuanced. Yes, "the Darwinism underlying many of Fanck's films placed them in dangerous proximity to National Socialist propaganda." Yes, in the context of the "nationalistic elevation of alpinism, the films of Arnold Fanck were praised as a 'profession of the faith of many Germans.'" But, Trimborn writes,

despite such arguments, it would be an oversimplification to consider the mountain films exclusively as prefascist creations, as this does not take into consideration the complex roots of the genre, including the literature of Romanticism, the alpinist movement, and the nature cult of the early twentieth century.

If this is right - and I think it is - it doesn't help to make the case for Riefenstahl. With her considerable talent, energy, and opportunism, she absorbed Fanck's technical innovations in camera work and editing and used them to produce works of pure Nazi propaganda. What makes The Triumph of the Will such a poisonous film is not the classicism and crude Romanticism of Weimar-period Deutschtumelei, but the political manipulation of such aesthetics by Riefenstahl and Albert Speer, who designed the parade grounds at Nuremberg for the party rally.

As it happens, Thom at Film of the Year has just watched Triumph: "When images are presented and edited together in the way Riefenstahl has done here, the subject could be almost anyone, the crowd could be almost any crowd, and, for better or worse, the effect would be the same."

Of course, those techniques can be revised and accommodated to any old event at hand. Think of the opening ceremony for the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles or the 2004 campaign rallies for Bush.

Posted by dwhudson at May 28, 2007 8:50 AM