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Monstrous talent
By Nigel Andrews, FT film critic.
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How do you deal with a monster? Leni Riefenstahl was a multiple achiever on a frightening scale. She was an actress-dancer, a film-maker, a socialite and social climber, a propagandist for Nazism, and late in life a successful photographer. She had talent, even if some might deem it, in film critic Dilys Powell’s words, ”an appalling talent”.
By the end of a long life - she died at 101 - the director of Triumph of the Will, the Third Reich’s great hour in the artistic sun, was vilified for almost everything she did. Susan Sontag wrote the essay ”Fascinating Fascism”. Sontag’s thesis was that Riefenstahl blindly worshipped the strong, the beautiful, the dominant.
Triumph of the Will is great film-making. It is pointless to attack it as less and pointless to try to pull down its monumentality with words like ”shallow”, ”vulgar” or ”kitschy”. Great art can be made in terrible causes.
Riefenstahl might be thought to have met her match in biographer Steven Bach, who in an earlier life ran United Artists.
There is the same sense of a civilised flailing in his approach to Riefenstahl. Should he respect this woman or abominate her? Bach is not sure and it shows. This is the position we have met in every Riefenstahl book: a diffident stand-off, with the author staying inside his pentagram of decent liberal enlightenment, deploring here, admiring there.
Yet Bach writes well and researches well. For Leni he found unpublished interviews with the film-maker and followed these up with his own interviews with survivors. This is a fuller, rounder portrait, even if the main features show no change.
Bach also has a knack for the pithy phrase. In isolating reasons why Riefenstahl was remarkable, he cites a comment from Goebbels’ deputy Fritz Hippler: ”No one else in Germany had the right to decide alone what to film.” Exactly. And this film-maker was a woman, a non-party member and, quite possibly Bach reminds us, of Jewish descent.
It remains a stunning story. Riefenstahl spent the second half of her life repudiating, or Jesuitically seeking to justify, the things she had done in the first half. But she had signed a Faustian pact. It was too bad for her that the Devil was thrown out of power, a decade after her signing, and she was left with all the infamy and none of the rewards.
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