Non-fiction: Monstrous talent
By Nigel Andrews
Published: May 16 2007 17:27 | Last updated: May 16 2007 17:27
Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl
by Steven Bach
ADVERTISEMENT
Little, Brown ₤25, 387 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤20
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 about director Ken Russell, ”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”, in which she tore into the German’s recently published, seemingly apolitical photo-books depicting the Nuba tribe of Sudan, arguing that they too were part of the vicious woof of supremacism. 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. He dealt there with monomaniac Michael Cimino of Heaven’s Gate, but quit when the studio collapsed, beggared by that western’s failure. He couldn’t control Cimino, as he recounted at length in his book Final Cut.
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 For Leni he found unpublished interviews with the film-maker and followed these up with his own interviews with survivors.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.
Nigel Andrews is the FT’s film critic.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Comments