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The Problem of Leni Riefenstahl
| Article
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11674 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1994 |
3,915 Words |
| Author
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Lloyd Eby
Lloyd Eby has worked in film and video since 1970 and has
published articles on the interaction of film and religion.
With René Berger, he coedited the book Art
and Technology (New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1986).
He is assistant senior editor in the Currents in Modern
Thought
section of The World & I. |
The publication of Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir in the United States in September 1993 and the showing of Ray Muller's biographical film The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl at the 1993 New York Film Festival brought to America's attention once again the life, the career, and the problem of one of the world's greatest cinema artists and the finest woman film director of all.
Riefenstahl's life and career are material for legend. As a film creator and innovator she is fully the equal of Sergei Eisenstein, D.W. Griffith, John Ford, and Orson Welles. But in a life that now has lasted ninety-one years, she was able to complete only four films--all shot before the end of World War II. Since then she has been blocked, blacklisted, had her financing withdrawn, and otherwise been prevented from making any further films, except for incomplete documentary work she has done on the Nuba in Africa. When she was seventy-two she also took up underwater filming, but no film has yet been completed from that either. Don't expect the American Film Institute or the Motion Picture Academy ever to give her a Life Achievement Award, despite her being so much more deserving than many minor figures and hacks so honored.
What is the Riefenstahl problem? She was the creator of the great documentary film about the Nazis, Triumph of the Will--a film that seems to be a promotional piece for Hitler and nazism--and she is a former admirer of Hitler (though she was never a member of the Nazi Party). Her life has been inextricably linked with and cursed by these facts.
EARLY LIFE
Leni Riefenstahl was born August 22, 1902, the first child of an upper-middle-class family in Berlin. She reports in her Memoirs that her family loved the theater but that her father "considered the acting profession to be not quite respectable." Yet young Leni "was fascinated by the very idea of the theater and of all that mysterious world behind the curtain." She seems to have been a particularly strong-willed, determined, and inquisitive student--traits that she has shown throughout her life. Among other things, when she was about fifteen (at a time before civilian air travel was available) she began to draw large imaginary passenger airplanes and plan for air travel to interconnect German cities, including estimating costs of plane manufacture, airfield construction, and fuel, in order to calculate the price that would have to be charged for tickets. These details show the early emergence of formidable organizational and administrative
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