BIOGRAPHY: Author Rainer Rother attempts to untangle the political signifance of Leni Reifenstahl's work in Nazi Germany and measuring its aesthetic quality, but ultimately does not quite carry it off according to Katrina Goldstone.
Leni Riefenstahl: The Seduction of Genius. By Rainer Rother.Continuum, 262pp. £20
In August, Leni Riefenstahl, director of the Nazi propaganda film Triump des Willens celebrated her 100th birthday, hosting a party with 200 guests. At the same time, an old controversy about her contentious career was resurfacing. A Roma human rights organisation claims that Riefenstahl deliberately allowed gypsies working in her film Tiefland (Lowland) to be sent back to concentration camps meaning certain death for some. Similar accusations to this have been circulating since 1949 and have formed the basis for other lawsuits in the past. Biographer Juergen Trimborn, whose Riefenstahl: A German Career was released recently, maintains Riefenstahl's use of gypsies demonstrated she was willing to work within the Nazi system to advance her career.
The focus of author Rainer Rother's book is more aesthetics than morality, though in the case of Riefenstahl the two simply cannot be neatly separated. Rother does attempt to steer a course between untangling the political significance of her work in Nazi Germany and measuring its aesthetic quality. Ultimately though he does not quite carry it off.
Rother is programme director for cinema of a Berlin museum and his book bears the hallmarks of academic film studies. Early on, he proposes that the link between the symbolic, demonised image of Riefenstahl and her career needs to be reassessed. Certainly there is some hypocrisy in the vilification of her. Men who were crucial to the Nazi killing machine were quietly rehabilitated in post war German society. Others found their place in the sun, spirited away by the Allies to America.
Riefenstahl found it difficult to work for many years. She reinvented herself, chronicled the lives of the Nuba of the Sudan , took up scuba diving in her 70s and returned to documentary-making recently with a film of marine life.
Despite this, the picture that emerges from this critical assessment of her art is still an unsavoury one, that of a woman who consistently distorted facts to suit her own legend and probably, so Rother argues, used the Nazi propaganda machine as a means to advance her burning ambition to become a famous film director.
This is the woman who could not understand why she was shunned in the US which she toured just after Kristallnacht in November 1938. Goebbels noted in his diary: "Leni Riefenstahl tells me about her American trip. She gives an exhaustive account which paints a far from pleasing picture. We have no say there. The Jews reign through terror and boycotts".
Rother maintains that his is not a biography and indeed apart from a chronology in the appendix, there is little detail about Riefenstahl's family, background or character. Rather he wants to "deal with Riefenstahl's work and the way it is bound up with Nazi propaganda". He frequently lapses into film studies speak, and like the film bore you get stuck with at a party, dissects, reel by reel, image by image, Riefenstahl's key films. Very early on he makes a strong case that Riefenstahl both cultivated and selectively controlled her own image and the creation of her own legend. She profited from the Nazi propaganda machine and as she was receiving her real break in film-making, Jewish and left-leaning directors and producers were being banished from the German film industry. Her first Party Rally film, Sieg des Glaubens, was only rediscovered in the 1980s, by which time Riefenstahl had underplayed its significance in the pantheon of Nazi propaganda. The premiere of Sieg des Glaubens was staged as a state ceremony and was a forerunner of the work which has garnered both acclaim and opprobrium Triumph of the Will, the film of the 1934 Nazi party rally. It was followed by Olympia, her highly stylised record of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Goebbels, whom the fledgling director hated, viewed Riefenstahl as "the only one of all the stars who understands us".
What comes across from Rother's book is how consistently manipulative Riefenstahl has been. It is clear that as a woman of unusual prominence, she was later demonised out of proportion to her role in the Nazi regime. The director Veit Harlan, who wrote and directed one of the most vicious of Nazi propaganda films, Jud Suss, was permitted to work again after the war. Riefenstahl's rehabilitation didn't begin in earnest until the 1970s and, crucially, was spearheaded by cultural critics and film buffs using the argument of her talent to obscure the more unpalateable aspects of her work.
But the fact that Riefenstahl still refers to Hitler's charm and power is hard to stomach. Iris Pinkepank of the Roma organisation calling for an investigation into the director's treatment of gypsy extras has said "Leni Riefenstahl is a woman who cares for her own history: She makes sure that only the truth she wants to read and only her version is published".
No amount of innovative or stunning film techniques can excuse that.
Katrina Goldstone is a critic and researcher