Beautiful Monster

By Crispin Sartwell

I was beginning to think she couldn't die, even if she wanted to, but Leni Riefenstahl is gone. She survived car accidents, helicopter crashes, wars, internments, avalanches, icebergs, war crimes trials, months alone in the African bush, climbing entire Alps barefoot, scuba-diving at age100. And she said, toward the end of her life, "I apologize for ever having been born."

It is certainly one of the most extraordinary and twisted lives ever lived. Riefenstahl started out as a celebrated young dancer and beauty, touring Europe in the 1920s until injuries made dance an agony. Then she shifted into movie acting, starring in a series of "mountain girl" movies as a kind of mysterious, cave-dwelling Alpine princess and engaging in some of the most harrowing stunts ever captured on camera: being buried in a real avalanche, scurrying around ropeless on sheer rock faces above thousand foot drops.

She then turned to directing movies, and to the seduction of Nazism. Hitler knew and admired her work, and, along with Joseph Goebbels, his propaganda minister, hired her to film the 1934 Nazi party meeting in Nuremberg. The film she produced, "Triumph of the Will," was at that time in many ways the best documentary ever made: Riefenstahl, with a limitless budget, created innovations in everything from film stock to camera movement, running a track around the podium so that shots of speeches would have dynamism, filming the mass movements of Nazi troops from an elevator just big enough for herself and her camera, where she perched atop a flagpole.

The film was propaganda, though she denied that for the rest of her life. And clearly the rally itself was choreographed with her aesthetic in mind, as she coordinated with Albert Speer - Hitler's architect and designer - in creating the aesthetic of Nazism. And aesthetics were key to Nazism, indeed in some ways its essence. Hitler himself had been an artist, and remained an art critic, albeit one with dictatorial powers, condemning "degenerate," "Jewish" modernism and turning toward a neo-classical cult of the body and of purity. In Hitler's hands, and often in Speer's, the result was sheer kitsch.

In Riefenstahl's, it was sublime. A consummate perfectionist and control freak, she invented her own editing equipment and edited her own films obsessively for months or years at a time, for up to eighteen hours a day. By the time she made "Olympiad," her masterpiece about the 1936 Berlin Olympics, she had created a style that might be described as visual symphony, with pristine images woven together in rhythms that recall Mahler.

She was a social friend of both Hitler and Goebbels - at least according to the latter's diaries - though she denied that and also the persistent rumors that she was the mistress of one or both of them. During the war, she was sent to front to take photographs, and retreated in horror.

Tried as a war criminal after WWII, she underwent "de-Nazification" while also escaping repeatedly from detention facilities. She denied knowing anything about the holocaust or concentration camps, and kept up those denials right up until her death. These claims have rightly been regarded with derision. Essentially acquitted, but unable to find work, she lived in poverty and obscurity for some years.

In the 1960s, she re-emerged as a photographer, first taking a series of stunning photographs of the Nuba of the Sudan, with whom she lived and traveled (and danced!) for months at a time. Later she became the world's oldest scuba diver, and made moving images of aquatic life even at her century mark. Even her later work, however, was connected by some critics to a Nazi aesthetic. But though the Nuba work also deployed the cult of noble body, that was her contribution to the Nazi aesthetic in the first place rather than vice versa.

Riefenstahl always claimed that her only purpose was to make beautiful things and do her work the best way she could, and she said a thousand times that she had no interest in politics. That, I think, was false, and even if it were true it would be disturbing or evil: art too has political ramifications, and it is incumbent on artists to think about questions such as whom they're working for and what the effects of their work might be.

But on the other hand, I don't think someone can be a war criminal simply in virtue of making movies, and I for one am very glad that "Olympiad" exists. I actually hope that - now that she's really, finally, actually dead and no longer rationalizing her existence - Riefenstahl can be remembered among other things as she would have wanted to be: as a maker of beautiful things.

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Crispin Sartwell teaches a course on the ethics of art and design at the Maryland Instigtute College of Art. c.sartwell@verizon.net