Leni Riefenstahl: Fabricating Fascism

"I am an artist through and through. That is Leni!"

Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003) was born to a businessman father and doting mother. Shy and withdrawn as a girl, she nonetheless participated in gymnastics, dancing and music, finding exhilaration in physical activity and artistic expression. She attended Berlin's Grimm-Reiter Dance School, despite her father's insistence that "you have little talent and will never be more than mediocre." Leni soon proved him wrong.
Riefenstahl gained fame as a dancer, performing both in Germany and abroad. Her film career took off with Arnold Fanck's alpine epics The Holy Mountain (1926) and The White Hell of Pitz Palu (1929). Possessing beauty, talent and ambition in equal measure, Riefenstahl dreamed of directing: "I couldn't help seeing everything with a filmmaker's eyes." Her debut film, 1932's The Blue Light, enchanted Adolf Hitler, who told Riefenstahl "you must make my films." After assuming power, the Fuhrer made Riefenstahl Germany's premiere director.
Riefenstahl directed four movies for Hitler. Victory of Faith (1933) and Day of Freedom (1935) are minor works, virtually forgotten outside of critical circles. Her outstanding films remain Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938). No movies, save perhaps Birth of a Nation and Citizen Kane, are more widely studied and copied. And no filmmaker is more ostracized for their work. Riefenstahl outlived the Thousand Year Reich by six decades, produced two other films and numerous books, but never escaped the shadow of Nazism.

The Fuhrer and his favorite director

Riefenstahl's motives remain inscrutable. Was she an unwilling participant in Nazi myth-making? An avid National Socialist? A real-life Hendrik Hoefgen, placing her career above moral considerations? It's a controversy that reams of biographies, memoirs, essays and documentaries fail to elucidate. Riefenstahl's later evasions and defensiveness are less helpful than self-pitying. Biographer Steven Bach suggests Riefenstahl didn't appreciate the connection between film and politics: "Tragedies... were not the stuff of Leni's lavish obsessions... Her heart belonged to art."
Regardless of their moral merit - hopefully few readers need instruction there - Riefenstahl's movies are both remarkable in their own right, and immensely influential. Her filmic brilliance isn't diminished by working under fascism, any more than are Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov for working under Stalin. These articles will consider Riefenstahl's four Nazi epics, focusing on their style, influence and legacy.

Victory of Faith (1933)

Trumpeting the Nazi death cult

Riefenstahl felt flattered by Hitler's attentions. She admitted she "felt very happy that such a man had come" and communicated her "deepest devotions" to Germany's strongman. Hitler suggested she make a biopic of SA martyr Horst Wessel. Riefenstahl declined the offer, proving more receptive to Joseph Goebbels' suggestion of a documentary chronicling the Fifth Party Congress (August 30-September 3, 1933) in Nuremberg. Thus originated Riefenstahl's first "Hitler film," Victory of Faith (1933), showing a Nazi Party just seven months removed from assuming power.
Like the Soviets, Nazi Germany viewed cinema as the essential art: easily digested by viewers, essential to control. Goebbels created Ufi-Group, envisioning himself Germany's David O. Selznick. Hence epics like Uncle Kruger (1941) and Kolberg (1945), equating the Reich's contemporary struggles with its historical glory. The latter evinces the Propaganda Minister's megalomaniac myopia: Goebbels conscripted 30,000 soldiers as extras, even as the Red Army overran Germany's frontiers! What better medium, then, to enshrine Hitler?
Riefenstahl made Victory of Faith on a modest budget of 60,000 marks, with collaboration and oversight from Goebbels. Riefenstahl claimed a contentious relationship with the Propaganda Minister, calling him "an appalling man": besides his domineering personality, Goebbels made crude sexual advances towards Riefenstahl and once threatened to "throw [her] down the stairs." She worked more amiably with rally organizer Albert Speer, who helped transform Nuremberg into the ultimate sound stage. Riefenstahl later disparaged Victory as "an imperfect fragment, not a motion picture."

The star of the show

Indeed, Victory of Faith is disappointingly conventional. Riefenstahl establishes Nuremberg with routine imagery rather than Triumph's majestic entrance, showing its landmarks and cityscape, its townspeople preparing for Hitler's arrival. This smacks more of newsreels than cinema. The SA's arrival receives as much pomp as Hitler's own entrance. The Fuhrer speaks, reviews troops and meets crowds but remains at ground level, presiding over rather than dominating events. Amusingly, Hitler's repeatedly caught whipping and brushing his hair, as if hoping to steal the spotlight!
Victory anticipates many of Triumph's familiar images. Hitler's initial entry presages Triumph: the Fuhrer filmed from behind, tracking shots of exultant crowds. There's an impressive tribute to German war dead, albeit less strikingly rendered than the Workers' salute in Triumph. Rudolf Hess acts as emcee, his toadying introductions almost comic. And Riefenstahl's montage work - church bells clanging in a new era, crowds of saluting soldiers and military vehicles - make a strong impression. But the overall effect is crude and non-dynamic: Riefenstahl even inserts studio shots of Speer and Julius Streicher "watching" Hitler's speeches.
The Congress itself shows the Nazis somewhat unsure in their position. Benito Mussolini's envoy gets a keynote address, as if acknowledging Hitler's debt to Il Duce; in Triumph, foreign dignitaries receive only passing acknowledgment. More ominously, Ernst Rohm, the thuggish SA chieftain, makes repeated appearances. Next to Hitler and Hess, Rohm appears most frequently in Victory, his Brownshirts dominating scenes of parade and spectacle. Heinrich Himmler's SS seems virtually invisible.

Hitler flanked by Joseph Goebbels and Ernst Rohm. Only one returned for the sequel.

Events soon overtook Victory. Rohm's fallout with Hitler, calling for a "Second Revolution" and openly challenging the Fuhrer's authority, led to a bloody reckoning. Rohm was among the 85 people liquidated in Hitler's Night of the Long Knives (June 30-July 2, 1934), which elevated the SS, placated German conservatives and cowed the SA into obedience. Victory of Faith was subsequently suppressed and presumed lost for decades. Checkered history aside, it's mostly a trial run for Riefenstahl's later work.

Triumph of the Will (1935)

The Second Coming is at hand

Riefenstahl always insisted that Triumph of the Will was "a pure historical film," documenting the Sixth Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg (September 5-10, 1934). And many still classify it as a documentary. Such descriptions are naive, if not mendacious. Siegfried Krakauer notes that “the Convention was planned not only as a spectacular mass meeting, but as spectacular film propaganda.” A paean to National Socialism and Adolf Hitler, Triumph is objective neither in theory or practice.
Riefenstahl claimed that Hitler forced her to direct Triumph. Coerced or not, Riefenstahl launched into the project with aplomb. With eighteen cameramen, Riefenstahl scoured the city to accommodate her mobile tracking shots, dynamic camerawork and sound equipment. Her memoirs recount a protracted row with Nuremberg officials over a flagpole camera lift, ultimately resolved by Albert Speer. Riefenstahl wrote "I experienced the pleasure of a filmmaker who gives cinematic shape to actual events without falsifying them." Rarely has a filmmaker been so disingenuous.
Triumph's production came at a crucial moment. The Long Knives purge and President Paul Von Hindenberg's death on August 2nd, 1934 removed the last barriers to Hitler's absolute power. Germany became less a dictatorship than personality cult. Journalist William Shirer imputed the rally with "the mysticism or religious fervor of an Easter or Christmas mass." Accordingly, Triumph is equal parts religious spectacle, Roman triumph and Wagnerian bacchanalia: Germany energized by new-found strength and confidence, anointing Hitler as its dark messiah.

Riefenstahl on set

Triumph of the Will is the ultimate storehouse of Nazi iconography. Every popular image of the Third Reich originates here: ubiquitous swastikas, goosestepping soldiers, saluting crowds, Hitler's histrionic speechmaking. Besides endless documentaries cribbing Riefenstahl's footage, even popular films reference it as shorthand for evil. Such unlikely works as Star Wars and The Lion King invoke Triumph, knowing audiences recognize the imagery at least secondhand.
Triumph's famous opening sets the tone. Hitler's airplane circles Nuremberg as the Horst Wessel Lied plays on the soundtrack. After disembarking from the plane, Hitler drives through the city, filmed from behind like Christ in a Hollywood biblical epic. Later, he's backlit during a nighttime speech by a heavenly spotlight, conveniently while evoking God. He blesses military standards with the "blood flag" carried in the '23 Beer Hall Putsch. And always he's elevated above the crowd on imposing platforms. Riefenstahl leaves no doubt who Germany's real savior is.

German workmen pledge obedience

The Congress pays tribute to Hindenburg and soldiers killed in the First World War, equating them with Hitler's nascent armies. The military parades thousands strong in implacable grid formations like Roman cohorts; Hitler's always flanked by the SS, his black-shirted Tenth Legion. One sequence shows a cadre of civilian laborers, wielding shovels and hoes like rifles. This further emphasizes Hitler's power, parting this brown sea like a fascist Moses. Even modern viewers, inculcated to loathe Nazism instinctively, will be impressed by Riefenstahl's pageantry.
Nazi orators stress Hitler's achievements: construction of the Autobahn, agricultural advances, national unity. Only a few discordant notes emerge. Gauleiter Adolf Wagner denounces the idea of a Second Revolution, pointedly rebuking the SA (whose new leader, Viktor Lutze, grovels obsequiously). Hitler dismisses Rohm's alleged treachery as a "dark shadow" now past. Julius Streicher, editor of Der Sturmer, lectures on the need for racial purity: the sole reference to antisemitism. Riefenstahl sanitizes Hitler's New Order: cleansed of genocidal bigotry and imperialism, it almost seems benign.

One Reich, indivisible under the swastika

Riefenstahl strikes other provocative chords. She shows Nuremberg's adults in traditional Bavarian costumes next to fresh-faced children: fusing tradition with the energy of youth. Riefenstahl introduces an erotic note with bare-chested Brownshirts brawling and gnawing sausages, alongside handsome Hitler Youths and pretty young women cheering the Fuhrer. Along with the immaculate uniforms and staging, Triumph evinces the fetishism noted by commentators Wilhelm Bittorf and Susan Sontag.
Few aside from cinephiles and history buffs will find Triumph conventionally entertaining. It's two hours of rallies, parades and political speeches; all but Nazi experts require Wikipedia to follow the dizzying roster of dignitaries. Nonetheless, Riefenstahl's dark craftsmanship can't be denied. Triumph of the Will ranks alongside Battleship Potemkin as a totalitarian masterpiece. 
Part II will examine Day of Freedom (1936) and Olympia (1938). Part III will examine Riefenstahl's later life, legacy and influence.