In 1934 people were crazy and there was great enthusiasm for Hitler.
- Leni Riefenstahl
Leni Riefenstahl was in many ways an auteur simply looking for a way to advance her art. Her misfortune was to go to work for an employer who became perhaps the worst monster ever spawned by humankind. Her crime was meekly going along for the ride and using it for the opportunity.
She gained wide acclaim for "Triumph of the Will," a documentary on the 1934 Nuremberg rally, and "Olympia," a filmed record of the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
Riefenstahl always denied political involvement with the Nazi party or any romantic link with German dictator Adolf Hitler who selected the dancer-turned-actress to be Nazi Germany's official filmmaker. But he gave her vast resources to make movies that idealized and glorified Nazism.
Although she admitted "Triumph of the Will" was used to promote Nazi ideals, she said that was not her intention. "One can use it for propaganda, but ... it is no propaganda film. There is not one single anti-Semitic word in my film," she told The Associated Press....
Her biographer, Rainer Rother, said the filmmaker's view was simplistic though. "I think she might not have been an anti-Semitic woman, but she still was aware of what was going on."
Brian Winston, a media scholar at the University of Westminster, agreed. "Riefenstahl represents a big lie and she's been lying for 50 years. She was extremely close to the regime and her only defense is that she wasn't a party member."
More than anything, Riefenstahl wanted to be an artist, and that she without a doubt was. Her "Triumph of the Will" is both beautiful and terrible, perhaps the most amazing work of cinematography ever produced. It also may well be the most viscerally frightening. Given the literally hundreds of camera angles used to film the Nuremberg Rally, "Triumph of the Will" is as much a work of geometry as it is cinema. She will go into history as one of cinema's greatest pioneers. She will also be reviled as one of history's greatest propagandists.
Reifenstahl could possibly saved herself a lifetime of being reviled if she had simply admitted her complicity in the promotion of Hitler's Reich. Instead, she seemed to be unable to grasp the significance of the evil she had helped to propagate. Hitler would have come to and maintained power without Reifenstahl's propaganda films, but her work certainly eased his path.
So much talent, used to promote such an unregenerated monster. What a waste.
