The Revolt of the Pendulum (24 page)

The top Nazis were delighted. They included Goebbels, whom Leni, after the war, found it expedient to characterise as a dangerous enemy jealous of his bailiwick as the supreme studio executive
nominally in charge of Nazi movies. In fact Goebbels, generously overlooking her refusal to put out for him, thought highly of her artistic prowess, blowing his top only when she went mad with the
money. (Stephen Bach, who wrote
Final Cut
, the best-ever book about a film director on the rampage, is especially good on the subject of how Leni treated a budget as the merest letter of
intent.)

After
The Triumph of the Will
, the road was open for Leni to do what she wanted. What she wanted was to turn the 1936 Berlin Olympics into a celluloid masterpiece. By far her most
palatable cinematic achievement,
Olympia
was, and remains, crucial to her later reputation. Even more crucial is that the film is not notably a Nazi one. Hitler the arch-nationalist
didn’t enjoy being stuck with staging an international event, but while he was at it he had enough sense to go light on the ideology. The Jews are, of course, absent, but there are blacks
present, notably Jesse Owens, whom Leni didn’t hesitate to caress with her lenses as if he were a god-like presence.

She wasn’t having a thing with Owens. She was having that with another American, the decathlete Glen Morris, whom she obliged to add an eleventh discipline to his event. But she filmed
Owens with loving appreciation. It’s a shameful consideration that no Hollywood director would have been encouraged to do the same, at the time. Owens in repose looked lovely anyway, and on
the move he was poetic, but it took a fine eye and a lot of knowledge to get the poetry on film, and Leni knew how to do that with him and with many another athlete. It was only logical for the
camera to climb the tower with the diver, for example, but she figured out how to do it.

Knocking herself out to catch the unforgettable moment, this was the hard-driving, indomitable, manpower-manipulating Leni at her best, and Susan Sontag later made a serious mistake in arguing
that
Olympia
was entirely steeped in fascist worship of the beautiful body. It’s nature that worships the beautiful body. Fascism is natural. That’s what’s wrong with it:
it’s nothing else. Much of
Olympia
’s reputation for beauty can thus safely be endorsed, but always with the proviso that a lot of the athletic events were beautiful anyway, and
that her technical inventions for capturing them would eventually suffer the fate of all technical inventions, and be superseded: everything she did in Berlin in 1936 was topped by what Kon
Ichikawa did in Tokyo in 1964. Nevertheless, Leni, with her material handed to her on a plate, and unhampered by those requirements of invented narrative that she could never manage, had made quite
a movie for its time. It was a huge hit all over Europe.

In November 1938, Leni, who had probably always had one eye on Hollywood, flew the Nazi flag to America. In Los Angeles she was scheduled to walk the red carpet at the premiere of an entirely
de-Hitlerised copy of
Olympia
. She had every reason to expect that she was heading for a big welcome, and she might still have had one, even though
Kristallnacht
happened only five
days after her ship docked in New York. But she blew the scene with what she said. She said that nothing had happened, and that to suggest such a thing was a slander.

Hollywood gave her the freeze. Almost nobody in America except Henry Ford even invited her for drinks. Back in Germany, she reported to Goebbels, who was suitably indignant on behalf of his
thwarted artist. ‘The Jews,’ he told his diary, ‘rule by terror and bribery.’ When the Nazi counter-terror against the Jews went rolling into the East, Leni, in sole command
of her own film unit, was along for the ride, but she saw something in Poland that stopped her in her tracks, even if it didn’t stop the Nazis. Accidentally present at a mass shooting in the
town square of Konskie, she was photographed looking distraught.

As a general rule, any expression on Leni’s face when a camera was pointing in her direction was adopted at her own command, but in this case it might have been possible that her distress
was genuine. Whatever the truth of this permanently controversial moment, however, it seems probable that Leni, when she next saw Hitler, asked permission to be excused from the war. She
didn’t opt out of the Nazi party’s inexorable conquest of the world – she was there to film Hitler’s victory parade in Warsaw, the only time he lent his presence to such an
event – but she never again went near a battle. Instead, she asked and received permission to resume filming
Tiefland
, the dramatic blockbuster which she had abandoned when the Nazis
came to power. Here was the chance for her to prove, to the full satisfaction of her post-war admirers, that she was indeed an artist who had no knowledge of what the Nazis were really doing.

Once again, however, she blew it. Personally financed out of Hitler’s deep pocket (he got a royalty for every postage stamp with his face on it),
Tiefland
had unlimited resources,
but it needed some Spanish-looking child extras, and all the children readily available looked too Aryan. So Leni shipped in some gypsy children from a holding camp where they were waiting for a
train to Auschwitz. Long after the war, the tirelessly litigious Leni won a law-suit against a documentary maker who suggested that she, Leni, had known about Auschwitz. She might just possibly not
have known. But she certainly did know that she was employing forced labour; and her claim that she met some of the children after the war was a flat lie. She lied about everything. She just went
on lying until people got tired, or old, or died. One of her most telling lies was the one she told about Streicher. She said that she had loathed him. But there is preserved correspondence to
prove that she invited his company and treated him as a close friend until quite late in the war. The idea that Streicher would never mention to her what was happening to the Jews is preposterous.
He was proud of it, and was eventually hanged for it.

Leni, although she never managed regret, had enough sense to feign ignorance. Playing dumb, she was de-Nazified in the second least noxious category, which meant that she could continue her
career, if she could pick up the pieces. High-ranking Allied officers of various nationalities were eager that the process of de-Nazifying Leni should be continued in private. But one of her closer
questioners got the admission out of her that really mattered. He was Budd Schulberg. His famous days as a screenwriter were still ahead of him, but he would never dream up a neater scene than the
one he played out with Leni. After unrolling her usual impatient rigmarole about having known nothing about any Nazi atrocities, Leni made the mistake of saying that she sometimes, against her
will, had to do what Goebbels wanted, because she was afraid of being sent to a concentration camp. Schulberg asked why she should have been afraid of that, if she didn’t know that
concentration camps existed.

So there was the whole story. For anyone with a memory for recent events, the question of Leni’s moral status was settled. What came next, stretching on to the end of the millennium and
now beyond, was the question of her artistic stature, supposedly a different thing. She built another career photographing tribesmen in Africa, and then yet another one, filming life below the
waves in yet another new role as the oldest diver in the world. And as the people with a memory for the real world grew fewer, those who knew about nothing except the movies gradually redefined the
issue.

At the end of the first
Star Wars
movie, George Lucas copied the ambience of
The Triumph of the Will
with no apparent sense of how he was really proving that the cause in which
Luke Skywalker and his friends had just triumphed could not have been worth fighting for. Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, and Madonna all enrolled themselves on the growing list of Leni’s fans. So
did Siegfried and Roy. Francis Ford Coppola said he admired her. Steven Spielberg said he wanted to meet her. If he had made
Schindler’s List
ten times, he could not have undone the
portent of such a wish, because he was really saying that there can be art without a human framework, and that a movie can be made out of nothing but impressive images. Some of Leni’s images
were indeed impressive. But the question is never about whether or not you are impressed. The question is about whether you can keep your head when you are. Leni Riefenstahl was impressed by the
Nazis, and look what happened.

New York Times
, March 25, 2007

Postscript

Walter Benjamin, who said so much that was deliberately incomprehensible, spoke the simple truth when he said that all aesthetic politics lead to fascism. The connection
is made especially clear in our memories of the top Nazis. Civilized people with a yen for Leni Riefenstahl are flirting with horror. She looked good in shorts, but her mind was a madhouse. Is
there any stopping this tendency to sentimentalize the unspeakable? Probably not: and certainly not where the movies are involved. Even the best movies about the Nazi era, if we can bear to look at
them at all, are performing cosmetic surgery on the past. Admirers of
Downfall
are right to be impressed by its narrative drive, but they ought to be aware that the glamour principle has
done its debilitating work. The actor playing Albert Speer does a fine job of modelling a full-length leather coat, but his fastidious, concerned expression is the exact face that the post-war
Speer so successfully presented to the world. Wouldn’t that have been us? we ask. No it wouldn’t, because there was no such man. Speer, one of the best-informed men in Germany, knew all
about what was going on. ‘I should have known’, his post-war mantra suitable for all media, was just a classy way of saying, ‘I never knew.’ It was a lie, but people went
along with it because they could imagine themselves sitting down with him to dinner. The beautiful young secretary who was stunned to learn that Hitler hated Jews is another fairytale. Interviewed
in her old age, she regretfully said that she should have found out. But she had more to regret than that. She already knew when she applied for the job. Up on the screen, however, her lovely young
worried eyes are pools for our doubts to drown in. Throughout the movie, our imagination rushes in to fill the gaps. But our imagination is benevolent. The Nazi imagination wasn’t. Similarly,
when we look at Riefenstahl’s movies we imagine that such glamour must have had a brain behind it that was something like ours. But it was nothing like ours.

MADE IN BRITAIN, MORE OR LESS

Even as Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni came to the end of their lives, the BBC, to accompany a long summer season of British films, gave birth to a multi-part
documentary round-up called
British Film Forever
. The first part was called ‘Gangsters Guns and Getaways’: no comma, no apologies for brashness. ‘Us British love
films,’ the commentary began, grammatically daring from the first word. Had Bergman ever spoken like that in Swedish, or Antonioni in Italian?

But the slapdash exuberance of language, one hoped, might still leave room for a less approximate underlying idea. Perhaps us British – I was keen to include myself in this possibility,
having once, while still in short pants, seen
The Sound Barrier
two nights running at the Rockdale Odeon in Sydney – did love films. On the level of handing out addictive free samples,
the series had to be counted a success from the jump. Clips from much-loved British films abounded:
Brief Encounter
,
In Which We Serve
,
Gone With the Wind
. . .

Wait a second:
Gone With the Wind
was made in Hollywood. So why were we looking at Clark Gable? Well, he was holding on to Vivien Leigh, a star born and raised in Britain. And why were we
looking at
Wuthering Heights
, which was also made in Hollywood? Well, Laurence Olivier was in it, holding on to Olivia de Havilland. Follow the British stars and you could often get to a
great big film that us British loved, although it might not always be a British film. In Britain, Leigh and Olivier, the nation’s second most regal married couple, starred together in very
few films, most notably
That Hamilton Woman
, an Alexander Korda misfire which not even us British love any longer.

In Britain, Olivier on his own made
Henry V
,
Hamlet
and
Richard III
, each of them as home-grown as his kipper breakfast on the
Brighton Belle
: taken together, they
put him at the apex of achievement in world cinema both as actor and director. But on the scale of international box office, which effectively meant Hollywood, Olivier never became established as a
film star. He could say it didn’t matter to him, but it still matters to everyone who writes about him. It certainly mattered to Matthew Sweet, who wrote the commentary for
British Film
Forever
, and might have done better to subtitle it
Despite the Yanks
before going on to face the subject of the Special Relationship squarely, instead of finding a dozen different
self-deceiving ways of leaving it out.

The most glaring self-deception was a persistent failure to follow the money. The director John Boorman once said that film turns money into light. In cinema, money might not be everything, but
it is always the first thing. In the chapter devoted to Romance (‘Longing Loving and Leg-overs’ was the exciting title), the commentary, when it dealt with
Dr Zhivago
, followed
Julie Christie (British star) into the arms of Omar Sharif (not British star) without noting that David Lean (British director) was bankrolled, for his big international films, by Sam Spiegel (not
British producer), the erstwhile S. P. Eagle of Hollywood. If Spiegel, in his role as Lean’s bagman, had needed to rely on British money, his yacht would have been propelled by a pair of
oars.