Theater of Cruelty (5 page)

What about
Olympia
, Riefenstahl’s documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, surely the best film she ever made? Divided into two parts,
Olympia: Festival of Nations
and
Olympia: Festival of Beauty
, the movie was first shown at the Ufa Palast am Zoo in Berlin on Hitler’s forty-ninth birthday in April 1938. Everyone who was anyone in the Nazi pantheon—Hitler, Goebbels, Göring, Ribbentrop, Himmler, Heydrich, et al.—was there, as well as such luminaries as the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, the actor Emil Jannings, and the boxer Max Schmeling. Riefenstahl’s name was up in lights. Hitler saluted her. The audience went wild over her. She was on top of the world, or at least on top of the Reich.

Riefenstahl told lies about this film, as she did about so much else. It was not an independent production, commissioned by the International Olympic Committee, as she claimed, but a film commissioned and financed by the Reich. There is also no doubt that
Olympia
was meant to burnish Germany’s image in the world as a benign, hospitable, modern, efficient, peaceful nation of sports lovers. Riefenstahl
willingly helped to give Hitler’s regime credibility. But what of the work itself? Is it an example of “fascinating fascism”?

Olympia: Festival of Nations
begins with a familiar melange of the neoclassical cult of Greece and moody Fanck-like cloudscapes, suggesting a continuity between ancient Greece and modern Germany. The famous sculpture of Discobolus, the discus thrower, slowly dissolves into a nude athlete, shot in Delphi. This film image has been interpreted as a tribute to Aryan manhood. And Hitler was so keen on the sculpture (the original of which no longer existed) that he bought a Roman copy in 1938. In fact, however, the Romantic identification with ancient Greece started long before the Nazis appropriated such imagery, and the model chosen by Riefenstahl was not German but a dusky Russian youth named Anatol Dobriansky, whom, as Bach tells us, she briefly took as her lover after paying his parents a fee.

Riefenstahl was as anti-Semitic as most of her compatriots, that is, enough to turn a blind eye to the persecution of Jews without, so far as we know, necessarily welcoming their extermination. But
Olympia
cannot be described as a racist film, and Riefenstahl’s personal taste in men was neither racist nor nationalistic; she had had Jewish lovers, and after she discarded the Russian boy, she took up with Glenn Morris, the American decathlon winner. If there is one heroic model of physical perfection in
Olympia
, it is Jesse Owens, the black American athlete.

Racism, however, is not an essential part of the argument that Riefenstahl’s aesthetic was typically fascist. It is the cult of physical perfection itself that is considered to be a fascist attribute, for it implies that the physically imperfect are sick and should be treated as inferior human beings. The cult of physical perfection is linked to the Darwinian struggle, where the strong not only prevail but must be celebrated, even worshiped for their physical power. This would
apply to individuals in sporting contests, as well as to nations or races.

That the Nazis held such views is clear, and Riefenstahl herself was not immune to them. But
Olympia
is a film about athletes, about physical prowess, about using the body to achieve maximum power and grace. Riefenstahl’s stated aim—and there is no reason to doubt her word on this—was “to shoot the Olympics more closely, more dramatically than sports had ever been captured on celluloid.” And this, assisted by forty-five excellent cameramen and seven months’ work in the editing room, is precisely what she delivered.

She went way beyond Fanck in visual experimentation: cameras were attached to balloons and light planes, suspended from the necks of marathon runners, and fastened to horses’ saddles. Some of the action was filmed from specially dug trenches or from the top of steel pillars. She enraged Goebbels with her incessant demands and financial extravagance. Other camera crews were rudely pushed aside and the concentration of athletes was carelessly interrupted. Some scenes were restaged and spliced together with other footage. She broke all the rules and was a pain to everyone, but she produced a cinematic masterpiece. Jürgen Trimborn is right to call it “an aesthetic milestone in film history.”

But if
Olympia
is indeed a tribute to physical perfection, it is a frosty perfection. Individual character, human emotion, none of this appears to have mattered to Riefenstahl. Bach talks about “the sensual, even erotic quality that pervades much of
Olympia
,” and Sontag’s critique was aimed at what she called the “eroticization of fascism.” This might be a matter of taste, but the nudity in
Olympia
strikes me as oddly unerotic, even unhomoerotic, despite Riefenstahl’s fascination with naked men frolicking in sauna baths and jumping into lakes. The film has the cold beauty of a polished white marble sculpture by Canova. Mario Praz’s description of Canova as
the “erotic frigidaire” could apply to Riefenstahl as well, her own frolicking with many men notwithstanding.
⁵

The Hellenistic and Romantic traditions echoed in
Olympia
can be found in official Nazi art, to be sure, but also in paintings by Jacques-Louis David, another opportunistic court artist and celebrator of revolutionary heroism. He, too, was fascinated with nude warriors, great leaders, and Romantic death scenes. But this does not diminish the beauty of his art. Just as one can admire David’s paintings without being a Napoleon worshiper, it should be possible to separate the cold beauty of
Olympia
from its political context.
Triumph of the Will
, however skillfully contrived, is nothing but political context. Its only purpose was political.
Olympia
is essentially about sports.

The problem with Riefenstahl, and the main reason for her limitations as an artist, is that she was not just an erotic frigidaire but an emotional one too. Her lack of human understanding, or any feeling for human beings apart from pure aesthetics, does not matter so much in a film like
Olympia
. It matters hugely in a feature film about love, rejection, and intrigue.
Tiefland
, which took Riefenstahl more than a decade to finish, and was finally released in 1954, is exactly what Bach says it is, “a kitsch curiosity, as nearly unwatchable as any film ever released by a world-class director.”

The theme of a child of nature (Riefenstahl) persecuted by the wicked denizens of decadent civilization is familiar. The sight of
Riefenstahl doing a pastiche of flamenco dancing surrounded by Spanish-looking extras is beyond camp; it is plainly embarrassing. That the extras were in fact Gypsies plucked by Riefenstahl from a camp in Salzburg,
⁶
where they were imprisoned before being sent to Auschwitz, added to her monstrous reputation. She lied about them too, claiming that they all happily survived the war. Most didn’t. But the film fails artistically, not because it is fascist but because it is clumsily staged like a bad silent movie, with histrionic gestures (echoing Riefenstahl’s expressionist dancing days) making up for plausible human emotions. It was as though nothing had changed since the 1920s.

Apart from everything else, the Nazi period did enormous damage to German artistic expression. The German language was poisoned by the bureaucratic jargon of mass murder, and art had been tainted so badly by the Nazi appropriation of Romanticism and classicism that aesthetic traditions had to be fumigated, as it were, by a new critical spirit. A younger generation of artists such as Anselm Kiefer, writers such as Günter Grass, and filmmakers such as Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder were able to do this. But a critical reinvention of German art was beyond the abilities of Riefenstahl. She was, in any case, too defensive about her own past to develop a critical attitude.

Let off by “de-Nazification” courts as a “fellow traveler,” Riefenstahl couldn’t stop playing the persecuted victim who had known nothing of the Nazi crimes, had been forced to make what she claimed were purely documentary films, and had adored her Gypsy extras. She was nothing but a pure artist in pursuit of beauty, and
would sue just about anyone who contradicted her. Many projects were prepared, most of them in the Romantic Fanckian vein, none of them from a critical perspective: a remake of
The Blue Light
; yet another Alpine vehicle called
The Red Devils
; a paean to primitive Spain entitled
Bullfights and Madonnas
; and a movie about Frederick the Great and Voltaire, to be written by Jean Cocteau, who was one of the very few admirers of
Tiefland
. “You and I,” he told Riefenstahl, “live in the wrong century.” It was a rather charitable view of both their records in the mid-twentieth century.

Riefenstahl only made a comeback of sorts in the early 1970s, when she published two hugely successful photography books on the Nuba:
The Last of the Nuba
and
People of Kau
. The color photographs of nude wrestlers, men covered in ash, face paintings, and beautiful girls lathered in butter are competently taken but not works of artistic genius. The subjects are so striking that it would not have been difficult for Riefenstahl to come up with something interesting. Putting herself in a position to do so, however, was not so easy. The Nuba were distrustful of snoops. Riefenstahl, now in her sixties, had the energy, the perseverance, and the thick-skinned gumption to manage it.

The beauty of athletic young black people had always fascinated her; one of her failed projects was a film about the slave trade entitled
Black Cargo
. Capturing the Nuba on film was inspired by the spectacular black-and-white pictures of them taken by the British photographer George Rodger in 1951. When Riefenstahl offered to pay him for useful introductions, he replied: “Dear madam, knowing your background and mine I don’t really have anything to say to you at all.”

Rodger was with the British troops as a photographer for
Life
magazine when they liberated Bergen-Belsen. He was shocked to find himself “subconsciously arranging groups and bodies on the ground
into artistic compositions in the viewfinder.” This is quite a good description of Riefenstahl’s way of looking at the world, even though she never applied it to emaciated victims of torture and murder. As she said in an interview with
Cahiers du Cinéma
, quoted by Sontag: “I am fascinated by what is beautiful, strong, healthy, what is living. I seek harmony. When harmony is produced I am happy.”
⁷
She meant: Jesse Owens, Nazi storm troopers, the Nuba.

Does this make her a lifelong fascist aesthete? Are her pictures of the Nuba infected by the same venom as the footage of SA men stamping to the sounds of the “Horst Wessel Song”? It is hard to maintain that they are. To be sure, the culture of the Nuba that interested Riefenstahl was not intellectually reflective, pacific, pluralist, or much associated with anything one would call liberal. But it is a stretch to see the tribal ceremonies of a people in the Sudan as a continuum of Hitler’s rallies in Nuremberg. Nor is it fair to describe a viewer’s enjoyment of Riefenstahl’s color photographs of wrestlers and naked youths as politically suspect. The Nuba are what they are, or, more accurately, were what they were when Riefenstahl got to them. Their appeal to her was certainly of a piece with her views on urban civilization. Like the characters she portrayed in Fanck’s mountain movies, she saw them as nature’s children: this was condescending perhaps, Romantic absolutely, but hardly fascism.

Riefenstahl went on working almost to her dying day in September 2003. She sustained injuries from various crashes. Her morbid attempts to defy her age—the thick streaks of makeup, the straw-blond wigs, the hormone injections and facial surgery—gave her the appearance of an old man in drag. But there she was, celebrating her centennial in the company of Siegfried and Roy, from Las Vegas, and Reinhold Messner, the mountaineer, a week after the premiere on
television of her last work, entitled
Underwater Impressions
. As the oldest scuba diver in the world, she had spent the last two decades of her life photographing coral reefs and marine life with her much younger lover Horst Kettner.