#LeniRiefenstahl #Nazis
"A woman roaming the mountainside splashes her face in an unseen stream. Her hair drips toward a crystal prism glowing in her steady hand. Mist fills the space around her; her silhouette is gilded in light.
In this scene from the 1932 film *Das blaue Licht* (The Blue Light), a plucky heroine emerges from an Alpine range. 'Because a woman is the only one who can climb a dangerous mountain,' IMDb’s synopsis reads, 'villagers regard her as a witch.' From today’s vantage, the clip exudes a feminist vibe of a piece with a Patagonia ad. You could be forgiven for feeling a wee bit stirred as she (literally) scales the sublime. And for not realizing that this woman — who also directed the film — would soon be the grande dame of fascist cinema.
Or, as the new documentary *Riefenstahl* provocatively asks: Could you?
Andres Veiel’s movie makes a quiet — and disquieting — case for the insidious potential of the moving image, whose seductive power can be easily harnessed to heinous political agendas. That the propaganda in question comes from Leni Riefenstahl, a woman who directed her singular talent toward not only valorizing but inventing the Nazi aesthetic, throws into relief how foolish it is to reflexively affiliate a woman’s degree of artistic ambition or achievement with automatic progress.
Excavating archives recently gifted to Berlin’s Museum of Photography, Veiel visually foregrounds the materiality of film, the inevitably tangled nature of Leni’s art and ideology. A celluloid strip whirs before us, pausing to reveal three figures in a field, a bucolic scene until one recognizes the inverted likeness of a trio of SS officers Here the documentary cuts to an iconic views of 1934 Nuremberg: Throngs of Germans furiously greet their beloved Führer, their bodies packed so close that one loses sight of where one human being ends and another begins. 'As he spoke his very first words,' Leni recounts of the rally almost 50 years later, 'I was overcome by a very peculiar feeling, my whole body … trembling. And I was somehow captured, as if by a magnetic force.'
If Leni was enchanted by Hitler’s presence, she did all she could with her films to arouse that same captivation in her country(wo)men. 'The camera pans over to one side, and then it pans back over to the other side,' she avidly narrates as she reviews a clip of *Triumph of the Will* (1935). Her 90-year-old hand proudly swaying to the beat of Herbert Windt’s soundtrack, she adds, 'These two shots combine to create the form of a circle, and the resulting effect is very powerful.'
*Riefenstahl*’s head editor, Stephan Krumbiegel, also grasps the power of strategic juxtapositions — exposing not only Leni’s Nazi infatuation, but that of the German people at large. Following a sequence of unsettling shots of the Nuremberg rally, we pause on a close-up of a girl peeking out from behind a row of soldiers. Her short hair frames her mischievous grin; her side part parallels the swastika behind her. She, like Leni, exudes 'girl-power' swagger seemingly at odds with masculinist fascism — and in many other contexts, she, like Leni, would inspire rather than repulse. "
https://hyperallergic.com/1039657/examining-the-legacy-of-fascist-cinema-grand-dame-leni-riefenstahl/