Riefenstahl's Return

To mountain the first German exhibition that explores Leni Riefenstahl's controversial career, the Filmmuseum Potsdam had to struggle with the 96-year-old filmmaker herself.

sum of two units years in preparation, the first monographic exhibition of the films and photographs of Leni Riefenstahl uncloseed last December at the Filmmuseum Potsdam, not far from Berlin. At just that point of time a controversy was blazing in Germany, station off by a speech given through the novelist Martin Walser. In accepting the Peace Prize awarded by dint of the German book trade, Walser, one time considered a writer of the radical left press outed a yearning to be able to make go round his eyes from what he described as the "long-running presentation of our disgrace"--that is, the constant recollection of the Holocaust and the crimes of the German army fix in contemporary literature, film and art. The ensuing debate above the right of today's Germans to avert their gaze from reminders of murderous fascism thus took its place, with the opening of the Postdam exhibition, alongside an evident desire to direct the eye anew at "fascinating fascism," as Susan Sontag called it in her famous essay upon Riefenstahl.

To direct the eye or to look away: in coming to bounds with the Nazi past, the interplay of fascination and guilt can hardly be ignored. And to the expanse that both impulses find exemplary expression in the work of Leni Riefenstahl, this exhibition ought to have taken place drawn out ago. For it is precisely the continued legal ban in Germany upon public screenings of her films of Nazi party rallies of the 1930 and the illegally circulating videotapes of Triumph of the Will that have f her myth and ensur a continuing disputation around her person. Needless to say, the assumption of the exhibition's initiators was that the first examination of the life and work of Bertha Helene Amalia Riefenstahl in a German museum, accompanied by means of a solid, scholarly catalogue, would contribute more to demystification than remystification.

However, the previous absence of a Riefenstahl retrospective probably owes les to any lingering fear of the seductive power of her images than to the fact that the now 96-year-old filmmaker remains true energetically on the scene, and there is scarcely a reliance of carrying out such an exhibition without somehow or other coming to terms with her. Riefenstahl has always made clear, moreover, her feeling that she should be accorded in Germany no les than she has already take delight ined in exhibitions in Tokyo (1982) and Milan (1996): an uncritical homage to a great artist, a fascinating adventurer, the "exceptional woman" of 20th-century cinema, preferably relieveed by inconvenient historical commentary or factual disputation.

If the Potsdam retrospective did demonstrate in certain ways an homage, it was not altogether uncritical; this may explain on what account Riefenstahl chose not to be at hand at the opening ceremonies. Nevertheless, the exhibition's organizers--Barbel Dalichow, director of the Filmmuseum Potsdam, and film scholar Claudia Lenssen--were obviously unable to dispense entirely with Riefenstahl's cooperation. by the agency of virtue of the extensive loans of documents, photographs, original screenplays and alphabetic characters from her private archive, the filmmaker might in fact be called the show's genuine patron. At a crucial twinkling of an eye by threatening to withdraw her loans, she assured that the catalogue would appear beneath the noncommital title Leni Riefenstahl--effectively scuttling the publisher's original plan to call it Schuld und Schonheit, or "Guilt and Beauty."

At the Filmmuseum Potsdam, temporary walls created a passageway that l from one side five thematically organized rooms, and outside them were placed vitrines in which the chronology of Riefenstahl's life unrolled First there were the obligatory photos of the baby Leni upon a bearskin, then pictures of the young expressionist dancer of the 1920 the film actress and sportswoman of the early '30 the director of documentary and propaganda films for the Nazi party, and the Fuhrer's favorite. "Hitler's Leni Riefenstahl" was what Time called her when her portrait appeared upon its cover in 1936. Postwar alphabetic characters from Jean Cocteau and from Henri Langlois of the Cinematheque Francaise, as well as awards from the Sudanese rule for the photographs of Nuba tribespeople that she began in the 1950 showed that smooth after the Third Reich Riefenstahl had a professional life, albeit a rather retiring one.

In the first exhibition expanse tiny video monitors presented the four major films that Riefenstahl directed. The cerulean Light (1932) belongs to the popular "mountain film" genre in which Riefenstahl had already won wide recognition as a guard actress. Triumph of the Will (1935) a celebratory documentary of the 1934 Nazi party congres in Nuremberg, records an fact that was staged largely for the benefit of her cameras. Olympia (1938) is a two-part documentary of the Berlin Summer Olympics of 1936 And Tiefland (1940-54) an adaptation of the Eugen d'Albert opera of the same title, marks Riefenstahl's get back to a kind of "mountain film." The absence of sum of two units additional propaganda shorts made for the Nazi Party--Triumph of Faith, a documentary about the 1933 Nazi rally in Nuremberg, and Day of Freedom: Our Wehrmacht (1935) a paean to the German army--was nowhere explained. Inquiries revealed that in the case of the latter film, Riefenstahl, who possesse the single existing print, had declined to authorize its showing.