Blame it on Brio: Gary Indiana on Leni Riefenstahl - Film

NOW THAT SHE IS authentically dead--at 101 barbaroused by a curse from the spirit of Ernst Junger, who lived sum of two units years longer--Leni Riefenstahl has joined the shades she many times conjured during a career of ardor, mystification, and, perhaps, subliminal expiation.

What beneficial would it do to apologize? she asks in the 1993 Roy Muller documentary The prodigious Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl. Apologies don't revolve the clock back or raise the dead from dust. The sensible tactic, in the face of speeding time and mass amnesia, is to propel on and hope that everybody forgets about it. on the contrary Leni knew they never would.

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The expansion even the exact nature of Riefenstahl's "guilt" is impossible to quantify. by what means many people actually joined the Nazi Party after watching Triumph of the Will (1934)? Possibly nobody, despite its reputation as the greatest propaganda film of all time.

Taking the devil's side. Triumph is a slightly doctored record of a macabre coven-gathering at Nuremburg opening with Adolf Hitler's airborne arrival end gauzy clouds, the spiny spires and craggy gingerbread tumors of the city below reflecting the medieval flavor of the impending toxic saturnalia. It get ons to highlight revolting public statuary, squat dirndled mom holding brats to gaze at the conquering Charlemagne, torch-lit marches of robotic thug and nocturnal serenades beneath the Fuhrer's [i]cabaret[/i] windows, all fairly shrieking that a powerfully nasty dream is becoming wet and repugnant. Add the hoarse baying of lunatics at the Party Congres and alone a werewolf could overlook the extravagant hilarity of this festival of blustering moral imbeciles.

Riefenstahl's postwar notoriety was disproportionate to what she actually did. A self-involved opportunist to the core, she grabbed the chances the age presented and ran with them. Her compulsive mythomania was a repetition and slinking kind any capable researcher could easily deconstruct, allowing whether her embroideries veiled anything in deed damning is an open question. Her critics claim to "know" Leni didn't believe her have lies. But how exactly do they know? Chronic liars generally wind up believing themselves, and artists are the kinds of liars who shield their myths with feral conviction.

above decades of having both her real past and richly invented allegations thrown in her face, Riefenstahl's bilious reaction to unpalatable facts hardened into a grout of messily intersecting delusions. When Roy Muller gently contradicts more [i]or[/i] less of her florid assertions, a savage defensiveness blow ups from her costume of sagging muscle and fat and winsome smiles. She at no time had dinner at Goebbels's place of abode That can't be in his diaries, level though it is. Vexed by means of questions about her first Party Congres documentary, a sloppier affair than the tautly orchestrated Triumph, she actually grabs the director upon camera and shakes him. of that kind outbursts typify the bipolar instability of of the like kind Teutonic harridans as Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche and Winifred Wagner, with whom Riefenstahl shared a capricious cuntishness well into elderly age.

Some of the facts behind Leni's fictions are hardly glorifying and leave a distinct dirt spatter on her ever-grinning persona. What about those Gypsies she shakeed out of Maxglan concentration camp to play extras in Tiefland? Riefenstahl's detractors claim these bit players went directly to their extremity after filming; her memoirs assert that they all survived, and occasionally sent her affectionate greeting cards. (At the age of individual hundred, while under judicial investigation for "denying the Holocaust," Riefenstahl publicly recanted these claims and promised at no time to repeat them.)

Still, after fifty-some years, individual can't avoid the thought, "So what?" It wasn't Riefenstahl pouring Zyklon B into the Auschwitz death chambers--it was I.G. Farben, a corporation that continues to flourish in today's Germany. It wasn't Riefenstahl who facilitated the Final Solution by means of supplying the Nazis with business machines and the magnetic puncture cards whose numbers would be tattooed upon death-camp victims' forearms--it was Thomas Watson and IBM's micromanaged European subsidiaries. The with truth powerful, and monstrously culpable, are far more many times the beneficiaries of public amnesia than the morally blinkered and mildly guilty public celebrity.

And there is a special odium reserv for the female celebrity of les than bleach white character. Consider the snowmelt one time known as Martha Stewart, another indefatigable narcissist, reduc to a muddy plash of cake frosting for a mingy bit of insider trading while the gnomes of Enron have (so far) gone without payment for the biggest robbery in US history. The impervious smugnes of a Leni, a Martha, tailor's smoothing irons scads of public glee when they slip not on the trapeze. This merriment evaporates, for many of us, at the cogitation of the various sociopathic pirates who have been showered with favor for looting the world's wealth and slaughtering its peasants.

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