Leni Riefenstahl
is often considered the most controversial filmmaker of all time. Equally famous for the explosive
content and masterful craftsmanship of her Nazi propaganda films Triumph of
the Will and Olympia, she embodies the age-old question of whether or not
it is possible to separate an artist’s virtuosity from the content of her
message. These films are infamous;
everyone knows them, or at least knows of them. They instantly catapulted Riefenstahl to stardom and
solidified her place in film history, while simultaneously leading to her exile
from the world of filmmaking and persecution in the world at large. Hearing what most have to say about
Riefenstahl, one could be forgiven for thinking she magically emerged from the
ether in 1934 just in time to film the Nazi Party Conference in Nuremburg to
make Triumph of the Will and
become "the quintessential articulator of the Nazi film aesthetic" (Schulte-Sasse,
124). Riefenstahl’s propaganda
films have become synonymous with her persona, eclipsing everything she did
prior. What’s forgotten is her
work in Weimar cinema, first as actor in many prominent mountain films (a genre
called bergfilm) of the era, and
then as director of her very own mountain film, 1932’s The Blue Light, that made her a minor star before she became the
Nazis’ secret cinematic weapon. By
working within the framework of Weimar cinema, then ushering in the advent of
the Nazi cinema that would take its place, Leni Riefenstahl exists at the
intersection of Old World and New World cinematic values and signals the
transition in Germany from one to the other.
The
bergfilm was a specifically German genre
that celebrated the romanticism of the Alps and the heroism of mountain life
and mountain climbing. It was
simultaneously a part of, and apart from, Weimar cinema, gaining popularity in
the Weimar Republic while generally not conforming to the dark, uneasy
atmosphere of most films of the era.
It was a lighter alternative to the heady, heavy fare that was making
the rounds typified by proto-horror (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, etc.) and proto-noir (Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler, M). The genre’s ethos was practically the
polar opposite of Weimar city films, like Berlin: Symphony of a Great
City.
Where the city film was practically an exercise in techno-fetishism,
fixating on the innovations and customs of modern (rather, modernist) life, the
bergfilm often “featured a primal
and very male struggle between man and nature… far from the purportedly
softening, feminizing influences of modern urban society” (Brockmann,
152). Bergfilme were shot on location in the Alps, and were often
lacking in plot or character development, instead relying on the spectacle of
their settings to entertain.
Riefenstahl’s life
changed forever when she saw Arnold Fanck’s 1924 bergfilm, Mountain of Destiny. She
had been a relatively successful dancer, taking classes at the Grimm-Reiter Dance School in Berlin since she was 16, but
a knee injury had forced her to stop working. She saw an advertisement for Mountain of Destiny while waiting for the train one day, went to see the
film on a whim and was entranced.
As a dancer, she was especially captivated by the way the film captured
the movement of the natural world.
In Ray Müller’s 1993 documentary The Wonderful Horrible Life
of Leni Riefenstahl, she recalls, “[It was]
the first mountaineering film. The
first with sequences so filled with movement. The clouds were alive with movement. I’d never seen that before. I didn’t
know much about film, but I realized I was looking at a very special art form
on the screen for the first time” (Müller). She tracked down and charmed Fanck, who was so smitten he
wrote his next film, 1926’s The Holy Mountain, specifically for her.
Fanck
demanded a lot of his actors, and working for him was rigorous, but Riefenstahl
rose to the challenge. She learned
to ski and rockclimb, quickly becoming a skilled mountaineer and even climbing
with bare feet and no ropes. She
didn’t care that mountain climbing was an activity practiced exclusively by
men, showing an assertiveness that would come out again when she took part in
the almost exclusively male National Socialist movement eight years later. She then convinced Fanck to let G.W.
Pabst co-direct his 1929 silent bergfilm,
The White Hell of Pitz Palu. Riefenstahl starred in it, and it was a
huge success, becoming the second highest grossing film of the year at the
German box office. In her words,
“Fanck was a wonderful outdoor director, for filming nature. Pabst was a fabulous feature film
director. I brought the two
together and it worked wonderfully.
That’s the reason Pitz Palu
was such a success worldwide” (Müller).
It was on the set of that movie that Riefenstahl first started giving
thought to the idea of becoming a director.
In
1932, Riefenstahl traveled to the Brenta Dolomite mountains in Ticino,
Switzerland, to produce, direct and star in The Blue Light, a romantic fairytale of a bergfilm. Though
it was only her first film, she was already a perfectionist. She ordered a special lens from
Hollywood, and asked the Agfa Film Corporation to invent a new kind of
film-stock, called R-Stock, for her to use to shoot the night scenes. When filmed through a red filter,
R-Stock made blue look practically pitch black.
The
Blue Light is the tale of Junta, a “wild”
woman who lives in union with nature and Monte Christallo, the local mountain,
but at odds with the villagers who live at the mountain’s base. Only Junta knows the source of the
titular blue light that shines from the top of the mountain every full moon,
and the villagers think her a witch.
It doesn’t help matters that every full moon, a different man from the
village attempts to scale the mountain to reach the light and ends up falling
to his death. A new man, Vigo,
comes to town and falls in love with Junta. She shows him the blue crystals that are the source of the
light and he betrays her secret to the villagers.
In
keeping with bergfilm tradition, the
picture is pervaded by a naturalistic quality in the visual aesthetic. When the audience is first introduced
to Junta, she seems like a forest nymph of sorts. She is juxtaposed with cascading waterfalls and an
otherworldly mist, serenely holding her mystical blue crystals, bathed in an
ethereal glow that outlines her body and makes her hair shimmer. Her habitat is something out of a
dream: fantastical and surreal.
Her disconnect with the outside world is illustrated by shots from her
point of view from atop the mountain.
Shunned or attacked whenever she visits the village, Junta is only safe
on or around the mountain’s “natural” setting. Later, when Vigo leaves the village in search of her, he
finds her by way of “natural” clues — a dropped apple she was eating, a branch
that falls from the bush she is hiding behind, her reflection in a puddle of
water. Junta is literally embedded
in the landscape. Adolf Hitler
proclaimed the film one of his favorites of 1932, and it’s easy to see
why. The film is filled with the
kind of idyllic, people-less landscapes of which Hitler was such a vocal fan,
and painter before he was rejected from art school and turned to a career in
politics.
There
is also a surprising amount of dark, distorted imagery; unexpected affinities
with the rest of Weimar cinema and its obsession with the macabre. Riefenstahl has a great eye for faces —
all the people of the village are grotesque in their own way. They all have a faraway look in their
eyes, like they’re not entirely there.
The village is an ugly, unfortunate place, while Junta and her world are
beautiful. Once the full moon
comes out, the Expressionist imagery becomes far more pronounced. Tall, black buildings loom large. The already disturbed (and disturbing)
villagers turn downright creepy as they lock their doors and shutter their
windows. Overcome with a sick
desperation, they steel themselves from their fears of the unknown. It’s literal lunacy, and more than a
little reminiscent of a werewolf film.
When one of the men inevitably begins his ill-fated climb to the blue
light on the mountain, he is presented as being hypnotized, drawn to the light
like a moth to a flame. The theme
of hypnosis, in and of itself, is a motif of Weimar cinema — a manifestation of an obsession with the
dark side of the mystical, here exemplified by the villagers’ vilification of
Junta. The village’s cobblestone
corridors are narrow and twisting, labyrinthine and claustrophobic, calling to
mind the mangled cityscapes of films like Caligari.
The
Blue Light is about the clash between old
and new world values, of the rapid changes of modern times. Junta represents a simpler, more
naturalistic way of life — sleeping on a bed of straw in a Spartan cabin away
from the burdens of society. Vigo
is the embodiment of that modern society, infiltrating her secret realm and
ultimately betraying her trust (regardless of his arrogant belief that it is in
her best interest). Vigo can’t see
past the crystals’ superficial beauty.
“It’s a real treasure,” he says to Junta. “It must be found and brought to the village. You’ll never have to run around in
these rag clothes anymore.” He’s
no different than anyone else in the village, after all: the crystals only thrill
him insofar as they have the possibility to be worth money. Junta asks him to stay and not tell
anyone of the sight he’s been privy to, but he arrogantly brushes her off,
thinking he knows best. Vigo sees
only opportunity — a discovery to be mined, appraised and drained — while Junta
appreciates the crystals for her own personal reasons. Neither of them truly knows what the
crystals mean. Vigo’s reaction is to
try to control what he doesn’t understand, while Junta appreciates the beauty —
that of the natural world — for its own sake.
My conjecture is
that Hitler’s love of the movie stemmed from his own misgivings about modern
times. WWI was the first modern
war and it completely ravaged Germany, leaving it in a state of social,
political and economic turmoil.
Hitler may have appreciated the film’s message promoting a return to
simpler, less complicated times, just as he wished to “purify” Germany, washing
it clean of outside influence, reinforcing a back-to-basics nationalistic
attitude. It’s easy to see Hitler
identifying with Junta — a misunderstood misfit, cast out and at odds with the
world, struggling to preserve and protect the beauty of the things she holds so
dear. Whether those things are nationalist
ideals or mysterious blue crystals, the concept remains unchanged.
In an emotionally
wrenching final scene, Junta takes one last cathartic climb before finding her
secret grotto ransacked. Sold out,
her holy mountain desecrated and her trust in Vigo the outsider violated, she
plunges to her death.
In
the same year that she made The Blue Light,
Riefenstahl heard then-presidential candidate Adolf Hitler speak at a rally and
was mesmerized by his talent as an orator. Describing the experience in her memoir, she wrote: “I had
an almost apocalyptic vision that I was never able to forget. It seemed as if
the Earth's surface were spreading out in front of me, like a hemisphere that
suddenly splits apart in the middle, spewing out an enormous jet of water, so
powerful that it touched the sky and shook the earth” (Riefenstahl, 101). She wrote to him, requesting a
meeting. Already impressed with
her work, Hitler accepted and invited her to film the 1934 Nazi rally in
Nuremburg. The result was 1935’s Triumph
of the Will, the documentary/propaganda that
brought Riefenstahl international fame, while signaling the end of Weimar
cinema and the beginning of “the Ministry of Illusion,” so called by Rentschler
because “[the Nazis] were keenly aware of film’s ability to mobilize emotions
and immobilize minds, to create overpowering illusions and captive audiences”
(Rentschler, 1).
In
the film’s prologue, Riefenstahl contextualizes the rally with a mixture of
German history and loaded religious imagery. By saying the rally occurs “16 years after Germany’s crucifixion,”
Hitler is implied to be Germany’s resurrection — a Christ-like second coming
after the humiliation suffered during WWI. The narrative intertitles then tell us that “Adolf Hitler
flew again to Nuremburg to review the columns of the faithful followers.” This is followed by shots from within
his airplane, flying right above the clouds before dipping down over the
assembling masses, its shadow a crucifix on the ground. Hitler literally descends from the
heavens, touching down in the Nuremberg airport to be greeted by hundreds of
thousands of cheering, adoring fans, as if he were some holy rockstar. Hitler is driven through the streets to
the tune of a booming, triumphant soundtrack — the camera so close that we
can’t see his car — appearing to be floating past the crowd; a divine hero of
the people, something more than human.
"Systematically using editing techniques and structures such as the
shot/reverse shot rarely found in previous documentaries, [Riefenstahl]
constructs a cult of personality around Hitler. The editing patterns turn the
Fuhrer into an object of desire, one who is looked at adoringly by the crowds
that surround him" (Musser, 326).
In
this film, more than in any Weimar cinema, the camera is alive; animated to a
self-conscious degree. Moving up
and down, left and right, the camera flits from audience member to audience
member to Hitler, the MC of the party.
The camera sees all.
Riefenstahl makes effective use of different kinds of angles, shocking
in their effects. Characters (Hitler
in particular) are often shot from below, seeming larger than life. Soldiers often march right at the
camera, enveloping the screen and, ultimately, us. Used most of all is the extreme close-up. The human form, especially the face, is
idealized, made to look more like a statue than flesh and blood. It really says something, that almost
any shot in the film could be isolated and turned into its own Nazi propaganda
poster. This is Riefenstahl truly
harnessing the power of the medium.
She shoots common people — anonymous faces — but turns those people into
characters, and those characters into stars. Even when she shoots sweeping panoramas of massive crowds of
fervent followers, the lens aggrandizes the subject. There are countless shots of what appears to be an infinite
number of Nazis marching into the distance, as far as the eye can see, taking
on the grand stature of a Cecil B. DeMille silent film spectacular.
There
is a deliberate focus on Nazi youth culture; the children and teenagers in the
crowd. Innocent, wholesome scenes
of jocular tomfoolery (including wrestling and grooming) serve to break up the
pedantic, formal tone of the film.
Moreover, they resonate as instances of everyday German culture, whether
it’s real or idealized. As high-ranking
Nazi Alfred Rosenberg says in his address, “This is our unshakeable belief in
ourselves… This is our hope in the youth of today… They are destined to
continue the work started.”
Everything is invested in the youth, to be flag-bearers, to pick up the
party mission and carry it forward.
Riefenstahl always
maintained that she never meant to make a Nazi propaganda film — just an
objective documentary — but that becomes almost impossible to believe when
lines like, “A nation that doesn’t maintain its racial purity will perish” are
banded around. Later, Goebbels
praises “the creative art of modern political propaganda,” a sentiment that
takes on a self-reflexive quality under the circumstances.
Triumph of the
Will signaled the end of an era. More than 700,000 Nazis were in
attendance at the 1934 Nuremburg Rally, and Hitler took over Germany in August
of the same year. The Third Reich
replaced the Weimar Republic.
Weimar cinema, in its shadowy angst and cynical glory, was forced out of
the picture by Hitler and Goebbels’ Nazi cinema, which ended up being a bizarre
mix of frothy entertainment and blatant propaganda. Leni Riefenstahl wasn’t a catalyst for the change, but she
did have an undeniable role in it.
From her Weimar bergfilme
to her Nazi propaganda documentaries, she was a sign of the times; a consistent
indicator of the zeitgeist. Made
on the cusp of this change in cinematic values, Triumph of the Will still allows for some Expressionist flourishes. The scene of the second night, for example,
is rife with smoke and shadows.
Though the scene is supposed to be jovial, a modern historical vantage
point combined with the ambiguous imagery lends it a completely different tone. It now seems ominous and menacing: a
thinly veiled threat. It’s a
veritable army of shadows, Nazis saluting in silhouette all over the
place. The scene ends with shots
of the soldiers, backlit by what are supposed to be celebratory bonfires but
now seem like the very flames of Hell.
Bibliography/References
The Blue Light. Dir. Leni Riefenstahl. 1932.
Brockmann, Stephen.
A Critical History of German Film. Rochester, NY: Camden
House, 2010.
Musser, Charles.
"Documentary." The
Oxford History of World Cinema. Oxford UP,
1997.
Rentschler, Eric.
The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and its Afterlife.
Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Riefenstahl, Leni.
Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.
Schulte-Sasse, Linda.
"Leni Riefenstahl's Feature Films and the Question of a Fascist
Aesthetic." Cultural Critique 18 (1991): 123-48. JSTOR. Web.
Triumph of the Will. Dir. Leni Riefenstahl. 1935.
The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl. Dir.
Ray Müller. 1993.
