May 2, 2007
 
BOOK REVIEW: Steven Bach’s ‘Leni’ Reveals Falsification, Denial, Lack of Remorse Displayed by Hitler’s Favorite Filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl
 
By David M. Kinchen
Huntington News Network Book Critic
 
Anyone studying the history of motion pictures faces the dilemma of what to do about groundbreaking filmmakers who use their talent to produce racist or otherwise questionable films.
 
I’m thinking of two landmark cinema figures in particular: American D.W. Griffith, for his 1915 “The Birth of a Nation” and German Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003) for the films she produced and directed as “Hitler’s favorite filmmaker.”
 
One of my film reference books says the only way you can see “The Birth of a Nation,” based on Thomas Dixon’s “The Clansman,” is on videotape; it’s still too controversial to be shown in a theatre or at a venue like New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Don’t look for it anytime soon at, say, Lewisburg’s Carnegie Hall. It’s a racist look at the aftermath of the American Civil War, with stereotypes of African Americans that make Don Imus look like Little Mary Sunshine.
 
“Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl” (Knopf, $30.00, 400 pages, 32 pages of photographs, notes, bibliography, index) by Steven Bach is a book every cinema devotee should read, as well as every student of Nazism and the horrors committed by the 1933-1945 German regime.
 
Bach knows his movie industry: He previously wrote an excellent biography of Leni’s contemporary and sometime rival Marlene Dietrich and he is the former executive of worldwide production for United Artists, originally formed in 1919 by Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin – and D.W. Griffith. At UA, films produced during his tenure included “Raging Bull,” “Manhattan,” “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” and “Heaven’s Gate,” a Western that went out of control in terms of budget and destroyed the studio -- and resulted in Bach’s first book “Final Cut.”
 
The full title of that book – “Final Cut : Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate, the Film That Sank United Artists” – contains three words that could very well apply to Helene Amalie Bertha Riefenstahl, born in a working class district of Berlin: “Art” “Money” and “Ego.”
 
To the end of her days Leni Riefenstahl defended herself by saying she was producing great art, writes Bach. She was too busy with her “art” to notice politics and leaders, she said as recently as a few years before her death. It’s too bad that some of her films used as extras gypsies “borrowed” from a holding camp and destined for the death camps. She was constantly suing people, including fellow filmmakers, who accused her of indirect complicity in the Holocaust.
 
She even sued her niece and nephew – the children of her younger brother and only sibling Heinz who died on the Russian Front in 1944 – over the estate of the company founded by her plumber father Alfred. It was all about money for Leni, who spent the Third Reich’s equivalent of the 1980 Michael Cimino film “Heaven’s Gate” on “Tiefland,” the film using the death-camp-bound gypsies (also called Roma or Sinti) who suffered the same fate as Jews in Nazi Germany.
 
Speaking of Jews, many of her supporters and lovers – Bach shows how Leni was a calculating woman who used her beauty and feminine wiles to advance her career – were Jewish, including Henry Sokal, Bela Balazs and Carl Mayer – as were many figures of both the German and American film industries. Thanks to Hitler’s racist policies, many of these Jewish film artists ended up in Hollywood.
 
Leni’s last film before the Nazis took over in 1933 was “The Blue Light” (1932) discussed fully on pages 69-81 of Bach’s must-read book. All three men – Sokal, Balazs and Mayer – were involved in the production of the movie, which starred Leni as Junta, an Italian girl in the Dolomites. She could easily play an Italian with her buxom figure and dark hair and she played a Spanish gypsy just as easily in “Tiefland”, which wasn’t completed until almost 10 years after the end of World War II. And the names of all three Jews – Sokal, Balazs and Mayer -- were eliminated from the credits when the hit film 'The Blue Light' was re-released in 1938. It was all about ego for the girl from the poor but striving district of Berlin-Wedding.
 
Bach deals with rumors that Leni Riefenstahl was Jewish on her mother’s side, noting that Leni’s certificate of “racial purity,” required after 1933, referenced her mother Bertha’s stepmother rather than her birth mother. Under Jewish tradition, anyone born to a Jewish mother is considered Jewish. Bach tells how Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, a rival of Leni’s, may have spread the information to discredit the dancer who became an actress and the iconographic filmmaker of Nazi Germany.
 
Those who defend Leni Riefenstahl point to the absence of a Nazi Party Card by the filmmaker, to which Bach replies that only about 5 percent of the members of the party were women in male-chauvinist-pig Nazi Germany. A woman had to do everything she should could to succeed in a country dominated by men and in an industry – filmmaking -- then and now still dominated by men. Leni did what had to be done, in her estimation.
 
Bach covers in detail the two films that cemented Leni’s reputation with Hitler, “Triumph of the Will,” a documentary of the 1934 Nazi Nuremberg Rally and “Olympia,” her groundbreaking film of the 1936 Olympics, which wasn’t released until the spring of 1938. Like Michael Cimino of “Heaven’s Gate” fame, Leni believed in coverage, with filming locations everywhere in both films – especially in “Olympia,” where camera operators worked in specially dug pits to photograph low angle shots of athletes. Bach reveals the complete cooperation of the Nazi regime in the filming – and financing of the expensive documentary.
 
Early in her career as an actress, Leni Riefenstahl appeared in films that were popular in free-wheeling, cosmopolitan Berlin, including a topless performance (documented by a photograph in Bach’s book) in a 1925 silent called “Ways to Strength and Beauty.” Leni Riefenstahl, the Weimar Republic’s answer to Anna Nicole Smith – who would have thought it! Of course, she denied everything in her memoirs. I consider memoirs to be a form of fiction: Virtually everybody is a whitewash artist when it comes to their own lives.
 
Bach notes that Leni’s first career choice was the dance. She went into acting in the Alpine and mountain films popular in Germany and Austria and her directing was an extension of that career. As noted with the three men involved in “The Blue Light,” she sought out the best talent available, even if she later claimed everything was done by her.
 
“Triumph of the Will” and “Olympia” were strong influences on later filmmakers, including the “Star Wars” series of George Lucas, Bach writes. He quotes the approving assessment of American film critic Andrew Sarris who declared Leni Riefenstahl as one of the great auteurs of filmmaking (Sarris coined the term “auteur theory” echoing the French New Wave critics who said directors are the “authors”—“auteurs” – of their films).
 
As a producer, Bach naturally takes issue with the “auteur theory”, arguing that filmmaking is one of the most collaborative of arts. It’s a good point to answer the Cahiers du Cinema crowd!
 
During the war, Leni married a German army officer, Peter Jacob (identified as Peter Jakob in the captions of photos of him in the book). She later divorced him, but remained on good terms.
 
In the U.S. in November 1938 to secure American distribution of “Olympia,” Leni’s plans clashed with those of her patron when Hitler ordered the pogrom of Kristallnacht (Night of the Broken Glass) on Nov. 9-10, 1938, which resulted in the looting and destruction of Jewish shops and synagogues and the murder of hundreds of German Jews who had been declared “subjects” rather than “citizens” three years earlier. No other country has ever done this to its citizens, Bach notes.
 
The author said that at first Leni denied that Kristallnacht even happened! When it was confirmed, she continued on to Hollywood in a misguided attempt to convince the major studios to distribute the film. Major error in judgment, Bach says. The reception was very cool, to say the least. Only Walt Disney received her, but even he declined to screen the Olympics film. (The Disney meeting with Leni is covered extensively by Neal Gabler in his new biography of Walt Disney, which I’ve reviewed on this site.) Right-wingers like the Chandler family that owned the Los Angeles Times held a reception for Leni at the California Club, one of several downtown L.A. clubs which refused to admit Jews as members well into the late 20th Century.
 
Bach’s portrait of Leni, who went on to photograph natives in Africa, including the Sudan, show an ego-driven woman who only grudgingly conceded that the Holocaust had occurred. It’s up to individual readers to assess the value of Leni Riefenstahl’s contributions to filmmaking and whether these contribution were compromised by her Nazi benefactors and patrons and by Riefenstahl’s actions.
 
Publisher’s web site: www.aaknopf.com