A couple of nights ago I finally watched "The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl" on DVD. Riefenstahl was a remarkable woman - born in Germany in 1902, she was by turns a dancer, actress, mountaineer, pioneering film director and photographer, who learned to scuba dive at the age of 70 and died in 2003 aged 101. I first read about her a few years ago in Charles Sprawston's cultural history of swimming "The Haunts of the Black Masseur", in a section where he talks about the incredible diving sequences she filmed for her own documentary about the 1936 Berlin Olympics (they are amazing to watch even now).
The most controversial part of Riefenstahl's life however was her involvement with Hitler and the Nazis during the 1930s and 40s. She famously made a film of the 1934 Nazi party congress ("Triumph of the Will") and continued to work during the war. She later claimed ignorance of the Nazi atrocities, and was determined to be a "fellow traveller" rather than a Nazi activist by post-war tribunals, but her film career was effectively finished after the war and she was vilified as "Hitler's film-maker" for the rest of her life.
The film is principally based around interviews with Riefenstahl (aged around 90 at the time) by the director Ray Mueller as he talks to her about these various episodes of her life. It's fascinating to see how in spite of her age her mind was still very active - especially when she is arguing with Mueller and his crew about how to shoot a particular sequence, recalling the technical details of shooting her films in the 30s, or reviewing underwater footage that she had shot earlier in the day. She seemed to light up when talking about editing machinery, film stock and camera angles - and in that regard she appears basically to have been what you might now call "a complete geek".
I think that the tight focus on Riefenstahl to some extent obscures the broader picture, though there is some attempt to contextualise the films with her life especially during the Nazi era (the account of her life after the war is disappointingly vague). To his credit Mueller does ask some direct questions about her past, but I felt like the documentary as a whole shied away from really challenging the view that she puts forward. The picture that emerged for me was of someone who wanted desperately and above all else to make her films, and didn't want to engage with the reality of her times. This self-delusion is the most troubling part of her story (and is elaborated on in an excellent review at Bright Lights Film Journal).
What is clear though is that she was a truly gifted and innovative film maker, pioneering techniques (for example the use of cranes and tracking shots) that have since become commonplace. One of the joys of "Wonderful Horrible Life..." is having the opportunity to see the beautiful footage that she shot (some of it previously unseen), and based on this the comparisons with Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock don't seem inappropriate (all the more impressive for a woman working in a male industry). Ultimately though her involvement with the Nazis - whatever the truth of it - is likely to always colour the perception of her life and work: wonderful horrible life indeed.
No comments:
Post a Comment