Hitler Bad, Films Good

Leni Riefenstahl the film maker who sat on Hitler’s face during the 1930s and the spent the rest of her life denying it is no longer with us. She died last week at the age of 101, which will be the beginning of our forgetting. She has been the shorthand for triumph of art over ethics and the subject of much ethical hand ringing about the nature of memory, but in the common view her movies arrived ex nihilo from an evil place with no precedents and no antecedents.

This is untrue, she was the woman who gave birth to public relations, whose ideas and shots were stolen by everyone and perhaps in a round about way among the most influential film makers of the 20th century. Her films allowed us to have a cult of male beauty, made the quick shots, abstracted imagery and strong juxtapositions take the place of traditional narrative and allowed what looked good to be made more important then what was.

In /Triumph of the Will/, her 1934 film of the Nuremberg Rallies, most images were shorter then 5 seconds. This made a movie that was supposed to be about one speech be about anything else. Images of domestic banality were matched with images of swastikas and guns. Shots were taken at odd angles, the music was jarring and the whole thing did not have any narrative at all. The most evocative of these are jackboots marching to a romantic German folk tune working with an image of a child playing the soundtrack being martial marches. Looking at it now, it resembles music videos or ads for coke—namely video pieces that are meant to reflect a series of base emotions rather then anything more complex or well thought out.

This continues and expands with /Olympia/, her depiction of the Munich Olympics of 1936. Playing into Hitler’s obsession with fine Aryan stock, she obsessively photographs men playing, their muscles rippling in competition for the fatherland. This is the modern spectacle right large with athletes as heroes. This was the recasting of breads and circuses as sporting events, tied to a series of political maneuvers. There is so little content here, we do not know who wins the gold medals or who is even running, what is being used to sell Hitler is the body. Think now of Calvin Klein with his nubile boys or Abercrombie and Fitch with their frat boy pseudo-eroticism, what is sold there is not overpriced underwear or t-shirts. What are sold there are what was sold under Riefenstahl—youth, health, and the hope that those things are supposed to bring. In the words of the Horst Wessel Song which was adapted by the Hitler Youth “The Future Belongs to Me”

This is not to suggest that we are now fascist or that Coca Cola and Calvin Kline are about to round up their competitors in box cars, but it would be ridiculous to ignore what this woman meant. Her genius was to develop a new language that did not depend on any of the old forms. Her techniques are used because they are convincing. They require no thought, no ambiguity and no complexity.

The bizarre thing is that she might have not known what she was doing. When Goebbels asked noted expressionist Fritz Lang to make movies for him, he responded “I’m Jewish”, which apparently could be overlooked. When Goebbels asked Riefenstahl, she wanted to make movies so badly that she did not respond. She kept telling interviewers that she had no idea about what was going on. Her films are so visceral, refusing to engage at all with the mind that it is almost the work of someone who had no thoughts, But the elegant construction betrays that, the coldness and the of ideas conveyed was indicative of the coldness and the efficiency of the machine world, which is something North Americans in the ‘00s reward as much as Germans in the ‘30s.