|
CounterPunch
September
11, 2002
The Nazi Who
Won't Die
Leni Riefenstahl at 100
by James C. Faris
"I want to see, that's all. This
is my life. I want to see."
Leni Riefenstahl,
on the occasion of her ninetieth birthday
(Vanity Fair, September 1992)
Leni Riefenstahl, amazingly, turned 100 in August.
She won't die. She has survived skiing accidents, mountain
falls, internment, automobile and helicopter crashes, and according
to her, uncountable extremes of heat, cold, bugs, discomfort,
narrow bureaucrats, false accusations, contempt, bad luck, and
suffering, all of which she endured in the cause of great art.
Not only is this old romantic notion a necessary factor in her
theory of creativity, it is also necessarily her fate--having
been born a century late, and hence misunderstood by so many
and vilified by pedants. The day following her birthday, in
fact, the German Government inaugurated a lawsuit against Frau
Riefenstahl accusing her of having denied the Holocaust-a punishable
crime in Germany.
She lives today in a grand almost-glass
house outside Munich, known colloquially as "the house the
Nuba built,"-- from the wealth produced by her books on
peoples of Kordofan Province, Sudan. Photographs of these peoples
have been exhibited and published widely, and Riefenstahl has
been fêted and celebrated during the past two decades in
Japan, the U.S., and Germany. She still travels, though somewhat
inhibited by a back injury from scuba diving (and undoubtedly
exacerbated by a helicopter crash in the Sudan in 2000, while
attempting to visit "her" Nuba once again). She most
commonly appears publicly in angelic white stretch pants with
stirrups, matching fuzzy sweater and fur-tipped low boots. 1950's
après ski.
Everyone is familiar with her work for
the Third Reich, culminating in the two films, Olympia and
Triumph of the Will. She directed filming of a succession
of Nazi Party annual congresses in Nuremberg from 1933 to 1935--the
1934 congress yielding Triumph of the Will, regarded by
many as the greatest propaganda film ever made. Olympia
was originally a two-part film based about the Berlin Olympics
of 1936. It exists today in several versions--some de-Nazified.
While Riefenstahl also had the lead role in several ice-maiden
movies prior to World War II, her principal infamy derives from
these documentary works of the 1930's.
Much of her fame and fortune, however,
stems from her post-war work: still photography of the Nuba peoples
of Sudan. She (or rather, her long-time cameraman and companion,
Horst Kettner) also filmed the Nuba peoples, but we are told
much of that ciné footage was destroyed (sabotage?) in
processing. More bad luck. Nevertheless, most critics, while
condemning Riefenstahl's work for the Nazis (or not, since some
argue that the two documentaries are brilliantly effective work,
however repulsive their sponsorship), praise her later photographic
work in Africa. To the extent that Riefenstahl is regarded as
having been rehabilitated, this later post-war work is given
credit.
Susan Sontag, in a famous review ("Fascinating
Fascism"--New York Review of Books, 6 February 1975)
of Riefenstahl's first book on the Nuba (paradoxically titled
The Last of the Nuba), argued that her photography of
Nuba peoples emphasized purity, the lack of pollution, the authentic,
the triumph of the strong over the weak, as did her documentary
film work for the Third Reich. Sontag saw continuity in Riefenstahl's
vision from her earlier work for the Third Reich to her later
photography of Nuba, calling it "fascist aesthetics."
Stung by this critique, Riefenstahl has challenged anyone to
find "fascist" her photographic volumes on underwater
coral formations. But the extent to which notions of purity,
beauty, authenticity, and threat from pollution characterizes
this underwater work, it too might easily be considered fascist.
Her actual photography on land, especially in Sudan, is a mixture
of grotesque close-ups, the voyeurism of the long lens, and people
arranged in settings and in colors Riefenstahl found more photogenic.
She brought lots of beads and money and oil, and chased off
elders and others with clothing, requiring only the naked and
painted. Riefenstahl certainly leans heavily on the spectacular
and flamboyant.
However, while Riefenstahl's photographic
vision is limited, it seems too easy to dismiss it all as simply
"fascist." First, to do so absolves us of any closer
critique and axiomatically conflates content and form; secondly,
this discrimination could be applied to just about all photography
of non-Western people of lesser power by Western photographers,
and this same critique applies to much of National Geographic's
production and most coffee table photographic volumes of others.
It is an aesthetic widely shared in the West, a practice of
photography well-insulated and rewarded these days by humanist
notions of the underappreciated beauty of those photographed,
their overlooked misery, their unrealized authenticity, with
a further inference that we (the photographers) should be lauded
for having documented and appreciated them. Often such photographic
practice is presented in terms of how much we can learn from
them or how much these photographs can help us capture a less-polluted
time, a less-compromised setting, a more genuine experience--all
from the secure vantage point of the lens.
Back to Riefenstahl. Her memoirs, coming
out in several editions, and certainly heavily edited from the
original German publication in 1987, are a litany of the evil
and vindictiveness of others, a whitewash of her past, and in
the case of the Nuba peoples, filled with outright lies. She
has always allied herself with those she thought could most help
her. In the Sudan she associated with Germanophiles (or those
seeking contracts with German industrial and defense interests),
such as the one-time dictator, Gaafar Niemeri. Indeed, she was
named by him an honorary citizen of Sudan, and she tells us her
Nuba books were given as Christmas presents by Sudanese embassies
around the world (a rather ironic claim, if true, featuring
naked pagans as advertisements for a severe Islamicist state).
She regularly had army vehicles made available to her while
in Sudan, and was not averse to throwing fits when things didn't
go her way. As in Germany in the 1930's, she did not seem to
care about the politics of those in power, so long as they facilitated
her projects. In the biography section of her present web site,
she is featured in pictures with Siegfried and Roy and white
tigers, Mick Jagger, and at home, surrounded by balloons, champagne,
and stuffed animals. She has been fêted by feminists (for
having been a successful single woman in a Nazi regime characterized
by firm patriarchy), and there is reputed to be a sympathetic
portrayal of her life, based on her memoirs, in a forthcoming
movie featuring Jodie Foster.
Despite some significant differences
between her memoirs in German and the later English editions,
both are characterized by self-aggrandizement and blame heaped
on others. She sees herself as the lone heroic white woman,
especially in Africa, a trope that resonates well in the northern
hemisphere and hence in Hollywood productions. Here again, we
have to ask why such a presentation is so successful in the West.
Is it, following Hannah Arendt, the latent potential in us all,
the thin edge over which are totalitarianism and racism-the cheap
aesthetics of the spectacular, the limits of a facile modernism?
Is it our conditioning from an atavistic anthropology, our
uncritical acceptance of the fictions of photography and truth,
or simply the lack of a morality? This last spells itself out
as the absence of an image ethics, making the world available
to all with capital and camera, under the rationale that all
that can be photographed should be photographed. Whatever it
is, it has served Riefenstahl very well indeed, and testifies
to the profound degree to which her photography is approved in
Western aesthetics and photographic practice.
James Faris,
a retired anthropology professor, lives in Santa Fe, NM. His
most recent book is a critical history of the photography of
an American Indian people, Navajo and Photography (University
of New Mexico Press, 1996). One of his earlier books, Nuba Personal
Art (Duckworth, 1972), contained maps that lead Riefenstahl to
the Southeast Nuba of Sudan, resulting in her second book on
the Nuba people, The People of Kau (Harper, 1976). In her memoirs,
Riefenstahl claims to have learned of the Southeast Nuba from
a dream. She was inspired to visit the subjects of the first
Nuba book, The Last of the Nuba (Harper, 1974), from a photograph
taken in Nuba land by the British Magnum photographer, George
Rodger. Rodger had been a photographer with Allied Forces that
first entered Bergen-Belsen at the end of the war, and went to
the Sudan to attempt to recover from the horror of that assignment.
Rodger was bitter to the end of his life at this terrible irony
and at her use of his work.
Faris can be reached at: jfaris@newmexico.com
CounterPunch Special Report:
9/11 One Year After
Bill Christison
A
Year Later: It's Happening Here
Alexander Cockburn
The
Tenth Crusade
Susan Davis
Mr. Ashcroft's
Neighborhood
Bruce Jackson
When
War Came Home
David Krieger
Looking
Back on September 11
Mike Leon
Bush and War
Peter Linebaugh
Levellers
and 9/11
William McDougal
September 11 One Year On:
That's Entertainment!
Riad Z. Abdelkarim and Jason Erb
How American Muslims Really Responded
to 9/11
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Trouble
with Normal
Tom Stephens
Rise Up...Dump Bush
New
Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- War Talk As White Noise:
Anything to Get Harken and Halliburton
Out of the Headlines;
- First Hilliard, Then
McKinney: Jewish
Groups Target Blacks Brave Enough to Talk About Justice in the
Middle East; Intimidation
is the Name of the Game; Smearing
"Insane" McKinney As Muslims' Pawn;
- The Missing Terrorist?
Calling Scotland
Yard: "Where's Atif?"
- They Never Booed Dylan!:
Tape Transcript Shows
Famed Newport Folkfest Dissing of Electric Dylan Not True. The Catcalls were for Peter
Yarrow!
- New Shame from the Liffey
Shrike
Remember, the CounterPunch website is
supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. Our worldwide
web audience is soaring , with about seven million hits a month
now. This is inspiring, but the work involved also compels us
to remind you more urgently than ever to subscribe and/or make
a (tax deductible) donation if you can afford it. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe
Now!
Or Call Toll Free 1-800-840-3683
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|
September
7 / 8, 2002
Bill Christison
A
Year Later: It's Happening Here
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Tenth Crusade
Susan Davis
Mr. Ashcroft's
Neighborhood
Bruce Jackson
When
War Came Home
David Krieger
Looking
Back on September 11
Mike Leon
Bush and War
Peter Linebaugh
Levellers
and 9/11
William McDougal
September 11 One Year On:
That's Entertainment!
Riad Z. Abdelkarim
and Jason Erb
How American Muslims Really Responded
to 9/11
Jeffrey St.
Clair
The Trouble
with Normal
Tom Stephens
Rise Up...Dump Bush
September
6, 2002
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Stolen
Trust
Gale Norton, Indians and the Case of the Missing $10 Billion
September
5, 2002
Ben Tripp
Jesus vs.
George the Second
William Hughes
McKinney's
Defeat:
Undue Meddling
Gavin Keeney
Beaux
Reves, Citoyens!
Wayne Saunders
War
Begins; Nobody Notices
Irit Katriel
Drunk
with Power:
Israeli Chief of Staff Calls Palestinians a "Cancerous Demographic
Threat"
Gary Leupp
Who's Afraid
of Iraq?
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By
Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
|