The Wonderful, Horrible Life and Films of Leni Riefenstahl

At the Harvard Film Archive: "Triumph of the Will" on October 5; "The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl" October 8-10.

"I was never anti-Semitic and never a member of the Nazi Party...So where does my guilt lie?" These last lines of the film, "The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl," leave viewers with a final sense of the notorious German director's elusiveness.

But Ray Muller's three-hour biographical documentary is still a fascinating and worthwhile portrait of the world's greatest living and most despised female film director.

Riefenstahl, still witty, athletic and argumentative at age 91, is best known for her film "Triumph of the Will" (also reviewed in this issue) which documents the 1934 Nazi Party rally at Nuremburg. She is also well known for "Olympia," a documentary of the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin.

Muller does question Riefenstahl about her involvement with the Nazis throughout, but this film is not meant as a trial or an interrogation. Instead, "The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl" examines her various occupations and interests. To emphasize his purpose, Muller opens the film with a curious montage of tropical fish, Nuba tribal dancers, and marching Nazis.

Muller has several alternating ways of presenting Riefenstahl to the viewer, tracing her life both chronologically and geographically. While Riefenstahl does most of the talking in a series of mini-monologues at many of the important places of her life, Muller also engages her in conversation about specific aspects of her life and work.

Along with this dialogue, Muller intersperses clips from movies which influenced Riefenstahl and from the films in which she acted or directed. All of the film's contrasts insure that the viewer never gets bored.

"The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl" also consciously displays the advantages and problems that a documentary filmmaker faces, especially when the subject is another filmmaker. Muller accomplishes this by having one camera person film the rest of the crew as it works.

Muller is able to ask intelligent questions about Riefenstahl's work because he himself is a director, but this common identity is also the cause of friction between the two. Riefenstahl is still serious about filmmaking, and she is as stubborn as any other director who has an artistic vision. Some of the more amusing parts of the film occur when Muller and Riefenstahl argue about the best way to make certain scenes work.

At the old UFA Studios in Berlin, where many German silent films were made, a dispute flares up when Muller asks Riefenstahl to walk and talk at the same time. In another scene at Nuremberg, she grabs Muller's shoulders and shakes him.

The most fascinating and disturbing part of the films is when Riefenstahl must face the questions raised by her association with, and work for, the Nazis. From this segment, Muller takes Riefenstahl back to the old Nazi parade grounds outside of Nuremberg.

Although Riefenstahl was not a member of the National Socialist Party, she did make "Triumph of the Will." This has made her forever a pariah of the filmmaking world.

This part of the films raises several important and complex questions: What is the relation between art and politics? What is an artist's responsibility?

"Triumph of the Will," says Riefenstahl, is an artistic and not a political film; a documentary and not a propaganda film. Art, she says, is entirely separate from politics, and an artist is in no way responsible for the effect that his or her work has in its political context.

This is a hard line for Muller to swallow, and he presses Riefenstahl to defend her opinions against critics who say that "Triumph of the Will" was a glorification of the Nazis.

Riefenstahl defends herself adamantly, saying that critics are blaming her now because of the atrocities committed by the Nazis during the war, whereas before the war, "Triumph of the Will" won critical acclaim and several international awards.

Riefenstahl's contention that she is being treated unfairly does have some force. After all, no one condemns the great Sergei Eisenstein for making nationalist films in Soviet Russia, where the government killed even more people that the Nazis did.

However, Riefenstahl's conviction that an artist has no political responsibility for his or her art will strike most viewers as naive at best, and disingenuous at worst. And the idea that "Triumph of the Will" is not propaganda is just plain impossible to take seriously. Riefenstahl defends herself by saying she was hired by Hitler as an artist to make an artistic film, not a political one.

But is "Triumph of the Will" an example of great art? Which is more important, the film's status as a technical masterpiece, or its content, which seems to praise one of history's most evil ideologies? These are the difficult questions that Muller leaves the viewer to consider.

Riefenstahl is also remembered for the critically acclaimed "Olympia," an exhaustive record of the 1936 Summer Olympics, which was revolutionary in its treatment of sports. Many of her innovations are still used today. It is fascinating to watch Riefenstahl describe some of her experiments, like underwater photography of diving events, and setting cameras aloft in balloons.

The rest of the film details some of her work with the Nuba tribes of Sudan, and some of her own footage is shown for the first time.

Now Riefenstahl, who has not made a film since the war ended, is working on a documentary to promote the preservation of the tropical seas. She is the world's oldest scuba diver and a member of Greenpeace.

Is she "feminist pioneer, or a woman of evil?" Muller's otherwise exhaustive film does not answer the question. But it does a brilliant job of illustrating the superb talent, the energetic drive and the moral ambiguity of Leni Riefenstahl.