** THE WONDERFUL HORRIBLE LIFE OF LENI RIEFENSTAHL
(Worth seeing) Directed and written by Ray Muller.
It would be wrong, therefore, to insist that Muller’s documentary is simply a puff piece–that it’s like Stephen Schiff’s rhapsodic Riefenstahl profile in Vanity Fair a couple of years ago, or John Simon’s equally uncritical and unscholarly front-page review of the Riefenstahl autobiography in the New York Times Book Review last fall. But even with a running time of slightly over three hours, the film is far from the definitive, multifaceted portrait it aspires to be. Too many traces of Riefenstahl’s controlling hand remain, often in the film’s omissions. When Riefenstahl maintains at one point that Triumph of the Will is a “straight” documentary of a particular event, that would have been the perfect time for Muller to cite the film’s carefully crafted studio retakes well after the event, which were documented at some length in Albert Speer’s memoirs, among other places. Muller, apparently believing this fact to be less important than Riefenstahl’s social standing with Goebbels, lets the lie pass unchallenged.
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It’s commonly believed that Riefenstahl is the only major woman director who dramatizes such a contradiction, but this isn’t the case. The other strong example is Yulia Solntseva, the widow of the great Russian filmmaker Alexander Dovzhenko. Starting out as an actress in her husband’s silent pictures, she later directed Stalinist and post-Stalinist films–including Poem of the Sea (1958), The Flaming Years (1961), The Enchanted Desna (1965), and Golden Gate (1969)–that are all eye-popping, ear-filling realizations of unfilmed Dovzhenko projects. The Enchanted Desna and Golden Gate are among the most ravishingly beautiful and poetic spectacles ever made, even if their ideological agendas consist largely of Stalinist claptrap. These movies used to be screened regularly in Paris, which is where I saw most of them, but they’re virtually unknown in this country, with the lamentable result that Riefenstahl is always treated in this neck of the woods as an exceptional case. But if I had to select a single totalitarian masterpiece to take with me to a desert island, I’d choose the spectacular 70-millimeter, stereophonic-sound Desna over Riefenstahl’s Olympia in a flash.
To learn something about Nazism and World War II, you’d be much better off going to see Claude Chabrol’s The Eye of Vichy, receiving its last two screenings this Sunday at Facets Multimedia (unfortunately overlapping with the Film Center’s Godard program). As an early title in Chabrol’s documentary explains, this compilation of French newsreels and related archival footage shows France between 1940 and 1944 “not as it was, but as Petain and his collaborators wanted it to be seen.” Consequently the film gives us some notion of what it was like to be living in France during the German occupation–or at least what it was like to see newsreels there and then. Occasional voice-overs briefly interject information that the newsreels either omitted or obscured.
It’s important to bear in mind that French newsreels between 1940 and 1944 are a close equivalent of TV news programs today, and that both are close equivalents of propaganda and advertising; how we differentiate between the four forms of communication is more a matter of degree and context than of substance. As Hugh Hudson rightly points out in the BBC documentary, Triumph of the Will was essentially “an advertising film,” and if we consider the image of Germany that Olympia–the greatest sports documentary ever made–was meant to promote, that film may not be far behind. We might also describe The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, The Eye of Vichy, the period clips in both, CNN and CBS and ABC and NBC as advertising or propaganda; the differences between them, when they matter, lie strictly in what’s being sold.
