Dear editors:
The way Jonathan Rosenbaum, in his piece on Leni Riefenstahl [“Can Film Be Fascist?,” June 24], relies on empty cliches like “puff piece” is typical of the sloppy thinking that permeates his review. In my Riefenstahl profile, I do praise her artistry and I do assert that she was not a Nazi, but I also write that, in her dealings with Hitler, “she had made a pact with the Devil”; I write that she cannot claim to be innocent and that certain arguments she makes on her own behalf are pure sophistry; most important, I insist that, contrary to her protestations, Triumph of the Will was indeed propaganda, and of the most powerful sort.
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If Rosenbaum wanted to accuse me and others of being “unscholarly,” he ought to have engaged in a little scholarship of his own. He might at least have skimmed Leni Riefenstahl’s memoirs, in which she never denies having socialized (if that is what Rosenbaum means by “hung out”) with Hitler and Goebbels; on the contrary, she details ad nauseam the time she spent with them. (A careful look at her statements in the Ray Muller film also belie Rosenbaum’s interpretation.) A little more research, and Rosenbaum would have discovered that the passage he so relies on in Albert Speer’s memoirs was (a) later retracted by Speer himself and (b) not even about Triumph of the Will in the first place. Triumph was a film of the 1934 Nazi Party Rally, and Speer’s passage is explicitly about the 1935 party rally, which Riefenstahl filmed for a rather undistinguished short called “Day of Freedom.”
Jonathan Rosenbaum replies:
“Puff piece” is neither an empty cliche nor sloppy thinking but a precise description of the sort of glamour profile Schiff writes. He isn’t the only one in Tina Brown’s New Yorker who writes such pieces (cf., for instance, Lillian Ross’s Premiere-style promo on Mrs. Doubtfire, a production that Ross’s son happened to be working on), and his may be less egregious than those of some of his colleagues, but to call this writing critical or scholarly to any serious degree is a bit of a stretch. The last piece of “straight” criticism I read by him was a review of The Player in Vanity Fair that began by calling the film “far richer and stranger” as a movie about moviemaking than Day for Night, Singin’ in the Rain, Sunset Boulevard, The Bad and the Beautiful, or Barton Fink, and then never got around to explaining why; perhaps this could be called a critical or scholarly analysis, but not by me.
