Leni Riefenstahl has been the most enduringly controversial of the Third Reich’s filmmakers. Triumph of the Will and Olympia can be said to have an aesthetic quality that surpasses their propagandistic purposes. Indeed, along with Carl Orff’s oratorio Carmina Burana, they are among the most admired of Nazi-era artworks. Riefenstahl was neglected for decades after the war, but the rise of feminism caused traditional film history to be reexamined, and she was rediscovered and acclaimed as one of the most important female directors. The beauty of her films was often stressed more than their historical role, and she was welcomed at feminist film festivals. Susan Sontag has discussed this trend, arguing that the beauty and the Fascist ideology of Riefenstahl’s films were inextricably linked, in her “Fascinating Fascism” (1975), reprinted in Bill Nichols, ed., Movies and Methods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 31-43.
The issue of Riefenstahl’s attitude toward the Nazis has also been much debated. She claimed that she was interested only in art when she made the films and that she knew nothing of oppressive Nazi policies. David Stewart Hull presents a description of her filmmaking based largely on Riefenstahl’s own claims in Film in the Third Reich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), especially pp. 13-16 and 132-37. More recently, Glenn B. Infield’s research has used government records and other archival material to show that at least some of Riefenstahl’s claims are untrue. See his Leni Riefenstahl: The Fallen Film Goddess (New York: Crowell, 1976). Richard Meran Barsam analyzes the film in deteail in Filmguide to Triumph of the Will (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975). For Riefenstahl’s most recent version of her activities, see her The Sieve of Time: The Memoirs of Leni Riefenstahl (London: Quartet Books, 1992). The ongoing debate is reflected in the title of The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993, Ray Muller), a feature-length documentary examining Riefenstahl’s responsibility for her Nazi-era films.
REFERENCES
1. A. A. Zhdanov, “Soviet Literature—the Richest in Ideas, the Most Advanced Literature,” in Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934: The Debate on Socialist Realism and Modernism (1935; reprint, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1911). p. 21.
2. Boris Shumyatsky, A Cinema For the Millions (Extracts), tr. Richard Taylor, in Taylor and Ian Christie, eds., The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Documents 1896-1939 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 359.
“For a Great Cinema Art: Speeches to the All-Union Creative Conference of Workers in Soviet Cinema (Extracts),” in The Film Factory, p. 355.
Quoted inJay Leyda, Kino: A History ofthe Russian and Soviet Film, 3rd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 353.
Quoted in Neya Zorkaya, The Illustrated History of the Soviet Cinema (New York: Hippocrene Books,
1989), p. 115.
Quoted in Sagalovitch, “Vladimir Petrov: Maitre du film historique,” in Les Maitres du cinema sovietique
Ema. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Welsh, David. Propaganda and the German Cinema 1933-1945. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983.
Au travail (Service cinematographique de I’U. R.S. S. en France, 1946), pp. 75-76.
7. Quoted in Gian Piero Brunetta, “The Conversion of the Italian Cinema to Fascism in the 1920’s,” Journal of Italian history 1 (1978): 452.
8. Quoted in David Forgacs, Italian Culture in the Industrial Era 1880-1980 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 72.
9. Quoted in Elaine Mancini, Struggles of the Italian Film Industry during Fascism (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985), pp. 170-71.
10. Giuseppe De Santis, “Towards an Italian Landscape,” in David Overbey, ed., Springtime in Italy: A Reader on Neo-Realism (London: Talisman, 1978), p. 127.
FURTHER READING
Apra, Adriano, and Patrizio Pistagneri, eds. The Fabulous Thirties: Italian Cinema 1929-1944. Milan: Electra, 1979.
Hay, James. Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy: The Passing of the Rex. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Landy, Marcia. Fascism in Film: The Italian Commercial Cinema, 1931-1943. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.
Mancini, Elaine. Struggles of the Italian Film Industry under Fascism. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985.
Rentschler, Eric. The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Taylor, Richard. “Boris Shumyatsky and the Soviet Cinema in the 1930s: Ideology in Mass Entertainment.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 6, no. 1 (1986): 43-64.
World History
