Two reviews of two new biographies, two opening sentences...
"Leni Riefenstahl was a liar." (Charles Matthews in the Washington Post) "Leni Riefenstahl was a slut." (Richard Schickel, doyen of American film writers, in the LA Times. He's talking about her lust for worldly success rather than her carnal appetite.)
All true, I suspect, although I'm slightly surprised that a critic as astute as Schickel isn't willing to separate the woman from the artist:
Why Riefenstahl's work would continue to impress critics — even Sontag, Riefenstahl's most implacable critical enemy, calls them the two greatest documentaries ever made — is a mystery, given the corruption of their origins and the fact that they are visibly not documentaries at all.
Fighting words. Schickel was just as indignant about Bowling For Columbine when I interviewed him some years ago for a feature I was writing on Michael Moore's dubious screen techniques. I agreed with him then. I'm not so sure this time.
As for the quality of the Nazi-era films themselves, Judith Thurman's New Yorker review makes a telling observation. For all their breathtaking imagery and technical innovations, Triumph of the Will and Olympia are very hard to sit through in their entirety:
A seductively exciting surface, such as the morbid spectacle of a mass delusion, may distract from, but cannot insure against, a slack core, and in Riefenstahl’s case a handful of sequences singled out for their formal beauty and a quality that [Susan] Sontag calls "vertigo before power" have achieved an influence disproportionate to their depth or originality. They are played over and over, and many people, even film buffs, seem never to have seen—or are unaware of never having seen—Riefenstahl’s documentaries in their entirety. But "Olympia" (three and a half hours long) and "Triumph of the Will" (two) both have their longueurs: endless scenes of shotputting and pole-vaulting in the former, of ranting and marching in the latter. In both, Riefenstahl relies heavily for her transitions on portentous cutaways to clouds, mist, statuary, foliage, and rooftops. Her reaction shots have a tedious sameness: shining, ecstatic faces—nearly all young and Aryan, except for Hitler’s.
Relentless spectacle, volume masquerading as content... something tells me that if Riefenstahl were alive and young today, her agent would have his pick of Hollywood blockbusters.
The video clip, by the way, comes from Olympia. That diving pool is still there, next to the stadium and the heroic statues. Now that it has been drained of water, it has the feeling of some epic sculpture, too.
He is honest about Kennan’s defects of thought; and yet he seems unwilling fully to accept what they imply about the man’s nature. Kennan made no secret of his low regard for the wisdom of the common man, and thus for the practice of a so-called democratic, as opposed to a professional, foreign policy. But Lukacs also notes that in the late ’30s — as Hitler’s Germany rose to power — Kennan began writing a book proposing that America adopt a more authoritarian model of government in which both immigration and suffrage would be curtailed. Kennan could not bring himself to despise Germany before, during or after the war. He was, on the other hand, "enraged" by Washington’s clumsy attempt to acquire bases in the Azores.
