The horror of history

I've read two books recently about Leni Riefenstahl, the infamous director of TRIUMPH OF THE WILL and OLYMPIA, who has typically been judged either a brilliant documentarian or an evil Nazi propagandist. I saw TRIUMPH, a film about the 1934 Nazi party rally at Nuremberg, for the first time in a Jewish history class on the Holocaust, and I've seen it at least one other time since; OLYMPIA (shot at the 1936 Olympics) I've only seen in bits and pieces. I'm still not sure myself what to make of Riefenstahl. Moments of both films are among the most striking ever put to film, but it's impossible to take them out of context: they were made with the financial backing of and in the service of Adolf Hitler.

Both of the recent books have the same agenda: to debunk the self-mythologizing comments that Riefenstahl made about herself over the years in attempts to claim that she did nothing wrong and that she was so devoted to art that she didn't notice what the Nazis were doing to her country and the world. Jurgen Trimborn's book, "Leni Riefenstahl: A Life," is laser-beam focused on this debunking, and he had some access both to her and her correspondence that other authors didn't, but his book does not give a very good picture of the woman herself. The other book, "Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl" by Steven Bach, is much better written and does let us see the person behind the controversial figure. Trimborn pretty much ignores her later life (she lived until 2003, dying just after her 101st birthday, and spent most of the last half of her life photographing African tribes and undersea life), but Bach spends almost a third of his book on that period of her career. I came away from the Bach book agreeing with German Culture Minister Christina Weiss who said that Riefenstahl had a "revolutionary artistic vision," but also a "political blindness and infatuation," and noted that, though her work has become part of "an aesthetic canon," she is also a reminder that "one cannot lead an honest life in service of the false, and that art is never apolitical" (Bach, 297). Andrew Sarris is quoted as defending her by saying that she was "imprisoned by the horror of history"; true, but aren't we all? I highly recommend the Bach book.