For dynamism alone, no female film director has matched the shots and cuts of Third Reich propagandist Leni Riefenstahl, who died on 8th September, aged 101. But the obituaries have missed a further and more curious point-that no female artist of the 20th century has taken so much pleasure in looking at men. Essentially, she was an erotic artist.
In a different age Riefenstahl might have made porn movies, although she would have considered herself too classy for that. Triumph of the Will (1935) had the suspense and build-up of sophisticated pornography, and photographed men in partial erotic archetypes. Her two Olympic films (1938) stripped the athletes bare then exalted their bodies. Her still photographs of the Nuba tribespeople of Sudan, a project she began in the 1960s, again centred on active, naked males. Yet, as if to prove Roland Barthes's point that pornography has no subtext, this bravura gallery of diverse masculine display is, in the end, a narrow body of work. The artist's eye does not stray beyond the immediate erotic force field. There is no flicker, no insight captured by chance-what Barthes called "punctum," the unconscious detail in a photograph that "pricks" or "bruises" you.
This absence of uncertainty does not consign Riefenstahl to the dustbin of film history. Ingmar Bergman, Billy Wilder and Busby Berkeley were great filmmakers, yet their work contains nothing extraneous to the main story or idea. What is more distinctive about Riefenstahl's career-given the events of her life, it is astonishing-is that she had no aesthetic breakdown. Third-rate directors plough the same furrow all their lives, and some first-rate ones, such as John Ford, remain classicists to the end. But most great artists transform their work. In the world of film, directors as varied as Bergman, Hitchcock and Powell/Pressburger came to a stylistic crisis and changed direction. The themes which interested audiences shifted, technology changed, and they adjusted their aesthetic accordingly. Yet Riefenstahl, whose way of making movies was allied to a national regime which became an international byword for monstrosity, sallied forth, when she was allowed to, in an arrow-straight line and made imagery of the exact same kind as she had while under the spell of the Nazis. There was not a kink in her path. There is no conceptual or compositional difference between the early shots of Olympiad, for example, and her Nuba pictures. She believed in the sublime (in the Burkean sense) in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and, presumably, in the 1950s too, when we heard nothing of her. She did what the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote of: she praised human beings. She framed and lit them to express their grandeur. That there are no signs of rethink or despair in her work, when there clearly is in those less tested by the times in which they lived, is what is hardest to understand about Riefenstahl.
Her 1943 film Tiefland, in which (whether knowingly or not) she used concentration camp inmates as extras, is rightly cited as the most abhorrent of her mistakes. Yet her utter failure to demonstrate any interest in the flux of new visual ideas that flowed through the 20th century suggests another species of error. Riefenstahl could not have been unaware of the Nazis' famous Entartete Kunst ("Degenerate Art") exhibition, held in 1937, which denounced modernism and abstraction. If she went with the Nazi flow then, scoffing at such work, might she not have looked again after the war and perceived an intellectual alternative? The themes of the divided self, and the despair which underscored modernism, went straight over her head. And even sticking closer to her beloved subject, the grandeur of the human body, might she not have shown more interest in Picasso's monumental nudes?
Riefenstahl, of course, was not a painter. But by the time she returned behind a camera, even cinema had become modernist. Antonioni, Godard and Fellini had all appeared. There were new ways of portraying human beings on film. Riefenstahl ignored them all. Perhaps it was too late in her career to change. Maybe, not being an intellectual, she did not follow or understand the latest trends in picture making. But most likely, she did not realise that she was tainted by more than her personal association with an ideology; she had made an artistic form itself guilty by association. In her hands, classicism was corrupted.
To these possible explanations must be added a fourth; that-again at the level of form (not content, not politics)-she considered herself to be right. To the extent that she worked out a rationale for her eroticising, classicising sensibility, she convinced herself that it was somehow perfect.
Riefenstahl's refusal to take any responsibility for the culture of National Socialism remained the ugliest aspect of her persona. What made her interesting is that this ugliness was layered on to an extraordinary, once in a generation talent. That has guaranteed her a position of ambivalence in the history books. But the bitter icing on the cake in the case of Leni Riefenstahl was a blinkered stylistic arrogance. Her inability to modify the form of her work is her concluding artistic indictment.
