Riefenstahl is no artist.  An artist defies the establishment and thinks independently, an artist is not an opportunist, an artist is not a propagandist. Riefenstahl is more akin to an opportunistic computer programmer, a technical wizard at the editing table who saw a chance at fame by being the Fuhrer’s most beloved director and who snatched it gratefully, who gambled on the Thousand Year Reich and lost. Blamable for her role as a key propagandist of the Nazi regime, Riefenstahl dishonestly attempts to convince the public that hers is the work of a naïve, intuitive, artist, a hopeless romantic who could never understand the brutality of the world around her. In evaluating Leni Riefenstahl’s life and work, we must examine whether her work is propaganda, whether she set out to create propaganda, and whether she contributed to the art of filmmaking. We will find that Riefenstahl contributed to the art of documentary making and of editing, but that she deserves nothing but blame for using her talent to support the Nazi regime, and that while Sontag’s criticism of her work may go too far, Riefenstahl deserves no pity or historical leniency.

The first, and easiest conclusion, is that Riefenstahl created a highly effective propaganda film in Triumph of the Will. According to the Random House dictionary, propaganda is “information, ideas, or rumors deliberately spread widely to help or harm a person, group, movement, institution, nation, etc.”  While Riefenstahl claims to have simply filmed an event that actually occurred, her editing clearly had the effect of casting Hitler as the mysterious, powerful leader of the enthralled German masses. Hitler descends from the clouds as if a savior from heaven. The film shows transfixed German crowds peering to the left, then a quick shot of Hitler, then German crowds peering to the right, then Hitler again. If Hitler is not on the screen, he is always an assumed presence, the object of the mass’s gaze, the erotic object of the mesmerized, ecstatic women in the crowds. By making it seem as though even the statues and cats stopped to gaze at Hitler and by setting Hitler against massive architecture, Riefenstahl is helping spread to all Germans, and to the entire world, a vision of Hitler as all-powerful, adored Fuhrer, a historical figure in his own time.

The party Congress took place over a number of days yet Riefenstahl selects and integrates the various activities that she considers film worthy and makes them appear contiguous in time.  For example, she made certain to give much time to Hitler, the SS commander, and the SA commander walking and standing together to honor the war dead. Riefenstahl is clearly interested here in portraying German leadership as a united front joined together by the common symbol of the swastika. Since Hitler had recently assassinated his detractors in the SA, this scene of apparent stability among German leadership lends credibility to Hitler’s claim that the men were executed as traitors. Once again, this scene supports the view of Triumph of the Will as propaganda since Riefenstahl is clearly promulgating a very clear, political message with her choice of footage.

By abstracting away the individuality from the German masses, Riefenstahl attempts to make her audience join the German people in their devotion and reliance on Hitler. Moreover, the director makes use of mass ornament to create an imagined community. For instance, in the Labor Service Rally, Riefenstahl films man by first showing hands, feet, and body. She suggests that Hitler is building the German people. In addition, she stresses the unity of the German people and its territorial ambitions in the scene were the Labor Service men call out where in Germany they are from, with one saying he is from the Saar, at the time a French-owned territory. There can be no question that this is a propaganda film, albeit an excellent one. Hitler himself views it as such calling it: “a totally unique and incomparable glorification of the power and beauty of our Movement” (Sontag 82).

By declaring that in Triumph of the Will “everything is genuine” and “that not a single scene is staged,” Riefenstahl becomes not just a propagandist, but a liar.  Riefenstahl admits in her book that “the preparations for the Party Convention were made in concert with the preparations for the camera work” (Kracauer 301).  The Party Convention was staged as a cinematic event and in that sense the entire film was staged just as the entire convention was staged. Riefenstahl may claim that she simply filmed things that actually occurred, but this also is dishonest. As Speer recalls of Riefenstahl’s use of shots staged in a studio in Berlin-Johannisthal, “Frau Riefenstahl, however, found the staged shots better than those made at the actual event.” Riefenstahl is a stylizer of reality; she does not merely record events as they happen in time but selects and edits to create a masterpiece of propaganda.

While Riefenstahl is a propagandist, she may have been unaware of her political environment and ignorant of the evil that Hitler and the Reich represented. She would like us to believe that she is like Junta in The Blue Light. As one commentator said, Riefenstahl “had her own intuitive feelings about nature and was destroyed by her naïve disregard of the real world around her, the world she set out to avoid” (Rentschler 30). Viewed in this light, Riefenstahl seems like a tragic artist, clinging to a bygone romanticism and ignorant of her political situation. This is a truly ridiculous idea. Riefenstahl was not only the character Junta in The Blue Light; she was also the director who shaped the perception of Junta by moviegoers. Because she works on both sides of the camera, Riefenstahl cannot claim to be the naïve, romantic Junta because she understands that Junta is a naïve romantic (Rentschler 48).

By her own admission in Wonderful, Horrible Life, Riefenstahl read parts of Mein Kampf, and thus should have read: “The mass meeting is … necessary for the reason that in it the individual, who at first, while becoming a supporter of a young movement, feels lonely and easily succumbs to the fear of being alone, for the first time gets the picture of a larger community, which in most people has a strengthening, encouraging effect” (Rentschler 20). This would certainly lead her to believe that a film like Triumph of the Will is a film that would have been made regardless of whether or not Riefenstahl existed. Hitler understood the need for scenes like the Labor Service Rally and the creating of imagined community through mass ornament. In all likelihood, Riefenstahl understood well what her place could be as a filmmaker in Hitler’s Germany and perhaps she believed in the myth of the Thousand-Year Reich. No doubt, she would have chosen to serve someone other than the Devil if she knew he would fall from power so quickly. In this sense, Riefenstahl is nothing more than one of Hitler’s henchmen, albeit a technically talented henchman.

            Perhaps, when Riefenstahl read part of Mein Kampf she also overlooked where Hitler wrote: “[The Jew’s] bloodsucking tyranny becomes so great that excesses against him occur … At times of bitterest distress, fury against him finally breaks out, and the plundered and ruined masses begin to defend themselves against the scourge of God” (Rentschler 68). While other artists fled Germany after reading his book and hearing his words, Riefenstahl spoke and befriended him completely aware of his political program. Certainly, the status of her work must be colored by our knowledge of her as a calculating, opportunistic technical wizard.

            Still, Sontag’s critique can be pushed too far. Susan Sontag in Fascinating Fascism argues that we must not separate Riefenstahl’s work from the historical and political context in which it was born, that we must be informed by her status as a Nazi propagandist serving one of the most evil regimes in the history of the world. Sontag argues that mountain climbing in The Blue Light “was a visually irresistible metaphor for unlimited aspiration toward the high mystic goal, both beautiful and terrifying, which was later to become concrete in Fuhrer-worship.” Rentschler argues that The Blue Light is of a piece with Nazi aesthetics in that Junta “had her own feelings about nature and was destroyed by her naïve disregard of the real world around her, the world she set out to avoid” (Rentschler 30). Riefenstahl contrasts the intuitiveness and romanticism of Junta whose soul is rooted in the mystery of the blue lights with the emerging modern world in which people destroy romantic myths for economic profit.

            The same Nazi aesthetics is evident in Triumph of the Will and Olympia. In Olympia’s famous diving scene, Riefenstahl makes faceless bodies out of famous national figures and depicts them in a stylized reality floating and moving backwards in space only to drop like bombs to the water below, demonstrating the Nazi principles of abstraction and of emotional power over physical reality (Rentschler 22). Because Olympia “renders Hitler as a modern Zeus with an omnipotent gaze,” we must realize that Riefenstahl’s career is marked by Nazism (Rentschler 29). Having filmed two Nazi party conventions, the German Olympics, and a Nazi film for the army which she refuses to discuss, a portrait of Riefenstahl as a propagandist embodying and spreading Nazi principles emerges.

Sontag even maintains that Riefenstahl seems hardly to have modified the ideas of her Nazi films even with her latest work The Last of the Nuba. Because the Nuba culture prized wrestling and violence, celebrated death above all other festivities, glorified surrender of the individual to the community, and worked to convert erotic energy into a community spirit, Riefenstahl seemingly continues her work as a propagandist of Nazi principles.

Sontag portrays Riefenstahl as an effective technical editor with ideas in line with Nazi aesthetics, who created a number of extremely damaging propaganda films and who continues to propagandize Nazi principles today.  In this view, the status of her work must be viewed almost in the same light as the work of Hitler himself, as being produced by a genius whose powers were wasted convincing people to murder, fight, and die for an indeterminate notion of German supremacy. However, while I believe Sontag fairly assesses Riefenstahl’s work in light of Nazi aesthetics, I believe the assumption that the general public should pay attention to the historical context of the creator’s day is incorrect. When the public reads a novel or watches a film, what they take from it is based largely on what they bring to it. We do not condemn readers of the Song of Roland or of most classic literature for reading without knowledge of the author’s day. If Riefenstahl had simply directed The Blue Light and The Last of the Nuba and these films were considered excellent and groundbreaking, there would no doubt be few essays blasting Riefenstahl as a Nazi. I believe we can appreciate her other work even if (and perhaps because) it exhibits “the ideal of life as art, the cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage, the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community, the repudiation of the intellect, and the family of man” (Sontag 96). These principles, though they are Nazi, are not the exclusive domain of the Nazis. Had Riefenstahl not been a propagandist commissioned by Hitler and had her work still been famous and considered excellent, we would have a different opinion of the status of her work, but as it is, Triumph of the Will and Olympia are Riefenstahl’s masterpieces and these films blatantly glorify one of the most violent, oppressive regimes in history.

Riefenstahl was a Nazi propagandist. From The Blue Light to the The Last of the Nuba, she demonstrated Nazi aesthetics although never so blatantly as she did in Triumph of the Will and Olympia. Riefenstahl was likely perfectly suited for a job as a Nazi documentary maker since even her early work demonstrated Nazi aesthetics. A dishonest revisionist, Riefenstahl is as far from Junta as Hitler himself. The naivete and innocence she would have us imagine are supplanted by her editing which so obviously has the goal of bolstering the popularity of the Reich and of Hitler. She claims that the theme of Triumph of the Will is peace; for this, she cannot be forgiven.