20 SEPTEMBER 2003, Page 64

Cautionary tale

Mark S teyn

eni Riefenstahl was a brilliant cine atographer and editor who could compose and edit anything, except, in the end, her own life. If only she'd been able to snip one problematic decade out of her 101 years, we'd know her as a game old gal who in her sixties went off to live with an African tribe, in her seventies learned to scuba dive, and at the age of 98 survived a plane crash in the Sudan. There was a documentary made about her a few years back in which she's seen getting off the boat at the end of a day's diving. The captain and her friend Horst walk up the pier ahead of her, lost in conversation. She follows behind, carrying her scuba gear and oxygen tank. She's 92, and it never occurs to either man to give her a hand. They don't think of her as a woman or as a nonagenarian.

If only it weren't for that awkward patch ..

In the 1930s, Fraulein Riefenstahl put her formidable film-making talents to the cause of the Third Reich, and produced one of the most remarkable films ever made: Triumph Of The Will.

Go back to that scuba-diving disembarkation scene in Ray Miiller's The Wonderful Horrible Life Of Leni Riefenstahl. in theory, it could all be a setup, and the participants chewed over how best to do it beforehand and did 15 takes: anyone who's worked in documentaries knows how phoney the whole business is. But the point is it seems careless — as if it happened, and the camera happened to be there to record it.

There's no sense of that in any frame of Triumph Of The Will. Granted that audiences were a lot less media savvy in 1934, and granted that a people dumb enough to fall for National Socialism will fall for anything, it's still hard to believe that even in its day anyone accepted what remained Fraulein Riefenstahl's official explanation to the end — that this was just a 'documentary record' of the 1934 annual party convention. Early on, we see the Fijhrer's motorcade driving through Nuremberg, with what seems like the entire citizenry jammed on to the streets to greet him. Riefenstahl's camera shoots Hitler (if you'll forgive the expression) from directly behind him, a sequence which for some reason always reminds me of Gore Vidal's boast that only very famous people such as himself know what the back of their heads look like. There's a fabulous moment when the great man — Adolf, not Gore — is responding to the Hitler salutes offered up by the crowds with his campy little elbow-bend and wrist-flip and, as his Mercedes moves forward, the sun catches his fingers and fills the palm, first bathing it in glory and then making it appear as if the Fiihrer's hand is the very source of the sunlight itself. Did the director just get lucky? Did the sun just happen to hit? Seconds later, we cut to a long shot of Hitler in the Mercedes continuing down the street. There's no camera in the car, though the scene we've just witnessed could only have been filmed by someone in the back seat. Another minute, and we're back to the close-up of the Fiihrer's neck.

Did she stop the car, get out and film the long shot, and then get back in? Did Leni get Adolf to do re-takes? Or maybe she made the entire population of Nuremberg re-take the scene; maybe they staged the procession twice. If Hitler was unusually agreeable about taking direction, it was because this was never a filmed record of an event so much as an event created for the film. Whatever Triumph Of The Will is, it's not a documentary. Its language is that of feature films — not Warner Brothers gangster movies or John Ford westerns, but rather the supersized genres, the epics and musicals where huge columns of the great unwieldy messy mass of humanity get tidied and organised — and, if that isn't the essence of fascism, what is? Riefenstahl has the same superb command of the crowd as Busby Berkeley, the same flair for human geometry (though Berkeley would have drawn the line at giving the gentlemen of the chorus as swishy a parade step as Hitler's personal SS bodyguard do).

The sets (that's what they are) that were built for Hitler's speeches blend Cecil B. de Mille with expressionist sci-fi: no party convention in Blackpool or even Los Angeles ever offered its leader a stage like this. It exists in the same relationship to reality as, say, Berkeley's 'Lullaby Of

Broadway' sequence in Gold Di1+;ers Of 1935: the conceit is that the number's taking place in a nightclub, but, as the song

continues and the dancers multiply and the perspective extends ever further into the distance, you realise that no nightclub any where on earth has a stage that vast.

Riefenstahl stretches reality in the same way, beginning in the streets of old Nuremberg and the band serenading below Hitler's balcony in his ivy-clad hotel, and steadily abandoning human scale until the Fijhrer is standing alone atop a giant stone block as thousands of standard-bearing party members march in formation below: extras on a set. Today, you can see

Riefenstahl's influence in the work of George Lucas (Star Wars) and Paul Verhoeven (Starship Troopers), both filmmakers for whom the principal thrill of directing seems to be the opportunity it affords to subordinate the individual.

Filmed a mere 18 months into Hitler's rule and only a few weeks after President Hindenburg's death removed the final

remnant of the pre-Nazi state, Triumph played a critical role in establishing the

sheer scale of the party's iconography.

Riefenstahl was a genius: watch the opening, with Hitler's aircraft (he was the first politician with a campaign plane) descend ing through the clouds to Nuremberg as if bringing a god to earth. She was one of the first to understand how to convey the unseen: thus, the shadow of the Ftihrer's plane falls on the columns of Nazis marching up the street in Nuremberg.

She was let down by the Nazis' weak spot: people. Not the blond boy drummers of the

Hitler Youth. Nor the adoring women, gazing at their Fiihrer as enraptured as Hedy Lamarr in the heights of orgasm in Ecstasy.

But in the Nazi bigshots, whom not even Riefenstahl can make look anything other than seedy and shifty. And the trouble with that Hitler salute is that on at least a couple of occasions it exposes an incredibly sweaty armpit. There are some things even a control-freak can't control.

Her directing career ended with the Third Reich. Had she been worse at mak ing the Nazis look good, her insistence that she was no more than a hired hand might have been accepted. Instead, she found herself too toxic to get any project off the ground, until finally, at the age of 100, she got to release one last film, a simple undersea documentary. 'Art is my life and I was deprived of it.' said Leni Riefenstahl. Tough. Working in the German film indus try, she saw that happen early on to innu merable Jewish film-makers. She was neither one of that select group of Nazi fanat ics committed to mass murder, nor merely of that vast contemptible majority of Germans too indifferent to evil to object to it. Whatever her disclaimers, she made evil look better than it had any right to: a cautionary tale in the art of film.