Hitler's she-wolf

The novelist Clives James purportedly reviews two new Leni Riefenstahl biographies in an essay, Reich Star, in the Times Book Review last Sunday.

The piece is really just James going off on the Nazi Reifenstahl, who apparently is given more sympathetic treatment by her biographers (whom he mentions just a few times).

Owen does a thorough job recounting Riefenstahl's brazen lies in her chilling attempt to rewrite her history, closing with this punch:

She lied about everything. She just went on lying until people got tired, or old, or died. One of her most telling lies was the one she told about Streicher. She said that she had loathed him. But there is preserved correspondence to prove that she invited his company and treated him as a close friend until quite late in the war. The idea that Streicher would never mention to her what was happening to the Jews is preposterous. He was proud of it, and was eventually hanged for it.

Leni, although she never managed regret, had enough sense to feign ignorance. But one of her closer questioners got the admission out of her that really mattered. He was Budd Schulberg. His famous days as a screenwriter were still ahead of him, but he would never dream up a neater scene than the one he played out with Leni when he interviewed her in 1945, shortly after her arrest by American soldiers. After unrolling her usual impatient rigmarole about having known nothing about any Nazi atrocities, Leni made the mistake of saying that she sometimes, against her will, had to do what Goebbels wanted, because she was afraid of being sent to a concentration camp. Schulberg asked why she should have been afraid of that, if she didn’t know that concentration camps existed.

So there was the whole story. For anyone with a memory for recent events, the question of Leni’s moral status was settled. What came next, stretching on to the end of the millennium and now beyond, was the question of her artistic stature, supposedly a different thing. She built another career photographing tribesmen in Africa, and then another one, filming life below the waves in yet another new role as the oldest diver in the world. And as the people with a memory for the real world grew fewer, those who knew about nothing except the movies gradually redefined the issue.

At the end of the first “Star Wars” movie, George Lucas copied the ambience of “Triumph of the Will” with no apparent sense of how he was really proving that the cause in which Luke Skywalker and his friends had just triumphed could not have been worth fighting for. Lucas wasn’t alone: Trimborn does a useful job of rounding up the unusual suspects. Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol and Madonna all enrolled themselves on the growing list of Leni’s fans. So did Siegfried and Roy. Francis Ford Coppola said he admired her. Steven Spielberg said he wanted to meet her. If he had made “Schindler’s List” 10 times, he could not have undone the portent of such a wish, because he was really saying that there can be art without a human framework, and that a movie can be made out of nothing but impressive images. Some of Leni’s images were indeed impressive. But the question is never about whether or not you are impressed. The question is about whether you can keep your head when you are. Leni Riefenstahl was impressed by the Nazis, and look what happened.

I'd be surprised if any of the stars mentioned above, except for Spielberg, ever pick/picked up the Sunday Times Book Review; even so, my hope is someone in their life--an agent or family member or friend--forces them to read James' piece. It's too bad the studio bosses of old aren't still around to chastise and educate these children when they stray off the backlots and open their mouths.

Even though they're mostly idiots, what Hollywood thinks does matter, if only because of inconvenient truths like most Americans would rather watch movies than read the Times (if I had to give up one for a year, it'd be movies, but I suspect I'd be one of the few).

James' piece goes astray though when he argues:

Susan Sontag later made a serious mistake in arguing that “Olympia” was entirely steeped in fascist worship of the beautiful body. But it’s nature that worships the beautiful body. Fascism is natural. That’s what’s wrong with it: it’s nothing else. Despite the too often prevailing calisthenic mass maneuvers, as if Busby Berkeley had met Praxiteles, much of the reputation “Olympia” has for beauty can thus safely be endorsed, but always with the proviso that a lot of the athletic events were beautiful anyway, and that her technical inventions for capturing them would eventually suffer the fate of all technical inventions and be superseded: everything she did in Berlin in 1936 was topped by what Kon Ichikawa did in Tokyo in 1964. Nevertheless, Leni, with her raw material handed to her on a plate, and unhampered by those requirements of invented narrative that she could never manage, had made quite a movie for its time.

I do agree with what James writes about Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Orimpikku, which sticks in my mind as one of the most surprisingly affecting movies I've ever seen.

But, even though I've only read Sontag's Fascinating Fascism essay once, I don't think she made any serious mistakes in it.

Along with essays by George Orwell, E.M. Forster, Joan Didion and E.B. White, it's one of the most organically true things I've ever read and will absolutely give you an understanding of how seductive fascism's allure can be, and how it must always be quarantined.

Everything it touches, even if it's something 'natural', is by definition perverted and can no longer be seen in its original context, regardless of its inherent qualities.

Just look at the swastika, which some scholars believe to be among the oldest symbols known to man in its original, Indian form. The Nazis reversed it and tilted it; and in doing so have ruined it for most of the world forever.

Sontag isn't arguing that Olympia is just about worshipping the beautiful body; she's saying it's about a particular type of worship, which isn't frank and admiring and innocent, but purposeful and directed and corrupting.

James compounds his misreading when he writes:

Not many Jewish athletes were there to be filmed anyway, but there were black athletes present, and one of them was Jesse Owens, whom Leni didn’t hesitate to caress with her lenses as if he were a godlike figure.

She wasn’t having a thing with Owens. She was having that with another American, the decathlete Glenn Morris, whom she obliged to add an 11th discipline to his event. But she filmed Owens with loving appreciation. It’s a shameful consideration that no Hollywood director would have been encouraged to do the same, at the time. Owens in repose looked lovely anyway, and on the move he was poetic, but it took a fine eye and a lot of knowledge to get the poetry on film, and Leni knew how to do that with him and with many another athlete.

I've seen Olympia, both the first and second part; the way Owens is portrayed isn't anything to be commended--again, it's the 'loving appreciation' the slaveowner has for a particularly fine physical specimen.

It's not surprising to me that as a white male James misses the corruption inherent in Riefenstahl's version of the male gaze.

Further, Owens, like a racehorse, is only extolled by Riefenstahl for his animal strength and force (I can imagine her asking him to open his mouth so she can get a shot of his teeth), fascism's building base.

Much as Riefenstahl later, in the words of Sontag, commandeered the Nuba tribe in Africa:

What is distinctive about the fascist version of the old idea of the Noble Savage is its contempt for all that is reflective, critical, and pluralistic. In Riefenstahl's casebook of primitive virtue, it is hardly—as in Lévi-Strauss—the intricacy and subtlety of primitive myth, social organization, or thinking that is being extolled. Riefenstahl strongly recalls fascist rhetoric when she celebrates the ways the Nuba are exalted and unified by the physical ordeals of their wrestling matches, in which the "heaving and straining" Nuba men, "huge muscles bulging," throw one another to the ground—fighting not for material prizes but "for the renewal of the sacred vitality of the tribe."

Really, I think what's happening with James' essay, which only mentions Sontag once, dismissingly and at the end, is what Harold Bloom terms the anxiety of influence.

The Times really should've just reprinted her essay; and James knows that. Post-Sontag, there's nothing more to be said about Riefenstahl and fascism, any more than post-Arendt there's anything left to be said about Adolph Eichmann and bureaucracy. (It's fascinating to me that Sontag apparently had a crush on Arendt; my gosh, for a seat at their dinner table!)

So James writes what he does about Sontag while essentially regurgitating her thoughts, poorly at that. It's all understandable, I guess, he had to write something; just ironic given how he takes Riefenstahl to task for glossing over truth.

Uncredit photo of Riefenstahl from an incredibly-confused UCLA student project website.

The Times published an interesting letter on 4/8 that made a good related point about James' bias:

To the Editor:

I admired Clive James’s review (March 25) of the new Leni Riefenstahl biographies very much, but I wondered why James, almost throughout the essay, referred to Riefenstahl by her first name. The men he discusses — Hitler, Goebbels, Julius Streicher, Jesse Owens — are all called by their last names, but Riefenstahl is “Leni.” This often happens with female artists, and it always carries a note of condescension. (Would I, in this letter, speak of James as “Clive”?) The curious thing is that in his recent book, “Cultural Amnesia,” James nowhere places himself on a first-name basis with his female subjects. Why the reversion to the double standard with Riefenstahl? And do the editors of the Book Review think it’s O.K. to treat men and women differently in this regard?

Joan Acocella, New York

Liesl Schillinger in the Times Book Review, incidentally, reviewed James' latest bad boy tome a couple of weeks after the Riefenstahl piece; mostly forgettable review, except for this part:

A conversation with Martin Amis, about how, “no matter how much you admire a novel, after about a year you forget everything in it,” confirmed him in his practice of rereading much of what he’d already consumed. “If we can’t remember it all, we should at least have some idea of what we have forgotten,” he writes; that is the intention of this book. “The writer represents all the expressive people to whom he has ever paid attention, even if he disapproved of what they expressed,” James explains.