Riefenstahl’s fellow mountaineers had been defeated as German or Austrian soldiers; their imperial structures disappeared and made way for a republic. However, the war had left an indelible mark on their minds and bodies. In a 1931 essay, Ernst Jünger declared that this experience altered people for life. “Victors are those who, like salamanders, have gone through the school of danger.” It is not security, he argued, but danger that determines the future order of life. He went on to explain that technical tools, such as cameras and photographic lenses, ensure that man’s new relation to danger is rendered visible. Man in the modern era is both civilized and barbaric, and approaches the elemental with an acuity of consciousness born of technology and death.128 Jünger’s brief essay reads like a programmatic elucidation of Fanck’s films. The people Fanck chose for his movies sought out danger. The combination of the mastery of the body and the mastery of technical apparatus is the absolutely modern element of his films, his production method, and his crew. The body, technology, and nature are the guarantors of heroic experience. Riefenstahl was the first woman to be placed at the side of these men. But not all of them had come from the war; some were too young to have experienced it, as she would have been, had she been born a boy. Riefenstahl’s childhood years had been war years, lacking any sense of security, future, long-term prospects, or stability. The war was followed by an unloved revolution, insurgencies, inflation, and economic hardship, and this period instilled a manifest survival instinct and a lust for adventure in many young people. They were on a quest for something radically different. Hans Ertl (born in 1908), Albert Benitz (1904), Walter Frentz (1907), and Richard Angst (1905) would be Riefenstahl’s young cameramen. They were children of the war era, the way she was, and they called themselves “mountain vagabonds.” One of their few forms of entertainment was to watch movies, sitting in the cheap seats. Love stories or gangster movies left these men cold; they loved Fanck’s mountain films, where they could watch big strong men having adventures with skis and ropes high up in the mountains, adventures that demanded nothing but strength and courage.
Mountain vagabonds shied away from forming attachments down in the valley; asked to choose because “living girls or dead ice, dance or battle,” they opted for the dead ice and the battle. Getting involved with women, they felt, would diminish their passion and strength for mountain climbing. They were unconcerned with what would become of them, because times were hard and the future looked grim. Fanck could go on the assumption that his mountain vagabonds would pour their hearts and souls into their work. None of them had had any previous knowledge of photography or filmmaking, not even Angst, who would later become a noted cinematographer. Riefenstahl was the only woman in the group; she was surrounded by men who either had stories of their own to tell about the war or yearned for a great event on the war’s scale. Riefenstahl had the sound of the war stories in her ear; she knew the fears, the energy, the desires, and the arrogance of these men. Over the course of the many months that she spent alone with them in their secluded location, she got to know them quite well, body and soul. She shared the danger with them all, and her bed with many of them. But beyond what she learned in these years about men, war memories, and danger, she also disciplined her body in snow and ice, and appreciated the value of technology for artistic expression. The work on the mountains transformed the young woman into both a creature of nature and a well-versed technological apprentice. Both of these changes would serve her well in the next stage of her career.
BLUE
In 1931, Leni Riefenstahl began to feel as though time was running out on her. Her career as a dancer was clearly over, and she did not want the same to happen with her acting. She decided to make a movie herself. “I have studied the camera, I know about lenses, footage, and filters. I have edited films and have a sense of how new effects can be achieved. I’m wary about this, because I am an actress and don’t want to split my energies. Still, I can’t change the fact that I see everything with the eyes of a filmmaker. I would like to make pictures myself.”1
Riefenstahl related two versions of how she was able to make this wish come true. According to the earlier one, which is far briefer and more matter-of-fact, she wrote a treatment for a cinematic fairy tale. Her friends liked what they read, but the film producers to whom she sent it deemed it boring. Determined not to give up, she put together her savings, had her ex-boyfriend Schneeberger agree to serve as cameraman without pay, and accepted the lead role in The White Frenzy in order to invest her earnings in a production of her own. She was short fifty thousand reichsmarks, but eventually Sokal agreed to help with the financing.
The later version was replete with accusations, aimed principally at Fanck. She felt that the filming of The White Frenzy was one long affront. Fanck, she claimed, was as sadistic as ever, and tormented her with a role that was far beneath her: “At almost every opportunity, the director asked me to cry out ‘Oh, great!’ I found it repugnant and I just couldn’t get it across my lips. The result was tears and fights with Fanck, who enjoyed it.”2 Klaus Mann saw the movie and wrote in his diary on January 8, 1932: “With E., R., and Babs in ‘White Frenzy’ (Phöbus); astonishingly bad, and monotonous, snow and ski film with the insufferably rotten Leni Riefenstahl.”3 According to Riefenstahl’s second version, she would be able to make her film only if she could stand up to Fanck and Sokal, who both took pleasure in humiliating her. She took on the director role out of financial necessity. It was only after she had pawned her jewelry and art and made the first screen tests that Sokal decided to finance the production and Fanck sent her an enthusiastic telegram. Her artistry had won over the two adversaries, and she could forge ahead.
The truth probably lies somewhere in between. The story about her financial difficulty served only as a pretext to downplay her ambition. It is hard to imagine that a person as egocentric as Leni Riefenstahl would consider entrusting her own screenplay to another director. And Sokal was closer to her than she was willing to admit. In 1932, they both lived at Hindenburgstrasse 97 in Wilmersdorf—on the same floor of the building. In Berlin, rumors swirled about their engagement, yet Sokal continued to deny that he had been one of her lovers.
For me, her many love affairs and tragedies became a source of neverending amusement, as long as they didn’t take place during my films. Sometimes they lasted only a matter of days, but during those days, Leni was totally engrossed in the partner in question, almost convinced that she loved him. Until the next one caught her eye and she loved him in turn. These partners were always the best in their field: whether they were a producer, director, actor, skier, or tennis player, they were unvaryingly the champions; her nymphomania, if we are to call it that, had an elitist bent.4
Before the start of shooting, she founded her own production company, L. R. Studio Films, Inc. Sokal oversaw the finances and organization while the movie was being filmed. This solved many problems. But Riefenstahl was a novice in the cutting room and feared that her work lacked suspense. She asked Fanck if he was willing to help her out, and handed over the print to him. They agreed that he would have a look at it and that they would bring it to the editing table together the following day. When she came by the next morning, however, Fanck announced that he had re-edited the film during the night, changing every scene in the process. Riefenstahl was convinced that he had ruined her movie. She worked hard to salvage it, but her relationship with Fanck was over. “I was no longer under his influence. My new, independent career had begun.”5 It is unclear whether Fanck’s fears of losing her really did drive him to destroy the film, but Riefenstahl’s subsequent version came with a major advantage: in this version, the film arose solely from her own genius. His influence on her ended when he destroyed her first film; according to this new legend, parting ways with Fanck enabled her to emerge as a director.
In the literary estate of Béla Balázs, who worked with Riefenstahl on the screenplay for The Blue Light, as her movie came to be called, there is a letter Leni Ri
efenstahl wrote to him from Moscow in February 1932 that casts doubt on the second version of her story. The letter clearly indicates that Fanck was involved in editing the film, and Riefenstahl appreciated his work. She wrote that the screening of the material she had edited had been “devastating,” and that the film seemed “insanely boring and stiff, overstated and unnatural.” Fanck re-edited and thus saved the film, and Riefenstahl praised his work to Balázs.6 Fanck contributed significantly to the success of The Blue Light—a fact that Riefenstahl never admitted in public.7 The dramatic end of the relationship between Riefenstahl and Fanck, as depicted in her memoirs, shows how much she feared Fanck’s destructive energy. For her, it was a repetition of a similar situation ten years earlier. Back then, her father had wanted to forbid her to dance, and she had to go behind his back. Riefenstahl knew that there was only one solution for her to get away from Fanck: she had to be better than he was. In her mind, it was not a contradiction that she brought Fanck into the filmmaking process in order to achieve this goal. She had no qualms when it came to putting forward her art. The visual language of her movie had to differ markedly from Fanck’s. She wanted to strike a new path in form and content.
Riefenstahl chose her cast and crew carefully for her ambitious project. True to her principles, she positioned herself as the only woman. She surrounded herself with men who had demonstrated their loyalty to her, had been her lovers, or had at least shown that they worshipped her, starting with her three cast-off paramours, Sokal (producer), Fanck (editor and adviser), and Schneeberger (camera). Walter Riml, whom she got to know and grew fond of during the filming of The Great Leap and The White Frenzy, was an excellent sportsman from the mountains. He was put in charge of the still photography, and he took the Junta photograph that has been reproduced countless times. Mathias Wieman, who had appeared in Avalanche with her, was the male lead. Heinz von Jaworsky served as both camera assistant and press secretary.8
A key member of the team whom Riefenstahl left unmentioned, presumably so that she could take all the credit for the film’s success, was Carl Mayer. His work on the film is briefly mentioned in her book Struggle in Snow and Ice (1933), and then sixty years later in Ray Müller’s film The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl: “I met Carl Mayer, the well-known screenwriter, the best one, who had written the Murnau films, and Béla Balázs, who was then considered the best screenwriter, and they were so taken with the subject matter that they offered good advice, and Balázs even helped out without a fee.”9 In a letter to the film scholar Jürgen Kasten dated February 1994, she put forward a different version, stating that she would have liked to work with Carl Mayer, but Mayer was too busy and recommended Béla Balázs to her.10 Perhaps this version was a reflection of her failing memory. In any event, it certainly appears as though Mayer helped shape her first film.
When Riefenstahl met Mayer, he had already made film history by cowriting the script for The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari with Hans Janowitz.11 He had been working in the film business for more than twenty years and had written six screenplays for F. W. Murnau, including the classic The Last Laugh. Mayer worked with Paul Czinner and Elisabeth Bergner on the Schnitzler adaptation Fräulein Else and with Gerhard Lamprecht on Emil and the Detectives. They probably met during the filming of Avalanche. Mayer had also been involved with this screenplay.12 Riefenstahl knew that Mayer was regarded as the best visual screenwriter in the business. “A script by Carl Mayer was already a film,” was cameraman Karl Freund’s oft-cited pronouncement. That must have made him interesting for her, as she was pursuing the goal of creating entirely new images for her first film. Riefenstahl was intent on making people believe that she had effortlessly achieved a masterpiece with The Blue Light as a director and screenwriter. She later made a point of concealing the fact that this success was not solely an outgrowth of her artistic genius. In the book she wrote in 1933, she was still recounting long nights of discussing the script with Mayer, but sixty years later, this collaboration was reduced to a couple of “good bits of advice,” and in the intervening years, she never even mentioned him.
Mayer conveyed his stories through imagery. His scripts juxtapose technical directions with visual cues. In Joseph Roth’s view, “These directions reveal the structure of the creative process: the poetic vision is transformed (consciously or unconsciously) into the cinematic way of seeing. Intuition has formed a bond with technology.”13 Along those same lines, Riefenstahl wrote:
Images arose from my dreams. I made out the hazy shape of a young girl who lived in the mountains, a creature of nature. I saw her climbing, saw her in the moonlight; I watched her being chased and pelted with stones, and finally I dreamed of this girl falling away from a wall of rock and slowly plunging into the depths. These images seized hold of me and grew more vivid, and one day, I wrote everything down as an eighteen-page treatment.14
She put her faith in technology to render the poetic imagery she was after in visual terms rather than in dialogue. She mistrusted words, and The Blue Light has elements of a silent film. The main character, Junta, does say a few words in Italian, but her true medium is her body. The viewer’s lasting impression of Junta centers on her haunted look and her fitful, tremulous movements. Mayer, a shy yet friendly man, had a penchant for imbuing outsiders with symbolic meaning, which may be why he was eager to craft the story of the beautiful Junta, who remains an outsider among the mountain people. It is also known that he had had enough of studio films and was interested in taking a different approach. Moreover, he was plagued with debt, and in need of a source of income. For Riefenstahl, who was determined to make a name for herself as an author and director, meeting him must have been a stroke of good luck. Mayer transformed trifles into art.
Balázs wrote the dialogue and helped Riefenstahl shoot the film when she was on camera. Like Mayer, he was a devotee of the silent film and reinforced Riefenstahl’s resolve to shoot The Blue Light using its aesthetics. Born Herbert Bauer in 1884 in southern Hungary, he adopted the name Béla Balázs in 1913. In the same year, he converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism. He later became a member of the famous Sunday Circle in Budapest, along with Georg Lukács, René Spitz, Karl Mannheim, and Arnold Hauser. They held casual meetings in Balázs’s apartment, where they enjoyed debates that ran from Sunday at three in the afternoon until 3 a.m. the next morning about Cézanne, the aesthetics of German romanticism, or French poetry. During the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Balázs became the acting director of the People’s Commissariat for Education, in charge of literature and art. During this turbulent period, he met the future film producer Alexander Korda (Sándor Korda), Ladislav Vajda (László Vajda, the co-screenwriter of the Piz Palü film), and Michael Curtiz (Mihály Kertész), who later directed Casablanca. When the Soviet Republic collapsed, Balázs fled to Vienna. He wanted to be seen as an artist, and he parted ways with Lukács.15 Balázs believed that communism was the only path to human spiritualization and sought spirituality in the taverns of the Puszta, in the faces of the rebels, in the bosoms of the nursemaids, and, when he worked with Riefenstahl, in the Sarntal peasants.16 In 1926, he moved to Berlin. He wanted to make films, express his views, and earn money. Balázs wrote two books about film as the beginning of a new age, both of which are considered important even today.17 With Korda he shot the film Madame Doesn’t Want Children, with Berthold Viertel and Margo Lion, Adventures of a Ten Mark Note. By 1928, his work as a screenwriter had begun to stagnate. It is difficult to determine whether his lack of success resulted from his political views or his mediocre screenplays. None of his planned projects came to fruition.
Several factors seem to have prompted Balázs to work with Riefenstahl. Both of them had yet to achieve a real breakthrough. Like Balázs, Riefenstahl repeatedly criticized the “industry” before, during, and after National Socialism. She declared that for her first film, she wanted to steer clear of the industry, by which she meant the major film companies, which were supposedly unwilling to finance true work
s of art. Balázs and Riefenstahl joined forces to display their artistry to the world and defy the movie-making establishment. Heinz von Jaworsky reported that Balázs had a strong political influence on Riefenstahl: “Riefenstahl held political views similar to those of Balázs, that is, left-wing.”18 She and Balázs regarded themselves as misunderstood geniuses whom the industry was holding back from realizing their ideas.
In the spring of 1931, they began working on Riefenstahl’s screenplay, and it was completed in mid-June. Balázs visited her in St. Anton during the shooting of The White Frenzy to work with her on it. There has been speculation that the two of them were having a love affair, and he wanted to be close to her for that reason as well.19 If we take her account at face value, the filming of The Blue Light proceeded flawlessly. The crew she put together proved to be a dedicated group. “We were like a family of eight. Everything was paid from a common kitty. Each of us tried to spend as little as possible so as to keep the kitty going as long as we could. If the soles of someone’s boots got torn, or something similarly urgent was needed, the money came from this kitty.”20 The photographs Walter Riml took during the filming convey this sentiment. We see a group of young people looking cheerful and utterly devoted. They all had one goal in mind: to film this magnificent woman and artist. Riefenstahl needed to be surrounded by men who were loyal to or in love with her. She found the work on this film quite stressful, and often felt on the verge of a nervous breakdown. In times of crisis, however, she proved to have nerves of steel. At one point, the entire group was stopped at the border en route to Italy, and the customs officials demanded a large sum of money from them, which they did not have. She proceeded to send a telegram to Rome, to the personal attention of Benito Mussolini, whom she had never met, asking him to waive the customs duties. After six tense hours they learned that Il Duce had given them the green light, and the group was allowed to go through the Brenner Pass.21
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