Theater of Cruelty

by Ian Buruma

  Olympia: Festival of Nations begins with a familiar melange of the neoclassical cult of Greece and moody Fanck-like cloudscapes, suggesting a continuity between ancient Greece and modern Germany. The famous sculpture of Discobolus, the discus thrower, slowly dissolves into a nude athlete, shot in Delphi. This film image has been interpreted as a tribute to Aryan manhood. And Hitler was so keen on the sculpture (the original of which no longer existed) that he bought a Roman copy in 1938. In fact, however, the Romantic identification with ancient Greece started long before the Nazis appropriated such imagery, and the model chosen by Riefenstahl was not German but a dusky Russian youth named Anatol Dobriansky, whom, as Bach tells us, she briefly took as her lover after paying his parents a fee.

  Riefenstahl was as anti-Semitic as most of her compatriots, that is, enough to turn a blind eye to the persecution of Jews without, so far as we know, necessarily welcoming their extermination. But Olympia cannot be described as a racist film, and Riefenstahl’s personal taste in men was neither racist nor nationalistic; she had had Jewish lovers, and after she discarded the Russian boy, she took up with Glenn Morris, the American decathlon winner. If there is one heroic model of physical perfection in Olympia, it is Jesse Owens, the black American athlete.

  Racism, however, is not an essential part of the argument that Riefenstahl’s aesthetic was typically fascist. It is the cult of physical perfection itself that is considered to be a fascist attribute, for it implies that the physically imperfect are sick and should be treated as inferior human beings. The cult of physical perfection is linked to the Darwinian struggle, where the strong not only prevail but must be celebrated, even worshiped for their physical power. This would apply to individuals in sporting contests, as well as to nations or races.

  That the Nazis held such views is clear, and Riefenstahl herself was not immune to them. But Olympia is a film about athletes, about physical prowess, about using the body to achieve maximum power and grace. Riefenstahl’s stated aim—and there is no reason to doubt her word on this—was “to shoot the Olympics more closely, more dramatically than sports had ever been captured on celluloid.” And this, assisted by forty-five excellent cameramen and seven months’ work in the editing room, is precisely what she delivered.

  She went way beyond Fanck in visual experimentation: cameras were attached to balloons and light planes, suspended from the necks of marathon runners, and fastened to horses’ saddles. Some of the action was filmed from specially dug trenches or from the top of steel pillars. She enraged Goebbels with her incessant demands and financial extravagance. Other camera crews were rudely pushed aside and the concentration of athletes was carelessly interrupted. Some scenes were restaged and spliced together with other footage. She broke all the rules and was a pain to everyone, but she produced a cinematic masterpiece. Jürgen Trimborn is right to call it “an aesthetic milestone in film history.”

  But if Olympia is indeed a tribute to physical perfection, it is a frosty perfection. Individual character, human emotion, none of this appears to have mattered to Riefenstahl. Bach talks about “the sensual, even erotic quality that pervades much of Olympia,” and Sontag’s critique was aimed at what she called the “eroticization of fascism.” This might be a matter of taste, but the nudity in Olympia strikes me as oddly unerotic, even unhomoerotic, despite Riefenstahl’s fascination with naked men frolicking in sauna baths and jumping into lakes. The film has the cold beauty of a polished white marble sculpture by Canova. Mario Praz’s description of Canova as the “erotic frigidaire” could apply to Riefenstahl as well, her own frolicking with many men notwithstanding.5

  The Hellenistic and Romantic traditions echoed in Olympia can be found in official Nazi art, to be sure, but also in paintings by Jacques-Louis David, another opportunistic court artist and celebrator of revolutionary heroism. He, too, was fascinated with nude warriors, great leaders, and Romantic death scenes. But this does not diminish the beauty of his art. Just as one can admire David’s paintings without being a Napoleon worshiper, it should be possible to separate the cold beauty of Olympia from its political context. Triumph of the Will, however skillfully contrived, is nothing but political context. Its only purpose was political. Olympia is essentially about sports.

  The problem with Riefenstahl, and the main reason for her limitations as an artist, is that she was not just an erotic frigidaire but an emotional one too. Her lack of human understanding, or any feeling for human beings apart from pure aesthetics, does not matter so much in a film like Olympia. It matters hugely in a feature film about love, rejection, and intrigue. Tiefland, which took Riefenstahl more than a decade to finish, and was finally released in 1954, is exactly what Bach says it is, “a kitsch curiosity, as nearly unwatchable as any film ever released by a world-class director.”

  The theme of a child of nature (Riefenstahl) persecuted by the wicked denizens of decadent civilization is familiar. The sight of Riefenstahl doing a pastiche of flamenco dancing surrounded by Spanish-looking extras is beyond camp; it is plainly embarrassing. That the extras were in fact Gypsies plucked by Riefenstahl from a camp in Salzburg,6 where they were imprisoned before being sent to Auschwitz, added to her monstrous reputation. She lied about them too, claiming that they all happily survived the war. Most didn’t. But the film fails artistically, not because it is fascist but because it is clumsily staged like a bad silent movie, with histrionic gestures (echoing Riefenstahl’s expressionist dancing days) making up for plausible human emotions. It was as though nothing had changed since the 1920s.

  Apart from everything else, the Nazi period did enormous damage to German artistic expression. The German language was poisoned by the bureaucratic jargon of mass murder, and art had been tainted so badly by the Nazi appropriation of Romanticism and classicism that aesthetic traditions had to be fumigated, as it were, by a new critical spirit. A younger generation of artists such as Anselm Kiefer, writers such as Günter Grass, and filmmakers such as Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder were able to do this. But a critical reinvention of German art was beyond the abilities of Riefenstahl. She was, in any case, too defensive about her own past to develop a critical attitude.

  Let off by “de-Nazification” courts as a “fellow traveler,” Riefenstahl couldn’t stop playing the persecuted victim who had known nothing of the Nazi crimes, had been forced to make what she claimed were purely documentary films, and had adored her Gypsy extras. She was nothing but a pure artist in pursuit of beauty, and would sue just about anyone who contradicted her. Many projects were prepared, most of them in the Romantic Fanckian vein, none of them from a critical perspective: a remake of The Blue Light; yet another Alpine vehicle called The Red Devils; a paean to primitive Spain entitled Bullfights and Madonnas; and a movie about Frederick the Great and Voltaire, to be written by Jean Cocteau, who was one of the very few admirers of Tiefland. “You and I,” he told Riefenstahl, “live in the wrong century.” It was a rather charitable view of both their records in the mid-twentieth century.

  Riefenstahl only made a comeback of sorts in the early 1970s, when she published two hugely successful photography books on the Nuba: The Last of the Nuba and People of Kau. The color photographs of nude wrestlers, men covered in ash, face paintings, and beautiful girls lathered in butter are competently taken but not works of artistic genius. The subjects are so striking that it would not have been difficult for Riefenstahl to come up with something interesting. Putting herself in a position to do so, however, was not so easy. The Nuba were distrustful of snoops. Riefenstahl, now in her sixties, had the energy, the perseverance, and the thick-skinned gumption to manage it.

  The beauty of athletic young black people had always fascinated her; one of her failed projects was a film about the slave trade entitled Black Cargo. Capturing the Nuba on film was inspired by the spectacular black-and-white pictures of them taken by the British photographer George Rodger in 1951. When Riefenstahl offered to pay him for useful introductions, he replied: “Dear madam, kn
owing your background and mine I don’t really have anything to say to you at all.”

  Rodger was with the British troops as a photographer for Life magazine when they liberated Bergen-Belsen. He was shocked to find himself “subconsciously arranging groups and bodies on the ground into artistic compositions in the viewfinder.” This is quite a good description of Riefenstahl’s way of looking at the world, even though she never applied it to emaciated victims of torture and murder. As she said in an interview with Cahiers du Cinéma, quoted by Sontag: “I am fascinated by what is beautiful, strong, healthy, what is living. I seek harmony. When harmony is produced I am happy.”7 She meant: Jesse Owens, Nazi storm troopers, the Nuba.

  Does this make her a lifelong fascist aesthete? Are her pictures of the Nuba infected by the same venom as the footage of SA men stamping to the sounds of the “Horst Wessel Song”? It is hard to maintain that they are. To be sure, the culture of the Nuba that interested Riefenstahl was not intellectually reflective, pacific, pluralist, or much associated with anything one would call liberal. But it is a stretch to see the tribal ceremonies of a people in the Sudan as a continuum of Hitler’s rallies in Nuremberg. Nor is it fair to describe a viewer’s enjoyment of Riefenstahl’s color photographs of wrestlers and naked youths as politically suspect. The Nuba are what they are, or, more accurately, were what they were when Riefenstahl got to them. Their appeal to her was certainly of a piece with her views on urban civilization. Like the characters she portrayed in Fanck’s mountain movies, she saw them as nature’s children: this was condescending perhaps, Romantic absolutely, but hardly fascism.

  Riefenstahl went on working almost to her dying day in September 2003. She sustained injuries from various crashes. Her morbid attempts to defy her age—the thick streaks of makeup, the straw-blond wigs, the hormone injections and facial surgery—gave her the appearance of an old man in drag. But there she was, celebrating her centennial in the company of Siegfried and Roy, from Las Vegas, and Reinhold Messner, the mountaineer, a week after the premiere on television of her last work, entitled Underwater Impressions. As the oldest scuba diver in the world, she had spent the last two decades of her life photographing coral reefs and marine life with her much younger lover Horst Kettner.

  The endless images of tropical fish and brightly colored sea anemones were not particularly well received. One reviewer, quoted by Bach, called Underwater Impressions “the world’s most beautiful screen saver.” Another spoke of “Triumph of the Gill.” But Riefenstahl felt at home underwater capturing the silent beauty of a yet unblemished natural world. In her own words, it had sheltered her “from the outside world, removing all problems and worries.” Perhaps best of all, it was a world entirely devoid of anything remotely human.

  1 Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl (Knopf, 2007).

  2 Under the Sign of Saturn (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972).

  3 Quoted in The Guardian, April 16, 2007.

  4 Translated from the German by Edna McCown (Faber and Faber, 2008).

  5 Bach relates how in 1933 Riefenstahl was partying with a group of men in the sauna of a Swiss hotel when she took a phone call from Göring, who informed her that Hitler had become chancellor of the Reich.

  6 The camp was in the fields near Schloss Leopoldskron, which had belonged before the Anschluss to Max Reinhardt, the theater director, and was later used as a location for The Sound of Music.

  7 Under the Sign of Saturn, p. 85.

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  WERNER HERZOG AND HIS HEROES

  IN HER MEMOIR about Bruce Chatwin, Susannah Clapp tells the following story. Not long before his death, already very ill, Chatwin was receiving guests in his room at the Ritz in London. Many of them left with a gift. One friend was given a small jagged object which Chatwin identified as a subincision knife, used to slit the urethra in an Aboriginal initiation rite. He had found it in the Australian bush, he said, with his connoisseur’s eye: “It’s obviously made from some sort of desert opal. It’s a wonderful color, almost the color of chartreuse.” Not long after, the director of the Australian National Gallery spotted the object in the grateful recipient’s house. He held it up to the light and muttered: “Hmmm. Amazing what the Abos can do with a bit of an old beer bottle.”1

  Chatwin had the gift of polishing reality like Aladdin’s lamp to produce stories of deep and alluring mystery. He was a mythmaker, a fabulist who could turn the most banal facts into poetry. To question the veracity of his stories is to miss the point. He was neither a reporter nor a scholar, but a raconteur of the highest order. The beauty of this type of writing lies in the perfect metaphor that appears to illuminate what lies under the factual surface. Another master of the genre was Ryszard Kapuściński, the Polish literary chronicler of third-world tyrannies and coups. One entire book of his, The Emperor, a poetic rendering of life in the court of Haile Selassie, is often read as a metaphor for Poland under communism—an interpretation denied by the author himself.

  The German film director Werner Herzog was a friend of Chatwin’s as well as Kapuściński’s. He made a film—by no means his best—of one of Chatwin’s books, entitled Cobra Verde,2 about a half-crazed Brazilian slave trader in West Africa, played by a half-crazed Klaus Kinski. The match was a natural one, for Herzog, too, shares the gift of the great fabulators. In his many interviews—remarkably many for a man who says he would prefer to work anonymously, like a medieval artisan—Herzog often compares himself to the Moroccan spellbinders who tell stories in the marketplace of Marrakech. As was true of Chatwin and Kapuściński, Herzog feels a great affinity with what a friend of mine, much at home in Africa himself and quite critical of Kapuściński, has called “tropical baroque”—remote desert countries or dense Amazonian jungles.3 Like them, Herzog—modestly of course, as if it’s really of no great consequence—likes to tell tales of his own frightful hardships and narrowly missed catastrophes: filthy African jails, deadly floods in Peru, rampaging bulls in Mexico. In a BBC interview filmed in Los Angeles, Herzog, in his deep, mesmerizing voice, is just explaining how in Germany nobody appreciates his films anymore, when you hear a loud crack. Herzog doubles over. He’s been shot by an air rifle just above his floral underpants, leaving a nasty wound. “It’s of no significance,” he says in his deadpan Bavarian drone. “It doesn’t surprise me to get shot at.”4 This is such a Herzogian moment that you would almost suspect that he directed the whole thing himself.

  The suspicion is not entirely frivolous, for Herzog not only expresses no interest in literal truth; he despises it. Cinema verité, the art of catching truth on the run with an often handheld camera, he dismisses as “the accountant’s truth.” While Kapuściński always maintained that he was a reporter and denied making things up for poetic or metaphorical effect, Herzog is quite open about inventing scenes in his documentary films, for which he is justly famous. In fact, he doesn’t recognize a distinction between his documentaries and his fiction films. As he told Paul Cronin in Herzog on Herzog5: “Even though they are usually labeled as such, I would say that it is misleading to call films like Bells from the Deep and Death for Five Voices ‘documentaries.’ They merely come under the guise of documentaries.” And Fitzcarraldo, a fiction film about a late-nineteenth-century rubber baron (played by Kinski) who dreams of building an opera house in the Peruvian jungle and has a ship pulled across a mountain, has been described by Herzog as his most successful documentary.

  The opposite of “accountant’s truth” for Herzog is “ecstatic truth.” In an appearance at the New York Public Library, he explained: “I’m after something that is more like an ecstasy of truth, something where we step beyond ourselves, something that happens in religion sometimes, like medieval mystics.”6 He achieves this to wonderful effect in Bells from the Deep, a film about faith and superstition in Russia—Jesus figures in Siberia and the like, another fascination he shared with Chatwin. The movie opens with an extraordinary, hallucinatory image of people crawling on the surface of a frozen lake, peering thr
ough the ice, as though in prayer to some unseen god. In fact, as Herzog narrates, they are looking for a great lost city called Kitezh that lies buried under the ice of this bottomless lake. The city had been sacked long ago by Tartar invaders, but God sent an archangel to redeem the inhabitants by letting them live on in deep underwater bliss, chanting hymns and tolling bells.

  The legend exists and the image is hauntingly beautiful. It is also entirely fake. Herzog rounded up a few drunks at a local village bar and paid them to lie on the ice. As he tells the story: “One of them has his face right on the ice and looks like he is in very deep meditation. The accountant’s truth: he was completely drunk and fell asleep, and we had to wake him at the end of the take.” Was it cheating? No, says Herzog, because “only through invention and fabrication and staging can you reach a more intense level of truth that cannot otherwise be found.”

  This is exactly what admirers of Chatwin say. And I must confess to being one of them. But not without some feeling of ambivalence. The power of the image is surely enhanced by the belief that these are real pilgrims and not drunks who are paid to impersonate pilgrims. If a film, or book, is presented as being factually accurate, there has to be a certain degree of trust in veracity that is not the same as the suspension of disbelief. Once you know the real unembellished story, some of the magic is lost, at least to me. And yet the genius of Herzog as a cinematic spellbinder is such that his documentaries work even as fiction. In defense of his peculiar style, it might be said that he uses invention not to falsify truth but to sharpen it, enhance it, make it more vivid. One of his favorite tricks is to invent dreams for his characters, or visions they never had, which nonetheless ring true because they are in keeping with the characters. His subjects are always people with whom he feels a personal affinity. In a way the main characters in his films, feature and documentary, are all variations of Herzog himself.