Riefenstahl Screened: An Anthology of New Criticism (review)

Riefenstahl Screened offers a number of unconventional analyses of Riefenstahl's work and persona that move beyond well-worn discussions of aesthetics, innovative cinematic techniques and montage, and complicity in the Nazi regime. Whereas Siegfried Kracauer and Susan Sontag have traced a trajectory of "fascist aesthetics" from Riefenstahl's Alpine films, Nazi-era films, and postwar Nuba photographs, the editors' goal is to investigate the fascination that Riefenstahl's oeuvre and image held and still hold over viewers and scholars. Divided into four thematic sections, the text addresses the intersection of politics and aesthetics, the reverberation of Riefenstahl's persona and films in popular culture, historical and theoretical perspectives on her oeuvre, and the director's legacy and iconic status. While all the essays provide thought-provoking discussions of her works or her myth and demonstrate thorough research, their scholarly quality and pedagogical usefulness varies. However, the volume as a whole offers fresh perspectives for both scholars and film students on her impact as a filmmaker and her status as a figure of controversy.

The first section, "Aesthetics," consists of insightful essays that analyze the political and social implications of her cinematic style. Riefenstahl's films have been viewed both as expressing "fascist aesthetics" and as avant-garde "works of art." As Georg Seesslen observes, the strict demarcation of popular culture—to which the former belongs—and high culture no longer apply. Seesslen analyzes the myths in her films, in particular the mythologizing of Hitler in Triumph of the Will and the male body in Olympia, a documentary of the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics. He claims: "In the Riefenstahl aesthetic, the driving forces of fear and desire are suspended in a monumentalized world of images" (23). Although Seesslen does not offer a new interpretation of the impact of her images, he convincingly explains the renewed interest in her films as part of "the new brutality of neoliberalism" of the 1980s (29). Carsten Strathausen argues for a shift away from a "production oriented" definition of "fascist aesthetics" to a "reception-oriented" approach. He correctly contends that Nazi aesthetics can be defined not by a "fixed set of tangible characteristics or stylistic patterns," but by the "transformative and self-realizing power of images and ideas" (34, 35). However, by analyzing the aesthetic of her images, one runs the risk of negating their political content (Riefenstahl herself perceived her aesthetic as beyond morality). I agree with Strathausen that "there is nothing to be gained any-more from rehearsing the same old debate about her personal guilt or innocence vis-à-vis the horrors of German fascism" (37). This section concludes with Lutz Koepnick's essay on the aesthetics of slow motion in Olympia. He offers a fine analysis of decelerated images of athletes as "celebrating profound moments of psycho-physical transformation and transcendence," but also depicts their limits: her shots are devoid of "the unpredictable, relational, flexible, and forceless force of playfulness" (61, 68). He concludes that, for Riefenstahl, history has meaning only when "framed by the camera" and "mirrored in the timeless forms of the past," and that she cannot imagine history "as something open to intervention, change, and multiplicity" (69).

In the second section, "Afterlife," the contributors examine the appropriation of Riefenstahl's images and persona in subsequent films. David Bathrick examines Charlie Chaplin's visual citations of Triumph of the Will in his Hitler parody The Great Dictator, Frank Capra's use of film clips of Triumph in his propagandistic and overtly anti-German World War II films Why We Fight and in the postwar documentary The Nazi Plan, which played a pivotal role in the proceedings and outcome of the first Nuremberg trial. In his scathing critique of Ray Mueller's documentary The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, Kansteiner correctly accuses Mueller of failing to set the record straight of the inaccuracies and lies in Riefenstahl's interviews, but fails to mention...