Status
Available
Genres
Publication
Knopf (2007), Edition: 1St Edition, 400 pages
Description
Leni Riefenstahl, the woman best known as "Hitler's filmmaker," is one of the most controversial personalities of the twentieth century. Her story is one of huge talent and huger ambition, one that probes the sometimes blurred borders dividing art and beauty from truth and humanity. Two of her films, Olympia and Triumph of the Will, are universally regarded as among the greatest and most innovative documentaries ever made, but they are also insidious glorifications of Hitler and the Third Reich. Relying on new sources--including interviews with her colleagues and intimate friends, as well as on previously unknown recordings of Riefenstahl herself--biographer Bach untangles the truths and lies behind this gifted woman's lifelong self-vindication as an apolitical artist who claimed she knew nothing of the Holocaust and denied her complicity with the criminal regime she both used and sanctified.--From publisher description.… (more)
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LibraryThing member pricer2312
"‘O opportunity! thy guilt is great, ‘Tis thou that execut’st the traitor’s treason;Thou set’st the wolf where he the lamb may get."
That's from Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece.
And speaking of opportunism run rampant, I've been working my way through Leni: The Life and Work of Leni
If this biography is accurate, or even close to accurate, wow. Just, wow. Riefenstahl was such an opportunist that she was definitely self-deluding, like many people at that time, but also a true narcissist. It is unbelieveable how cold and self-serving she was, pulling Gypsies from transport to use them as extras in her movie, for example, spoiling the children, giving them hopes for the future, then glibly sending them back on their way to the death camps. She hand-picked her Gypsies from camps, but then she swore she never knew the camps existed. Crazy.
Bach builds a portrait of a self-described artistic genius who was really a genius of opportunism. She maintained her own illusions and lies for years, building a facade around herself and never admitting its damage bymere facts or her own mistakes...it's incredible.
I do recommend this book, if you can take it. It's amazingly thorough and the photographs alone are very telling. My only quibble is that Bach has pages and pages of notes in the back, but no numbers, etc to reference them to in the text. I would like to read some of the supporting information. The whole story is terrible and fascinating.
That's from Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece.
And speaking of opportunism run rampant, I've been working my way through Leni: The Life and Work of Leni
Show More
Riefenstahl by Stephen Bach. It's slow going; two checkouts from the public library weren't enough. I had to place an interlibrary loan request through the library at Job #1. I'm not much of a biography fan, but I heard an interview with the author on NPR and had to check this one out.If this biography is accurate, or even close to accurate, wow. Just, wow. Riefenstahl was such an opportunist that she was definitely self-deluding, like many people at that time, but also a true narcissist. It is unbelieveable how cold and self-serving she was, pulling Gypsies from transport to use them as extras in her movie, for example, spoiling the children, giving them hopes for the future, then glibly sending them back on their way to the death camps. She hand-picked her Gypsies from camps, but then she swore she never knew the camps existed. Crazy.
Bach builds a portrait of a self-described artistic genius who was really a genius of opportunism. She maintained her own illusions and lies for years, building a facade around herself and never admitting its damage bymere facts or her own mistakes...it's incredible.
I do recommend this book, if you can take it. It's amazingly thorough and the photographs alone are very telling. My only quibble is that Bach has pages and pages of notes in the back, but no numbers, etc to reference them to in the text. I would like to read some of the supporting information. The whole story is terrible and fascinating.
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LibraryThing member Erin14
I am currently reading, "Leni" about Hitler's number one film maker during his rule of Nazi Germany. Prior to reading this book, I had seen two of Leni's propaganda films and marveled at her artistic ability and content.
This book is eye opening in that there are numerous events, (abuses of those
This book is eye opening in that there are numerous events, (abuses of those
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groups of people not favored by the Nazi party), Leni witnessed but denied until the day she died. Through her work on films, the reader is able to see some goals of the Nazis through the film productions they greenlighted. Show Less
LibraryThing member Periodista
This is one for ardent Nazism-philes--the completists--and people that somehow have never heard of Leni Riefenstahl. I'd seen Ray Muller's authorized documentary, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of LR, in the mid-1990s. It was part of a three-part series on Nazi artists with after-lifes sponsored by
If you've seen that doc or even noted the controversies of her final three or four decades (always the same controversy, that is) or have been fortunate to see the full-length screenings of Triumph of Will or the Olympiad, you will be wondering about the value of her work, especially everything aside from those two famous documentaries. As Muller pointed out, this is a woman with a 70-year career.
You will be disappointed. I don't think that even fifty pages cover LR's post Nazi-life and work.
Why was LR such a lightening rod when so many other Nazi filmmakers quietly slipped back into the industry including the one who made the most anti-Semitic film of all, Jew Suss? Bach notes that, but doesn't seem to wonder himself. Maybe there was a female factor? Were the others made public sincere regrets? In LR's final two decades, he tells us that film journals devoted special issues to her and that retrospectives (of what exactly?) were held in LA, Tokyo and so on. I longed for more information than that.
FWIW, it seems doubtful that she was very anti-Semitic herself--not more than the average European of the day--because she had a German lover for several years and worked with many Jews in her early films. However, she was a monstrous opportunist, as Andrew Sarris has pointed out, willing to ditch anyone (or use gypsies on their way to death camps in Tiefland) in the way of her ambition. Surely some shrinks have dissected her personality type? There doesn't seem to be anything striking in her childhood that would have formed such a ego.
And the viewpoints of her Africa photo books and film on the Nuba don't seem any different from those of early anthropologists or the confections of the present-day tourism industry. Still common among tourists today, notably the French, who can't be bothered learning anything more about a people if boo hoo! They're wearing T-shirts! They're spoiled by consumerism.
Tokyo in the early 1990s ...hmm, what did the critic Donald Richie have to say? Germany and Japan, of course were allies, and the Japanese to this day haven't done the soul-searching, film making and cultural education that the Germans have done. Some Japanese even claim that, along with European Jews, that they were the greatest victims. So the perspective might have been interesting.
It's important to bear in mind that Bach was always on the business side of the movie biz. He's not a critic or screenwriter or dp. Occasionally, when discussing the alpine and iceberg movies, made prior to Triumph of Will and the Olympiad, he'll borrow from a critic but never often enough. LR spent the last 20 years of her life making an undersea documentary that hadn't been released at the time the Muller doc. Bach devotes about three sentences: the reviews were tepid. Somebody said it was soporific. And ha ha, she's a member of Greenpeace but etc. Now I can understand how such a nature film without narration could become boring, even the most beautiful. But perhaps we could get some comparisons or description? Maybe this is the point to note that her strengths were in editing because surely they were not in dramatic films? Perhaps we could get the views of other nature filmmakers. And didn't she also publish undersea photo books?
On Amazon, I see two more promising books Riefenstahl Screened: An Anthology of New Criticism (2008) and harrumph, I thought there was one by a German. There's also LR's own 1992 memoir that Bach draws on to get the chronology and Hitler anecdotes straight--but did she never discuss her views of art and aesthetics?
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the Goethe Institute, which brought in a German critic who highlighted what was unsaid but filled out here (notably LR's experiences during the invasion of Poland). I wrote something about it for the local paper.If you've seen that doc or even noted the controversies of her final three or four decades (always the same controversy, that is) or have been fortunate to see the full-length screenings of Triumph of Will or the Olympiad, you will be wondering about the value of her work, especially everything aside from those two famous documentaries. As Muller pointed out, this is a woman with a 70-year career.
You will be disappointed. I don't think that even fifty pages cover LR's post Nazi-life and work.
Why was LR such a lightening rod when so many other Nazi filmmakers quietly slipped back into the industry including the one who made the most anti-Semitic film of all, Jew Suss? Bach notes that, but doesn't seem to wonder himself. Maybe there was a female factor? Were the others made public sincere regrets? In LR's final two decades, he tells us that film journals devoted special issues to her and that retrospectives (of what exactly?) were held in LA, Tokyo and so on. I longed for more information than that.
FWIW, it seems doubtful that she was very anti-Semitic herself--not more than the average European of the day--because she had a German lover for several years and worked with many Jews in her early films. However, she was a monstrous opportunist, as Andrew Sarris has pointed out, willing to ditch anyone (or use gypsies on their way to death camps in Tiefland) in the way of her ambition. Surely some shrinks have dissected her personality type? There doesn't seem to be anything striking in her childhood that would have formed such a ego.
And the viewpoints of her Africa photo books and film on the Nuba don't seem any different from those of early anthropologists or the confections of the present-day tourism industry. Still common among tourists today, notably the French, who can't be bothered learning anything more about a people if boo hoo! They're wearing T-shirts! They're spoiled by consumerism.
Tokyo in the early 1990s ...hmm, what did the critic Donald Richie have to say? Germany and Japan, of course were allies, and the Japanese to this day haven't done the soul-searching, film making and cultural education that the Germans have done. Some Japanese even claim that, along with European Jews, that they were the greatest victims. So the perspective might have been interesting.
It's important to bear in mind that Bach was always on the business side of the movie biz. He's not a critic or screenwriter or dp. Occasionally, when discussing the alpine and iceberg movies, made prior to Triumph of Will and the Olympiad, he'll borrow from a critic but never often enough. LR spent the last 20 years of her life making an undersea documentary that hadn't been released at the time the Muller doc. Bach devotes about three sentences: the reviews were tepid. Somebody said it was soporific. And ha ha, she's a member of Greenpeace but etc. Now I can understand how such a nature film without narration could become boring, even the most beautiful. But perhaps we could get some comparisons or description? Maybe this is the point to note that her strengths were in editing because surely they were not in dramatic films? Perhaps we could get the views of other nature filmmakers. And didn't she also publish undersea photo books?
On Amazon, I see two more promising books Riefenstahl Screened: An Anthology of New Criticism (2008) and harrumph, I thought there was one by a German. There's also LR's own 1992 memoir that Bach draws on to get the chronology and Hitler anecdotes straight--but did she never discuss her views of art and aesthetics?
Show Less
LibraryThing member Shrike58
The core of this book is how Riefensthal went from stage-mad girl to one of the great film makers of the 20th century and the milestones of contingency along the way. Finding expression first in dance, Leni leveraged her athleticism and nerve into a place in the "Alpine" film genre of the Interwar
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Period. This provided her with the experience in out-door photography which gave her the key skills to make the great Nazi propaganda epics she's famous for, though perhaps she was not as talented a producer as she imagined herself (her management of time and finances were abysmal). From there the Bach illustrates the downward spiral, as apart from being caught in the rip tide of Nazi collapse (though she was lucky not to be found more culpable) Riefensthal hit her ceiling of competence when attempting to produce dramatic films; she had grand visions but no sense of story apart from being the heroine of our own personal epic. One could go on but, of course, her epic was other people's nightmare; ranging from betrayed lovers, aggrieved co-workers and the exploited extras in her works (mostly notably the Romany people taken from concentration camps to be in her egregious romantic epic "Tiefland"). While one might have wished for more historical context at points Bach is a movie person and he probably does himself a favor by sticking to what he knows best and with a subject so given to living their life in a state of fantasy it's probably of limited value to speculate about their inner personality; Reifenstahl took most of her real self-insights with her to the grave. Show Less
LibraryThing member bnbookgirl
Inspired by the book The Extra by Kathryn Lansky, I decided to pick up this biography. So glad I did. Filled with not only info about the movie she made using the gypsies as extras (from book mentioned above), but filled with so many interesting fact about her and several members of the Third Reich
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including Hitler. I could not put this book down. Each chapter made me say "wow" when I came across another fact I never knew. Leni claimed to know nothing about the Holocaust but her photographs tell another story. A very interesting person who lived a very interesting life. Definitely one of the more controversial women of the twentieth century. Show Less
Awards
The New York Times Notable Books of the Year (Nonfiction — 2007)
Language
Original language
English
Physical description
400 p.; 6.6 inches
ISBN
0375404007 / 9780375404009