The Bad And The Beautiful

Leni Riefenstahl, who turned 100 last week, is clearly exasperated that she's still asked about the brilliant and powerful documentary films she made for Hitler in the 1930s. "I don't know what I should apologize for," she told the Associated Press in a rare interview. "I cannot apologize, for example, for having made the film 'Triumph of the Will.' It won the top prize." She's always insisted she was an artist, not a Nazi, and that she wasn't to blame if her films were used as propaganda. Literally, it's probably true. Commonsensically--morally--it's contemptible.

While Riefenstahl celebrated her birthday with such guests as tennis star Boris Becker and animal trainers Siegfried and Roy, the high-end publisher Taschen commemorated it with an imposing collection (580 pages, 13.4 by 19.7 inches) of the still photos she's taken in Africa since the 1960s. In matters of race, at least, she dissented from Nazi orthodoxy--her 1938 film "Olympia" riskily celebrated the black American athlete Jesse Owens--and her lustrous pictures of naked, painted African hardbodies may be her least troublesome legacy. Still, it's long been noted that these stern and statuelike portraits look like jut-jawed ubermenschen of color, and that there's a pitiless edge to their nobility. Would we note that if Riefenstahl's name weren't attached? Maybe in another hundred years we'll have enough distance to look at them clearly.

© 2002