Leni Riefenstahl, 1898-2003.

Riefenstahl
is dead, but her imagery is immortal, having been absorbed long ago into the
language of moving pictures. The German filmmaker’s stylistic imprint–bodies
framed within rectangular space like living sculpture, then racing, jumping
or flying through the air like gods–is everywhere. One can no more imagine
moving pictures without Riefenstahl than one can imagine the alphabet without
the letter "E."

The one-time
ballet dancer and actress often insisted that she had no idea what the Nazis
were up to–but even if she didn’t, she did. The evidence is right
there, in her propaganda films, which took the Hitlerian ideal of a conquering
master race and reduced it to a series of images that anyone in any country
could understand and become enamored with. Her photographs and film footage
of African tribesmen made from the 1950s through the present day torpedo the
notion that she was a racist; she just worshipped the human form, and the human
capacity for action.

But she
uncoupled that worship from morality and let Hitler use her visual skills in
exchange for money, influence and unlimited technical resources. What Hitler
wanted just happened to dovetail with what Riefenstahl was good at; it was a
match made in hell. (After the war, she spent almost four years in a detention
camp for being a Nazi sympathizer.)

Before you
condemn Riefenstahl as the most esthetically gifted moral sellout of the 20th
century–which she was–it’s important to at least acknowledge
the continuing appeal of her images. Impeccably designed and executed, they’re
as irresistible as chocolate or good beer. When results of Nazi doctors’
hideous medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners were revealed, there
was a furious debate about whether it was morally right to make use of their
findings. No similar debate took place in cinema over the use of Riefenstahl’s
sensationally effective style; it has been raided again and again since the
1930s, sometimes for satiric intent, but more often because filmmakers just
flat-out think it looks cool.

If you’ve
ever watched news or documentary coverage of a convention or other political
event in any nation with any type of government, at some point you’ve seen
a combination of long shots and low-angled close-ups reminiscent of Riefenstahl’s
1935 Triumph of the Will, a meticulously designed tribute to Adolph Hitler.
The concept of leader-as-savior is as old as humanity. But the idea was codified
for cinema by Triumph, a film of intense, nearly sexual energy that built
toward an orgasmic release designed to wipe out rational thought. It is not
just a record of an event, but a summation of fascism so visually direct that
subtitles are unnecessary–the double helix of modern propaganda filmmaking.
(My friend Sean O’Dea calls it "the first corporate video.")

The manufacture
of a new, ideologically charged reality was Riefenstahl’s specialty. Not
content to photograph real people and events in a way that suggested a certain
attitude toward them, she pulled life apart and reconstructed it. She was certainly
not the first documentarian, or the first filmmaker, to alter reality via camera
placement and editing. She had many predecessors and equals in this regard,
including Nanook of the North director Robert Flaherty, a legendary nonfiction
filmmaker who essentially made anthropological dramas in which real-life subjects
played a Flaherty-altered version of themselves. (What Flaherty did is probably
closer to contemporary Iranian dramatic movies than to what we commonly think
of as documentaries.)

Still, Riefenstahl
was responsible for taking a documentarian’s manipulations to another,
more insidious level. She was as obsessive about camera placement and mise-en-scene
as Fritz Lang or Stanley Kubrick–a rare filmmaker who could visualize a
whole movie in her head, shot-by-shot, cut-by-cut, then ride herd on her crew
and designers to bring that dream to life. As Hitler’s most important visual
propagandist, she might have been the first documentarian of a world-shaping
political event to demand (and receive) creative control over the decoration
of sets, the timing of events and arrangement of speakers and listeners within
the frame. At most televised American political conventions since 1988, audience
members don’t salute the red, white and blue; they salute the light red,
creamy white and ocean blue, because those lighter tones "read" as
red, white and blue on color televisions. The 1984 Ronald Reagan convention
film Morning in America, the 1992 Bill Clinton film, The Man from
Hope and numerous Bin Laden videos have Leni-style messianic overtones.
(Propaganda makes strange bedfellows.)

Riefenstahl
was the earliest, most prominent filmmaker to photograph human bodies in such
a way that they seemed capable of doing things human bodies can’t do. If
you watch an NFL game, coverage of an Olympic track-and-field or swimming match,
a Nike ad, a sports movie or almost any Hollywood shoot-’em-up, you can
see traces of Riefenstahl’s fascist esthetic. She treated the human body
as a perfectly tuned, nearly machine-like object, one that achieves perfection
(and transcendence) through action, and that deserved to be worshipped.

Riefenstahl
used slow-motion, mathematical cutting patterns and other nifty tricks (including
backward motion) to turn people into demigods. There are traces of Nazi filmmaking
in those Michael Jordan spots that used slow-motion and clever editing to make
the basketball star seem capable of flight (the offscreen sound of a jet engine
furthered the man-as-machine idea). She photographed swimmers and divers with
underwater cameras, often in slow motion so that they seemed to be floating
in air. To make footraces more visually dynamic, she ordered trenches dug a
couple of feet below the track, had dolly tracks built in the trenches, and
fitted the cameras with the shortest lenses she could find, in order to exaggerate
depth and height. The result suggested a mouse-eye-view of a contest between
giants. These techniques and others have been used in every Olympics since 1936.

Riefenstahl’s
fingerprints are all over Hollywood blockbusters–not just Star Wars,
which every schoolboy knows has a finale modeled on Triumph, but contemporary
action pictures like The Rock, Con Air, Bad Boys II and
almost anything directed by John Woo (all those cool guys sailing through the
air unloading handguns–and miraculously hitting their marks!). Riefenstahl’s
style was created by a German to ennoble Germans, yet it is so seductive that
it transcends geography and history (and the historical taint of Nazism). It
plugs into some primal human need to transcend the flesh–indeed, to transcend
all reality’s constraints, including age, nationality and ideology.

Maybe that’s
why even filmmakers who include Riefenstahl references as in-jokes eventually
succumb to the grandeur of her style. The shots of the coliseum in Ridley Scott’s
Gladiator can be dismissed as sly references, but not the scenes where
hero Russell Crowe dismembers armies of opponents in orgiastic slow-mo, then
strides triumphantly toward the camera, caked in blood and dirt–man as
superman. Oliver Stone seemed to be kidding Riefenstahl in Any Given Sunday
with images of indoctrinated spectators baying for blood and helmeted "gladiators"
arranging themselves in artful patterns on the gridiron. But whenever the action
stars, the movie’s slow-mo action, gut-punch editing and low-angled closeups
of tragic-heroic athletes pondering their fate reveal that Stone, too, has a
little Leni in him. Maybe we all do.