Tuesday, March 20, 2007 | 7:11 a.m.
Someone recently said that appreciating Leni Riefenstahl's brilliant artistry is like appreciating the craftsmanship in the furniture that serial killer Ed Gein made from his victims.
As Adolph Hitler's filmmaker, Riefenstahl glorified the Fuhrer and the Third Reich in "Triumph of the Will," one of the most controversial documentaries ever made, and helped boost Hitler's agenda with "Olympia."
As an artist, she was ahead of her time.
Her powerful camera angles, beautiful compositions and poetic contrast of light and form leaves the ongoing question as to how we can appreciate great art when its subject matter helped enable atrocity .
In "Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl," writer Steven Bach lays his argument against Riefenstahl's claims as an innocent artist. Bach's profile of this ambitious woman (who died at 101 in 2003) has already grabbed attention by national reviewers nodding in agreement with Bach. The book, published by Knopf, hit shelves last week.
Bach is a noteworthy man in his own right. After receiving a master's degree in American literature from Northwestern University, he became a teacher, but soon realized he wanted to be in the movie business even though he'd never been to California.
He became a film producer and was head of worldwide productions at United Artists when Michael Cimino's "Heaven's Gate" (1980) led to the collapse of that film company. Bach, who was there from beginning to end, lost his job and wrote "Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate, the Film That Sank United Artists."
His book, "Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend," sprung from his doctoral dissertation on Joseph von Sternberg, who was still alive when Bach was a student at the University of Southern California. "I had spent a lot of time with him, interviewing him. I watched every film he'd ever made with him," says Bach, who will be in Las Vegas on Thursday to meet with UNLV faculty at the Hank Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies for an interdisciplinary symposium on entertainment writing.
Just before dinner Wednesday, Bach, a Vermont resident who teaches film studies at Columbia and literature at Bennington College, took time to talk with the Sun.
Q: Why Leni Riefenstahl?
Every time I researched Marlene in Berlin, up popped Riefenstahl. They were the two most famous German women.
They were enough alike that they could be twins in ambition and independence, so I thought, OK, I'll take a crack at that one too.
They were born eight months apart. Their careers were vaguely parallel for 30 years of their lives. They both make Germans uneasy. And for opposite reasons.
Was there a message you wanted to convey with this book?
It was terribly important to call a spade a spade. Someone will say, "Look at that camera angle. Look at that lighting." I'm saying, "Look at Hitler."
Yeah, she was a great filmmaker when she was inspired. She was also a reprehensible human being and those films paved the way for countless deaths. There is accountability for what an artist does and you can't just let yourself off the hook. She shouldn't be let off the hook.
So, did you have an agenda?
My agenda when I started was to ask, "Are there extenuating circumstances? Are there ways to exonerate her for what she did?" Maybe there are ways you could view her as kind of Faustian.
And?
The straw for me was when she turned 100 and they turned up the names of Gypsies that she used as slave labor. She had to acknowledge that these people had died and she had to give some example of her feelings. All she said was ... "It's regrettable that during the Third Reich, Gypsies had to struggle."
Do you think she saw any wrongdoing in her work?
At one time I thought, now she's turning 100. She's gotta look up and say I'm sorry for what happened, but she couldn't accept that she contributed to this horrendous, historical moment.
As a filmmaker and photographer, she was ahead of her time and still revered.
There has been this sentimental aesthetic argument about her that we should look at her films for the aesthetic value. But those films had content and she was an enabler. There is no question, she made powerful films. She has apologists in the film and critical world. I don't mind that they like her movies as long as they own up to what those movies are about.
Describe the research experience.
Terrible. With Riefenstahl you really have to be prepared to immerse yourself in the Third Reich, the Holocaust and what led up to the Holocaust.
How did you approach your research?
Germans keep records. There are voluminous records in German archives. But I had this enormous stroke of luck. I had read a dissertation (by Peggy Wallace) that had never been published, but was complete. It only dealt with her life as a dancer and before her time with Hitler. But she researched her entire life. (She) went to Germany and interviewed everybody who was still alive in the early '70s, including Riefenstahl, and taped people.
She had tapes of people who had been dead for 25 years.
She said, "It's all in the garage and it's been waiting there for 30 years for the right person to come along and I think you're the right person."
How influential was that?
I could have written the book without her, but there is a level of detail in this book that could never have been there before.
One of the people on the tapes is Albert Speer, Hitler's architect. The guy who discovered Leni is on there. Her lovers are on there.
Did you try to contact her yourself?
I lived right around the corner from her in Munich and I used to see her in the streets and I'd wonder if I should go up and say something to her, but the more I delved into the research, I realized there was no way I could go up to her and pretend that I was neutral.
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