Leni Riefenstahl, heroine?

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Springtime for Hitler and Riefenstahl

Yesterday we surveyed the career of Hitler’s “perfect German woman,” close friend, and personal filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, who lived to be 101 years old and to party with Mick Jagger. Hers was a fascinating life – so fascinating, indeed, that more than one major Hollywood player has made serious efforts to get a film about it off the ground.

In 2007, for example, it was reported that Jodie Foster, after spending seven years trying to put together a movie in which she would play Riefenstahl, had “settled on a script by British writer Rupert Walters” and was looking for a director. During Riefenstahl’s life, Foster had tried to persuade her to cooperate with the project, but Riefenstahl had refused – partly because Foster wouldn’t grant her script approval, and partly because Riefenstahl would have preferred to be played by Sharon Stone, not Foster.

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Jodie Foster: Hitler’s “perfect German woman”?

By 2013, the project had passed into the hands of director Steven Soderbergh, who explained that he wanted “to see if we could make the audience root for her and treat Hitler and Goebbels as like the studio heads [!] and treat her as the aggrieved artist who is being held back by Philistines.” Soderbergh thought it “would be interesting if you could somehow over 90 minutes convince somebody to root for someone who probably on some level was pretty horrible.”

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Sharon Stone

Soderbergh (who has directed such films as Erin Brockovich and Contagion) emphasized that the Riefenstahl movie would “at no point leav[e] her point of view, or delv[e] into any of these moral questions,” because the moral questions would already be “there for the audience. They don’t need to be there for her.” At the same time, however, the goal of the picture would be to manipulate the audience into “rooting for her to win.” As Soderbergh imagined it, the film would end with Riefenstahl “onstage after the premier of ‘Triumph of the Will’ with people throwing roses at her.”

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Steven Soderbergh

What to make of this?  Granted, there may be a legitimate concept for a motion picture somewhere in there: movies have been made, after all, about various monstrous personages, both historical and fictional, in which part of the filmmaker’s challenge has been to trick viewers into identifying with (if not necessarily sympathizing with or “rooting for”) them, so as to personalize and enrich and deepen the audience’s experience of evil. But this kind of approach requires immense moral discrimination, historical understanding, and aesthetic delicacy on the part of a director; somebody capable of drawing a glib equation between Hitler and a Hollywood studio czar is unlikely to fit that bill. 

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Stephen James as Jesse Owens in “Race”

So a movie centering on Leni Riefenstahl has yet to be made. But guess what? She’s now a character on the big screen, anyway – in a new biopic about Jesse Owens, the black American runner who collected four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics. Those victories famously infuriated Hitler, who saw them (quite rightly) as undermining Nazi race ideology. The Owens film, Race, directed by Stephen Hopkins, reportedly depicts Riefenstahl as downright heroic. In one sequence, according to a June article by Will Lawrence for the Telegraph, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels orders Riefenstahl’s cinematographer not to film the 200-meter sprint. Why? Because Goebbels suspects Owens will win, and no Nazi film is going to show a black man emerging triumphant. The cinematographer complies, and covers the cameras. Riefenstahl, hearing of this interference by Goebbels, “storms into the stadium and pulls the covers off her cameras.” Writes Lawrence:

Nobody is going to tell her what she can and cannot film. She will film Owens. The Reich minister can go to hell. The implication could not be clearer: Riefenstahl, Hitler’s favourite filmmaker, had no truck with Nazi dogma, and documented Owens’s triumphant performance in the 200 metres against Goebbels’s wishes.

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Carice van Houten as Riefenstahl in “Race”

Portrayed in Race by Carice van Houten, an actress familiar from the TV series Game of Thrones, Riefenstahl is described by Lawrence as “a benign presence throughout the movie.” Tim Robey, the Telegraph‘s film critic, liked the movie but wondered aloud if the real-life Riefenstahl was really such a charmer. 

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Stephen Hopkins

For her part, Van Houten drooled over Riefenstahl, telling Lawrence: “I have a huge fascination with, and admiration for, her work….If you see the footage from Olympia, it is unbelievable what she did.” Okay, we’ll give Van Houten a break: she’s young (and an actress). But Hopkins – a guy in his late fifties, old enough to know about World War II and to have given some thought to the subject of Nazism – was also quick to say unsettlingly positive things about Hitler’s “perfect German woman” (who, let’s recall, praised her beloved Führer for “achieving deeds without parallel in the history of mankind”). In an interview with Lawrence, Hopkins called Riefenstahl a “bohemian, café-society artist with lots of Jewish friends” who “wasn’t necessarily a political animal.” Oh, not a political animal! Yes, she knowingly worked with and glorified on celluloid a mass-murdering dictator; yes, she witnessed an execution of innocent Jews by soldiers under that dictator’s command; yes, she knew that when gypsy extras were through working on her movie Tiefland they’d be sent to gas chambers. But she “wasn’t necessarily a political animal.” So by all means, let’s applaud her memory.

Ted Turner: capitalism for him, Communism for the masses

In a 2001 interview with Ken Auletta of the New Yorker, Ted Turner articulated his principle of world diplomacy: “Just about everybody will be friendly toward us if we are friendly with them.” This is the kind of naivete with which Turner approaches the world.

Last week we looked at Turner’s career, with a special focus on his ardent defense of two of the world’s remaining Communist regimes, those of North Korea and Cuba. Today we’ll wrap up our report on Turner with a few additional observations and quotations.

turner13 (2)In July 2015, Cristiane Amanpour of CNN interviewed Turner on a range of subjects. It was clear that his naivete was still fully intact. On Castro: “He had a lot of courage to tackle the United States.” On his own first trip to Cuba: “I flew home with a whole new desire to understand more about other cultures and political systems and to increase communication and dialogue between nations.” Turner told Amanpour that he seeks to “build bridges between nations” – and, as an example of this bridge-building, cited the Goodwill Games, which he founded, and which took place five times between 1986 and 2001. Turner has actually asserted that it was the Goodwill Games, apparently in combination with CNN, that brought down the Iron Curtain: “I thought, between sports and news and television and friendship, that you could end the Cold War and, by God, we did.” In the Amanpour interview, he also called for “total nuclear disarmament,” saying of the world’s nuclear arsenals that “we’ve gotta get rid of them” – as if this were as easily done as said.

turner11 (2)The more Turner talked about “understanding” political systems and “building bridges,” the more obvious it was that he somehow just doesn’t grasp that some “systems” are cruel, oppressive, and bellicose and therefore need to be challenged and resisted, not “understood.” He plainly doesn’t understand that when dealing with aggressive ideological adversaries, being “friendly” is simply perceived as weakness and will be exploited. Nor does he recognize that nuclear weapons are more dangerous in some hands than in others. Back in 2001, Auletta summed up a few of what he called Turner’s “contradictions”:

Ted-Turner_1He successfully opposed unionization at his company, yet he rails against élites. He has called himself “a socialist at heart” and a fiscal “conservative.” Turner speaks out on behalf of the rights of women but refuses to denounce Islamic states that suppress women’s rights. He has compared Rupert Murdoch, who owns the Fox network, to Hitler, yet when he is asked if he thinks Saddam Hussein is evil he says, “I’m not sure that I know enough to be able to answer that question.” And though he preaches tolerance, he has uttered some intolerant words; for example, on Ash Wednesday, seeing the black smudge on the foreheads of some CNN staff members, he asked them whether they were “Jesus freaks.”

turner14 (2)And here are some more of Ted Turner’s opinions. 9/11? “The reason that the World Trade Center got hit,” said Turner a few months after the terror attack, “is because there are a lot of people living in abject poverty out there who don’t have any hope for a better life.” Asked if he would let some of these desperately poor people live on his own land – which at the time was larger than the states of Delaware and Rhode Island put together – he answered: “Can I live in your home with you? We believe in private property in this country.” Or, to put it more correctly, Ted Turner believes in private property for himself, but not for the people of Cuba or North Korea. 

turner10Israel and the Palestinians? “The Israelis…they’ve got one of the most powerful military machines in the world. The Palestinians have nothing. So who are the terrorists?”

Global warming? “There’s too many people. That’s why we have global warming. We have global warming because too many people are using too much stuff. If there were less people they’d be using less stuff.” If we don’t act now, the world will be “eight degrees hotter in 10, not 10, but in 30 or 40 years, and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals.” Still, he has one of the largest personal carbon footprints in the world and spends much of his time burning jet fuel as he flies from one of his 28 homes to another.

Free speech? After John Hinckley tried to kill President Reagan to impress Jodie Foster, whom he’d just seen in Martin Scorsese’s movie Taxi Driver, Turner delivered an impassioned editorial on CNN. Scorsese and the others responsible for the making of Taxi Driver, he declared, were as much to blame for Hinckley’s assassination attempt as was Hinckley himself. Turner called for Congressional action to ban the production of such films.

Bottom line: the man doesn’t understand the first thing about freedom. Or the first thing about tyranny. Aside from that, he’s a genius.