Filming the Nazi Flag: Leni Riefenstahl and the Cinema of National Arousal

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Notes

1. Loiperdinger observes that nearly every audiovisual treatment of National Socialism exploits footage from the film (Der Parteitagsfilm “Triumph des Willens” von Leni Riefenstahl. Rituale der Mobilmachung, 1). For a discussion of this phenomenon see Bathrick, “The Afterlife of Triumph of the Will: The First Twenty-Five Years,” in Riefenstahl Screened: An Anthology of New Criticism, 73–97.

2. Recent biographical treatments include Rother, Leni Riefenstahl: The Seduction of Genius; Kinkel, Die Scheinwerferin: Leni Riefenstahl und das “Dritte Reich”; Trimborn, Leni Riefenstahl: A Life; Bach, Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl; Wieland, Dietrich & Riefenstahl. Der Traum von der Neuen Frau.

3. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations.

4. Sontag's “Fascinating Fascism,” first published in 1975, is reprinted in Under the Sign of Saturn (85–86, 93). Also, see Barker, “Indifference, Identification, and Desire in Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, Leni Riefenstahl's The Blue Light and Triumph of the Will, and Sagan's Maedchen in Uniform, in Women in German Yearbook: “Rather than avoiding or combating the hypnotism of power, Riefenstahl managed to replace it with the seductive hypnotism of beauty, including that of nature, and abstract compositions” (81).

5. See Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion. Nazi Cinema and its Afterlife, 27–51; Elsaesser, “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman,” Sight and Sound; Schulte-Sasse, “Leni Riefenstahl's Feature Films and the Question of a Fascist Aesthetic,” in Framing the Past: the Historiography of German Cinema and Television; Bronfen, “Leni Riefenstahl and Marlene Dietrich: Zwei Deutsche Stars,” in Film Museum Berlin, 176–77; Peucker, “The Fascist Choreography: Riefenstahl's Tableaux,” Modernism/Modernity; Zox-Weaver, Women Modernists and Fascism, 24-58; Glasenapp, Riefenstahl Revisited; Herzog and Leis, Kunst und Aesthetik im Werk Leni Riefenstahls; and Bathrick, “Afterlife of Triumph.”

6. Rother, Leni Riefenstahl, 183. In this context her third party rally film, Tag der Freiheit! Unsere Wehrmacht (1935), is of marginal interest.

7. Hoffmann, The Triumph of Propaganda: Film and National Socialism, 1933-1945, gives some attention to the flag in Nazi film but mainly treats broader questions of propaganda.

8. For example, Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” 102; Fest, Hitler, 327, 332; Lenssen, “Unterworfene Gefühle,” in Emotionalität: Zur Geschichte der Gefühle, 204. Hitler famously ascribed feminine characteristics to the masses in Mein Kampf, 183.

9. See Zox-Weaver, Women Modernists, 34–36, on this combination in Riefenstahl's performance in The Blue Light (1932).

10. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, 291.

11. See Berg-Pan, Leni Riefenstahl (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980), 114–15. A gathering of Nazi women was part of the rally but does not appear in Riefenstahl's films.

12. Theweleit, Male Fantasies. Also see Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” 93: “Fascist aesthetics is based on the containment of vital forces; movements are confined, held tight, held in.”

13. See Rentschler, Ministry of Illusion, 49, on Riefenstahl's images of “women who stand on the sidelines cheering the men who make history.”

14. A useful introduction is Elgenius, “The Origins of European National Flags,” in Flag, Nation and Symbolism in Europe and America, 14-30. On Germany, see Hattenhauer, Geschichte der Deutschen Nationalsymbole, chapter 1; Hoffmann, Triumph of Propaganda, 1–14.

15. I am not aware of an investigation of flag manufacture in Nazi Germany, but given demand, from the ubiquitous armbands to the party standards and massive banners for political rallies, one surmises it was a booming and profitable business.

16. See Quinn, The Swastika: Constructing the Symbol; Kristina Oberwinter, “Bewegende Bilder”: Repräsentation und Produktion von Emotionen in Leni Riefenstahls Triumph des Willens, 104–108; Loiperdinger, Der Parteitagsfilm, 84. Hoffmann, Triumph of Propaganda, 14–20. The metonymy persists in subsequent descriptions of flags and standards as subjects rather than objects. For example, Barsam, Filmguide to Triumph of the Will, 6. It similarly persists in use of “swastika,” notably in book titles, to signify the Nazi party or Hitler's Germany.

17. Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” 91–92; Göttsche, Geometrie im Film. Fritz Langs “Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler” und Leni Riefenstahls “Triumph des Willens.” Exceptions in Triumph of the Will, such as men bathing, eating, and enjoying recreational time or the informal meeting of Hitler and women in traditional costume, prove the rule.

18. Allert, The Hitler Salute: On the Meaning of a Gesture, 46-47. Tilman notes that a proper salute involved not only the right arm and hand but a rigid posture of the entire body.

19. Allert, The Hitler Salute, 38–39, 59–61; Loiperdinger, “Riefenstahls Parteitagsfilme zwischen Bergfilm und Kriegswochenschau,” in Filmblatt, 24; Wieland, Dietrich & Riefenstahl, 306. On the power of suggestion of a film frame filled with outstretched arms see Göttsche, Geometrie im Film, 113.

20. Hoffmann, Triumph of Propaganda, 15, 19–20, cites sexual significance for the symbol of the hooked cross, but also reads flags as proxies for Hitler. I would suggest rather that flags represented the promise of national transcendence.

21. Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, 51-59; Bach, Leni, 116–117. See Speer, Inside the Third Reich, 57–59; 96–98: “At that time I dearly loved flags and used them wherever I could. They were a way of introducing a play of color into somber architecture… It was always scenic drama I was after.”

22. On the inadequacy of party rally films made prior to 1933, none of which gained profile or distinction as did Riefenstahl's work, and the desire for a fresh approach, see Dolezel and Loiperdinger, “Adolf Hitler in Parteitagsfilm und Wochenschau,” in Führerbilder: Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt, Stalin in Fotografie und Film, 78–79; Loiperdinger, “‘Sieg des Glaubens’: Ein Gelungenes Experiment nationalsozialistischer Filmpropaganda,” in Formative Aesthetik im Nationalsozialismus; Bathrick, “The Afterlife of Triumph of the Will,” 74–75; Hoffmann, Triumph of Propaganda, 152–153.

23. Quinn, The Swastika, 104–105, suggests Hitler and the swastika as the two leading actors of Triumph of the Will but does not explore the nature of the latter's performance.

24. Virtually all discussions of her life and work engage this debate to some degree, as does Ray Müller's lengthy documentary film, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993). The issues, central to Sontag's critique, are outlined by Devereaux in “Beauty and Evil: the case of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will,” in Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection; Kramer, “Versuch über den Propagandafilm. Zu Leni Riefenstahls Dokumentarfilmen aus den dreissiger Jahren,” in Riefenstahl Revisited.

25. For Riefenstahl's imagination of the distinction see Leni Riefenstahl, A Memoir, 148.

26. Although cumbersome, the term adoring documentary propaganda might serve. Riefenstahl certainly did not deny her fascination. In Ray Müller's film Wonderful, Horrible Life, she stated more broadly that she had only ever been able to film what she was enthusiastic about. See Rother, Leni Riefenstahl, 64. That the disciplined choreography depicted in the film gave way “off-stage” to drunken carousing by party comrades is not itself indication that Riefenstahl “falsified reality” (Wieland, Dietrich & Riefenstahl, 317).

27. Peucker, “Fascist Choreography,” especially 283–290; Loiperdinger, “Riefenstahls Parteitagsfilme,” 18–19, on the significance of her choice of cameramen from the mountain films; Pfeiffer, “Sport–Aesthetik–Ideologie,” in Kunst und Aesthetik im Werk Leni Riefenstahls, 92: “Bei Riefenstahl gehen Bewegung und ihre Stilisierung zu medialisierten Bildern von Anfang an, mit dem Beginn ihrer Karriere als Tänzerin….” Strötgen, “Der Rhythmus des tatsächlichen Geschehens,” in Kunst und Aesthetik im Werk Leni Riefenstahls, 113, implies that Riefenstahl's films represent a continuation of her dance career by other means.

28. Riefenstahl's first starring film role (The Holy Mountain, 1926) reprises her earlier career in several key scenes that confirm her training in capturing the erotic gaze. See Elsaesser, “Portrait of the Artist,” 16. Rother, Leni Riefenstahl, 29, downplays the erotic component in her motion picture ambitions, though his analysis of The Blue Light (38–39) tends to support the argument here.

29. See Rentschler, “Fatal Attractions: Leni Riefenstahl's The Blue Light,” October, 64-65. Schulte-Sasse, “Leni Riefenstahl's Feature Films,” 156, referring to her later Lowlands: “one could scarcely find in film history a more typical example of the paradigm Laura Mulvey put forth in 1975 in which the woman acts ‘as object of the combined gaze of spectator and all the male protagonists in the film … isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualized … an internalized acceptance of woman's role as object permitted her narcissistically to enjoy fetishizing her own body.” Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” 75, notes that Riefenstahl starred from the beginning of her film career.

30. Soussloff and Nichols, “Leni Riefenstahl: The Power of the Image,” in Discourse, 29, note that she demonstrated sexual transgressiveness parallel to that of Louise Brooks or Marlene Dietrich while maintaining a posture of naïveté. See also Elsaesser, “Portrait of the Artist,” 16; Berg-Pan, Leni Riefenstahl, 171. On her sexual independence and many lovers see Kinkel, Scheinwerferin, 21, 211–215; Wieland, Dietrich & Riefenstahl, 38–39. In terms of her film persona see Herzog and Leis, Kunst und Aesthetik, 10, who argue that her erotic attraction was to compensate for her lesser ability as an actress. Rentschler, Ministry of Illusion, 36, cites Béla Balázs on Riefenstahl's ambition to make a mountain film in which a woman outdid the mountain.

31. Her first major film role situated her within a triangle, which mirrored the competition for her love between the director, Arnold Fanck, and the male lead, Luis Trenker. See Leni Riefenstahl, A Memoir, 74–53. Wieland, Dietrich & Riefenstahl, 35, notes her general intolerance of rivals; Berg-Pan, Leni Riefenstahl, 105: “Riefenstahl does not seem to like women.”

32. On the last point, see Kothenschulte, “Riefenstahls angewandte Avantgarde,” in Kunst und Aesthetik, 25–36.

33. Rother's excellent study of Riefenstahl (66, 74) distinguishes stylistically between her feature and documentary films based on criteria of realism versus the picturesque while exploring how she applied the structures and formal tools (narrative, shot/counter-shot) of the former to the latter. Elsaesser (“Portrait of the Artist,” 15, 17), argues that her career was of a piece notwithstanding differences between Olympia and Triumph of the Will.

34. Elsaesser, “Portrait of the Artist,” 16.

35. Her own account of her sexual relationships suggests confidence in her erotic appeal, yet the question posed here may well have been an existential one, pertinent as well to her later career as photographer and undersea explorer. Soussloff and Nichols, “Leni Riefenstahl,” 35: “Riefenstahl sees men as moths to her flame… sexual attraction constitutes a melodramatics of sexual desire.” See Bronfen, “Leni Riefenstahl and Marlene Dietrich,” 182–83, on her use of production stills from Triumph of the Will to compete with Hitler for visual attention. Zox-Weaver, Women Modernists and Fascism, 52–53, suggests that in the shooting of Triumph of the Will her dress and comportment as well as her directorial approach sought to “create a metonymic, virtual presence for herself.” See also Herzog and Leis, Kunst und Aesthetik, 18, on her starring role in her last (underwater) film of 2002.

36. Lungstrum, “Metropolis and the Technosexual Woman of German Modernity,” in Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, 139. See Zox-Weaver, Women Modernists and Fascism, 42–43. Fest, Hitler, 327, credits Hitler with “an unmistakably feminine aura” in his sensitivity to the feelings of his audience.

37. Kinkel, Die Scheinwerferin, 82, argues the film itself was a declaration of love for Hitler. See also Rother, Leni Riefenstahl, 70, on Triumph of the Will as a love story.

38. Hitlers Aufruf an das Deutsche Volk. A version that condenses Hitler's speech and has English subtitles is available from International Historic Films as Hitler, February 10, 1933 (1985). On the limitations of the original, see Dolezel and Loiperdinger, Adolf Hitler, 80–81; Loiperdinger, “Riefenstahls Parteitagsfilme,” 12; Bathrick, “Afterlife of Triumph of the Will,” 75–76. In diary entries of February 10 and 20, 1933 Goebbels recorded enthusiasm for the event and the film footage of Hitler's speech: Fröhlich, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Sämtliche Fragmente, 370–371, 380.

39. Goebbels' full radio address, from which the film version is excerpted, is in Goebbels-Reden (Helmut Heiber, vol. I: 1932—1939, 67–70. Hitler arrived late, as was his custom, to enhance anticipation and suspense.

40. In the former respect it could have been staged without reference to a specific event. In this too a creative cameraman preempted Riefenstahl.

41. In painting the scene for the radio audience Goebbels repeatedly treated standards and flags as mobile subjects that “advanced,” “moved,” “took positions,” and “marched,” for example. Only once did he refer to them in the passive voice as being “carried” (Goebbels-Reden, 68–69).

42. On the editing, see Dolezel and Loiperdinger, Adolf Hitler in Parteitagsfilm, 81.

43. Goebbels-Reden, Vol. I, 69, includes reference to “an army of camera operators” in front of the podium, yet it was cameras deployed elsewhere in the arena, capturing the enthusiastic audience, which provided testimony to Hitler's charisma.

44. Riefenstahl attended two Nazi rallies in the sports arena in 1932 and met both Hitler and Goebbels. In the first half of 1933 she was in Switzerland and later claimed to have been out of touch with developments in Germany. See Leni Riefenstahl, A Memoir, 101–108, 122–34; Kinkel, Die Scheinwerferin, 42; Wieland, Dietrich & Riefenstahl, 292–96.

45. For analyses that emphasize contrasts between Riefenstahl's two party rally films, see Rother, Leni Riefenstahl, 46, 54–57; Tegel, “Leni Riefenstahl: Art and Politics,” in Quarterly Review of Film and Video.

46. Her comment to Ray Müller in Wonderful, Horrible Life. Loiperdinger and Culbert, “Leni Riefenstahl, the SA, and the Nazi Party Rally Films, Nuremberg 1933–1934: Sieg des Glaubens and Triumph des Willens,” in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, identify the flaws in the first film but affirm essential continuity in camera work, editing and use of music.

47. Oberwinter, “Bewegende Bilder,” 106–108, where the mobility of flags has military connotations: aggression, victory, heroism, fame.

48. Hinton, The Films of Leni Riefenstahl, 51, notes this effect in the evening rally in Triumph of the Will. Barsam, Film Guide, 50–51, compares the flags to costumes covering the participants and thereby disguising them. Peucker, “Fascist Choreography,” 289–290, notes a mimesis of sculpture made animate and mobile.

49. In The Holy Mountain the overpowering effect of the dance is shown in the emotional response of the man who wins her love.

50. Peucker, “Fascist Choreography,” 290: “At one level, Riefenstahl's fascist, filmic choreography as read by Sontag expresses the struggle between erotic energy and formal control expressed by way of the body in dance.” Quinn, Swastika, 105, suggests that the design of the swastika merges the “gender difference girl/boy.”

51. The length of this sequence in the latter film is, however, roughly proportional to the overall length of the film. Cf. below, 13.

52. Sereny, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, 129, notes contested claims by Speer and Riefenstahl about the lighting effects. It was Speer's idea to hide the rotundity of party leaders behind the flags.

53. Göttsche, Geometrie im Film, 116.

54. See Rentschler, Ministry of Illusion, 48, on how the caresses of the camera loved her to death; von Hoff, “From Dance to Film: The Cinematic Art of Leni Riefenstahl and Dorothy Arzner,” in Visual Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany, 45–46; Zox-Weaver, Women Modernists and Fascism, 32; Bach, Leni, 75: “In no other film was Leni so lovingly or beautifully photographed.”

55. In Müller, Wonderful, Horrible Life, she claimed she always used contrasting lighting for male and female characters. This contrast was evident in Fanck's films and not limited to discrete shots. For example, in The White Hell of Piz Palü (1929) there are images of Riefenstahl and males together in which the focus and lighting differ for each. See Leni Riefenstahl, Memoiren 1902–1945, 105, on her interest in American techniques for shooting close-ups of females.

56. In several places in Triumph of the Will his image blurs in close-up shots when he moves laterally or steps into his limousine. The former is also the case in the indoor rally sequence in Victory of Faith.

57. Nor, of course, could he conquer mountains, by contrast with Riefenstahl and the male protagonists of the films in which she starred. See Berg-Pan, Leni Riefenstahl, 118. On Hitler as visual icon see Bathrick, “The Afterlife of Triumph of the Will,” 76–78. For a Hitler pose from Triumph of the Will that borders on caricature see Oberwinter, Bewegende Bilder, 153.

58. By contrast, Hitler's speech at the indoor closing ceremony encountered a responsive and vocal audience. In this sequence Riefenstahl did not intercut flags.

59. On the limitations of this sequence, see Koebner, “Der unversehrbare Körper: Anmerkungen zu Filmen Leni Riefenstahls,” in Der Film in der Geschichte, 189; Göttsche, Geometrie im Film, 128; Hinton, Films of Leni Riefenstahl, 54.

60. This larger issue, inseparable from the debate referenced in footnote 24, would require separate treatment. On contemporary efforts to analyze the visual impact of her work see Rother, “Stil-Ereignisse: Leni Riefenstahls Dokumentarfilme,” in Filmblatt.

61. She later enthused about how the concentration of flags and the dance-like cutting rhythm, in time with the music, highlighted the festive features of the event (Müller, Wonderful, Horrible Life). See Göttsche, Geometrie im Film, 137–139, more generally on the dance-like intersection of optical and musical elements.

62. Hinton, Films of Leni Riefenstahl, 53.

63. Oberwinter, “Bewegende Bilder,” 120, likens it to a field of grain swaying in the wind. A further artistic parallel might be found in Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (1912). Göttsche, Geometrie im Film, 123, without referencing gender implications, notes that this brief scene is exceptional for its “Befreiung von jeglicher Struktur und jeglicher Richtung,” thus its transgression of the geometric patterns which otherwise dominate the film's spatial field.

64. For Sontag, the pornography pertains primarily to the masculinity, smartness, and threat of violence embodied by the SS. Here, paradoxically, it could be read, following Theweleit, as a feminine flood which National Socialism otherwise aimed to contain.

65. See Loiperdinger and Culbert, “Leni Riefenstahl, the SA,” 11, on the awkwardness evident in this sequence.

66. The soundtrack records a 21-gun salute in a sequence lasting 90 seconds, thus averaging one firing every four to five seconds. The gun is shown a total of eight times. The first three images are widely spaced, corresponding to firings number one, eight and fourteen. The actual tempo of the gun firing increases only marginally in the final 20 seconds. It is the congested crosscutting to images of the gun for the last five firings (numbers 17 to 21) that creates the effect of acceleration and final climax.

67. In explaining her approach to Ray Müller in Wonderful, Horrible Life, Riefenstahl emphasized her aim to create excitement and climactic moments with material that was not inherently suited to such treatment. Strötgen, “Der Rhythmus des tatsächlichen Geschehens,” 111–112, notes the importance of rhythm in representation of ritual, particularly for intensifying pictorial impact, but does not explore how it functioned.

68. For a different reading of this brief scene, see Göttsche, Geometrie im Film, 126.

69. Müller, Wonderful, Horrible Life. Cf. Quinn, The Swastika, 104–105.