Steven Bach (1938–2009)

Inspired by the book The Extra by Kathryn Lansky, I decided to pick up this biography. So glad I did. Filled with not only info about the movie she made using the gypsies as extras (from book mentioned above), but filled with so many interesting fact about her and several members of the Third Reich including Hitler. I could not put this book down. Each chapter made me say "wow" when I came across another fact I never knew. Leni claimed to know nothing about the Holocaust but her photographs tell another story. A very interesting person who lived a very interesting life. Definitely one of the more controversial women of the twentieth century.… (mehr)

The core of this book is how Riefensthal went from stage-mad girl to one of the great film makers of the 20th century and the milestones of contingency along the way. Finding expression first in dance, Leni leveraged her athleticism and nerve into a place in the "Alpine" film genre of the Interwar Period. This provided her with the experience in out-door photography which gave her the key skills to make the great Nazi propaganda epics she's famous for, though perhaps she was not as talented a producer as she imagined herself (her management of time and finances were abysmal). From there Bach illustrates the downward spiral, as apart from being caught in the rip tide of Nazi collapse (though she was lucky not to be found more culpable) Riefensthal hit her ceiling of competence when attempting to produce dramatic films; she had grand visions but no sense of story apart from being the heroine of our own personal epic. One could go on but, of course, her epic was other people's nightmare; including betrayed lovers, aggrieved co-workers and the exploited extras in her works (mostly notably the Romany people taken from concentration camps to be in her egregious romantic epic "Tiefland"). While one might have wished for more historical context at points, Bach is a movie person and he probably does himself a favor by sticking to what he knows best and with a subject so given to living their life in a state of fantasy it's probably of limited value to speculate about their inner personality; Reifenstahl took most of her real self-insights with her to the grave.… (mehr)

A readable, if flawed, biography of the German film maker, Leni Riefenstahl. Riefenstahl rose from a perfectly ordinary working-class Berlin childhood to being one of the key propagandists of the Third Reich. Despite her later disavowals of any knowledge or complicity, Steven Bach's biography makes it clear that Riefenstahl was ruthless, narcissistic, utterly lacking in self-awareness, and quite attached to Hitler. It's true that she may not have been a fascist, ideologically speaking, but I think that's because she was attracted by power and the aesthetics of authoritarianism more than anything else. Riefenstahl would no doubt have risen to a similar height under another dictatorial regime.

Bach is good at sketching out the development of her career, from an early career as a dancer (having looked at a surviving clip of her on YouTube, she was terrible) to her direction of Triumph of the Will and the filming of the Berlin Olympics to her reinvention, late in life, as the creator of patronising, prurient photographs of Sudanese people. His opinion of Riefenstahl is plain but he refrains from either attacking or defending her, which is sadly a rare accomplishment for a biographer. He does however fail to deal consistently with his source material (he sometimes accepts, sometimes dismisses, Riefenstahl's account of her own past without always explaining why, though she was undoubtedly a skilled manipulator of her own biography), and doesn't contextualise her life in great detail.

The biggest failing of the book for me is Bach's failure to really consider how gender assumptions and sexism affected both Riefenstahl's career and her reception (at the height of her career and afterwards). For instance, Bach seems to regard Riefenstahl's interactions with Goebbels as yet further proof of her hypocrisy and her using her 'womanly wiles' to get ahead (having many sexual partners must mean that she was using sex to further her career, right? but it would of course be different if a male director did the same, just because), rather than realising that they rather show the workings of male privilege.

I cannot give a recommendation to the audiobook version of Leni, however. The narrator's pacing, intonation and inflection were all poor, but it was the way in which she mispronounced so many words so continuously that finally tipped things over into farcical. If you don't know how to pronounce abyss, libel, roster, tryst or nimbly, amongst others, you shouldn't be narrating an audiobook.… (mehr)