Fanck, born in 1889, was the son of a wealthy businessman. He suffered from severe illnesses in his childhood, including tuberculosis and asthma. Any excitement would bring on spasms and difficulty breathing. He was educated at home, was not allowed to play outside, and lived in isolation inside his house. “Fear . . . was the gist of my childhood,” he recalled in his memoir.78 Then his father met a doctor who advised him to send young Arnold to Davos for boarding school, and his life changed. His medical ailments disappeared, and he was able to spend five hours a day romping outdoors. From then on, he wanted to live a life of sports, nature, discipline, and toughening up. This story of healing—from an ailing, effeminate, hysterical boy to a bold, healthy, strong man—gave rise to Fanck’s lifelong obsession with the mountains. In conquering mountains, he conquered his fears. He studied geology, a branch of science that had been important for visual artists a hundred years earlier. Painters such as Caspar David Friedrich were influenced by drawings that geologists had brought back from their travels, and scientists in turn used artistic renderings to shed light on geological facts. Fanck’s filmic images were modeled on Friedrich’s paintings or drawings. One year before the war began, he shot his first ski film. Bernhard Gotthart, an innovative businessman from Freiburg who had founded Express-Film Company in 1910, sang the praises of Sepp Allgeier, an eighteen-year-old cameraman who could film on skis. Fanck and Riefenstahl would both go on to make many movies with Allgeier. Shooting 4628 Meter High on Skis: Climbing Monte Rosa entailed a whole host of dangers.79
During the war, Fanck served in the counterintelligence corps and was assigned the task of producing exact replicas of photographs. He then incorporated this technique into his next ski film. The Miracle of the Snowshoe was shot without a script; the film is one long improvisation on the mountain. It is noteworthy for its combination of physicality, technology, and war, a first for Fanck. Riefenstahl would go on to combine these elements in her films. But the picture that ultimately drew Riefenstahl to Fanck was Mountain of Destiny, his first alpine film with a plot. Mountain of Destiny portrays the battle between two generations climbing a mountain. In his earlier ski films, Fanck had focused on landscape as a backdrop for athletic prowess, but in Mountain of Destiny, landscape becomes a peril, a facet of an overpowering nature. A mountaineering magazine wrote, “Mountain of Destiny is the first film in which the mountain has a role of its own and appears as a character; for the first time, the soul of the mountain speaks to us and makes ours resonate with it. In Mountain of Destiny, the mountain (as an entity that combines rock, air, cloud, storm, and tempest) comes alive.”80
Luis Trenker had his onscreen debut in Mountain of Destiny. He was one of the young men who idolized Fanck. He had actually wanted to shoot a film himself, for which he had already written the screenplay and collected money. When Fanck came to Bolzano, he persuaded Trenker to transfer the approved subsidies to his project.81 No distributor wanted to take on the film, so Fanck rented the Nollendorf Theater for four months, set up two projectors, hired cashiers and projectionists, and had the poster made that Riefenstahl would see at the subway station. The movie was sold out for months. Fanck later recalled: “When I saw Leni Riefenstahl, my first impression was: child of nature, not an actress. . . . I found the driving dramatic force for the plot: it struck me that the contrasts between nature and culture, skiing and dance, sea and mountains would yield suspense.”82
Fanck took to the idea of making a film about an encounter between a bold mountain recluse and an impulsive, pretty, expressive dancer, and knew from the outset whom to cast in the lead roles: Luis Trenker and Leni Riefenstahl. Fanck actually preferred Riefenstahl’s lack of acting skills. The body and its sportive energy were his primary concern; the ability to act was of lesser importance. Riefenstahl was hired with a star’s salary of twenty thousand marks. Ufa, the motion picture production company, made a pianist available to her during the shooting and agreed to have a piano transported to the mountain huts. That was not bad for a beginner. Ufa had high hopes for this film, as reflected in its willingness to increase the production costs a great deal beyond the thirty-four thousand marks it had invested in Mountain of Destiny; five hundred thousand marks were budgeted for The Holy Mountain. The studio shots were filmed in Staaken, at the border of Berlin, and the location shots in the Swiss Alps, at the mountain resort of Lenzerheide. The filming took far more time than the three months that had been originally planned, and eventually stretched to eighteen months. The effort paid off handsomely.
The dramatically rendered scene at the Nollendorfplatz subway station became a turning point in Riefenstahl’s life. She turned her back on the city and sought her destiny in nature. In Riefenstahl’s portrayal of her life story, this subterranean train station would become a locus of transition: she was leaving the city that was compelling her to operate in functional terms. Riefenstahl went to the mountains, where camaraderie and closeness mattered more than functionality and detachment. She opted for personal interactions over impersonal roles. Elegance yielded to valor as she turned her back on urban niceties and sought freedom, beauty, and adventure in the mountains.
The screenplay of her first film seemed perfect for this new direction in her life. The Holy Mountain tells an unhappy love story among three people that culminates in the death of the two men; only the woman survives. Surprisingly, this movie, which Fanck dedicated to his friend who was killed in action, opens with Riefenstahl dancing in front of the raging and roiling sea in a short filmy garment. Her body is shot against the hard light, in contrast to the clouds, the waves, and the horizon. In this long opening sequence, Fanck was offering Riefenstahl once last chance at a major dance performance. These images reveal not only the woman’s bond with the elemental force of the water, but also the way her dance emanates from joy in her body, which was something entirely new in his films. The men who would fall in love with this creature were friends: Vigo (played by Ernst Petersen, Fanck’s nephew), and a character known only as The Friend (Trenker). We see the two of them sitting high up on a cliff, dreamily observing the mountains stretched out before them. This sequence introduces the major figures and their worlds: the woman and the sea, the friends and the mountains, the power of this male friendship, and the playfulness of the dancing woman (Diotima). Now the plot can begin. The friends go to Diotima’s recital, where she dances “Dream Blossom,” the choreography Riefenstahl is so proud of. Luxury hotel, big stage, elegant audience, garland of flowers, chauffeur, bevy of admirers—this is how Riefenstahl pictured the life of a successful artist, and Fanck was making it happen for her. In The Holy Mountain, Riefenstahl could play a dancer living life the way she had dreamed of. In the next act, we see The Friend coming down out of the ice while she jubilantly skips across blooming meadows and cuddles a lamb. Then she sits and stares awestruck at the towering mountain peaks. Eventually the two meet up. The Friend is sitting in front of the hut, contentedly puffing away on a pipe, as she sneaks up to him. When he sees her, his pipe nearly falls out of his mouth.
Diotima: Have you come from up there?
(Pause)
Diotima: It must be beautiful up there.
The Friend: Beautiful—hard—and dangerous!
Diotima: And what do you seek up there?
The Friend: Myself.
Diotima: And nothing else?
The Friend: And what do you seek up here—in nature?
Diotima: Beauty!
This dialogue cements their relationship. In the next scene, we see The Friend in his mother’s living room. He wants to climb up to seek the most beautiful mountain to celebrate his and Diotima’s engagement the following day. The sinister intertitle announces: “The sea and the stone can never be wed.” When he comes back down, he happens to see his fiancée with a man who has his head in her lap, and she is caressing him. In order to wipe this image from his mind, he feels he has to experience something “completely wild.” He decides to scale the perilous north face. Vigo goes along. Nei
ther of them knows about the other’s affection for Diotima. When a storm approaches, Vigo wants to turn back, but The Friend is hoping for death. With ice picks in hand, the snow-covered bodies face storm-lashed clouds and avalanches as they struggle up the mountain. The camera cuts away to Diotima in her luxurious hotel suite. She is preparing for her performance, full of foreboding about the impending disaster. Meanwhile, Vigo tries to bring his friend to his senses, but The Friend pulls his accordion out of his backpack and in the middle of the raging storm starts to play and sing wildly. Trenker’s camera paints a ghastly picture of the depths of despair. “Do you have anything you’re attached to down there with the rabble?” he asks Vigo. “A dancer . . . Diotima,” is the bashful reply. The Friend pounces on Vigo with a cry of “It was you!” Vigo backs away and falls off the overhang into the abyss, but because he is hanging by his friend’s rope, he does not plunge to his death. While these dramatic scenes are unfolding, Diotima is dancing. Her performance is interrupted by the mother’s urgent message that her son and his friend have not come back. She asks whether anyone is willing to help, but her pleas fall on deaf ears. The dancer sets out alone on skis, at night, and fights her way to a hut, where she finds mountaineers who cut their reveling short and set out to save the friends. On the wuthering mountain, The Friend holds Vigo by the rope because he cannot fasten it to anything: there is nothing but glazed ice all around them. “Cut me loose! At least save yourself!” Vigo shouts to his friend. The intertitle reads: “Sacrifice his comrade—or himself along with him? The great question of the mountains.” Throughout the night, The Friend holds Vigo, who has long since frozen to death. When the sun comes up, The Friend follows Vigo by plunging to his death. Diotima returns to the sea.
The hero of the movie is The Friend, who values loyalty above his own life. Riefenstahl plays Diotima, the alien element intruding on the men’s close bond. The mountain engulfs both men, and the engagement of the man and the woman does not come about in this icy realm. Fanck did not grant Riefenstahl a view from above. A woman can follow a man as far as the hut, but then the world of men begins; there is no way onward for her. Her place is in the valley. In real life, Riefenstahl would not put up with this constraint indefinitely.
On December 17, 1926, the film premiered at the Ufa Palace. Riefenstahl started off the evening with dance. The Berliner Morgenpost published a scathing review of her performance: “Leni Riefenstahl had nothing to offer in the way of acting, nor did she look good. All her flitting about was sometimes hard to bear.”83 This review, and others in a similar vein, did not interfere with the box office triumph of The Holy Mountain, which is considered Fanck’s first international success—and Riefenstahl’s.
She had built up quite a network of lovers and admirers. Heinz von Jaworsky, ten years her junior and later her cameraman, was quite taken with her, and decades later still went into raptures when describing her: “Definitely a sexy woman, no doubt about it.”84 Fanck was not oblivious to her charms either. When she sobbed to him that her engagement was off and he gave her a comforting hug, Riefenstahl wrote, she sensed that his feelings for her were not merely “fatherly,” as she had hoped. That is an odd thought, since Fanck was thirty-seven years old at the time—not an age at which a man has fatherly feelings for a woman in her mid-twenties. Although she rejected his advances, she stuck close to him. “I was unsettled . . . by the way Fanck grew more deeply in love with me day by day. He showered me with gifts, especially editions of Hölderlin and Nietzsche, woodcuts by Käthe Kollwitz, and graphics by contemporary artists such as Heinrich Zille and George Grosz.”85 Only on his bold mountain adventures and as the leader of a group of strong, brave men did Fanck appear not to have felt threatened in his manhood. Riefenstahl was the diametric opposite of the type of woman to whom he normally gravitated. Although she could put on a show of girlish innocence, she was actually a strong-minded woman who expected to be on a par with men. Because Fanck was fighting his own self-perceived effeminate nature, he must have been fascinated by a woman who posed such an unabashed challenge to men on their own turf.
The first serious complications arose when Fanck invited Riefenstahl and Trenker to Freiburg. Trenker was strikingly handsome; he was strong, amusing, and suntanned, and thus exactly the kind of man that appealed to Riefenstahl. Fanck invited his lead actress to pledge their friendship with champagne and drink to the success of the film. He would have been better off not having done so; the instant he left the room for a few moments, Leni and Luis fell into each other’s arms. “It may have been the champagne, the delightful prospect of our upcoming work, or just the atmosphere of our being together, but all I know is that this was the first time that I ever lay in a man’s arms under the spell of a happiness I had never known before.” Fanck caught the two of them in the act. Riefenstahl’s comment on this situation speaks volumes: “I pulled away from Trenker and was aghast at the idea that this incident might endanger our project. Would this destroy my dream of playing in The Holy Mountain?” Trenker left, and Fanck brought her back to the hotel. “No sooner were we alone than he broke down, sobbing and burying his face in his hands. From his incoherent, almost unintelligible words, I learned how deeply he cared for me, how much he had hoped for and dreamed about me, and how terribly wounded he had been by seeing Trenker and me embrace. I tried to comfort him while he caressed my hands, saying ‘You—my Diotima.’ ”86 This passage conveys the impression that the two of them were already rehearsing for The Holy Mountain, with its similar constellation of two men and one woman. Regardless of whether Fanck and Riefenstahl actually had an affair, their work together would not have come about without the sexual attraction he felt for her. The story of Arnold Fanck and Leni Riefenstahl is the story of a battle that was waged with every resource and on every level, a battle in which reality and fiction blended, and a battle that Riefenstahl would ultimately win.
Trenker never wrote a word about his affair with Riefenstahl, but in his memoir he seized every opportunity to malign her. In assessing the critics’ response to The Holy Mountain, for example, Trenker wrote: “The press poured out praise and censure. Praise went to the magnificent way the mountain milieu was captured and to the movie’s male actors, and censure went to the role of the dancing diva.”87
The roundelay of her men extended beyond the two rivals Fanck and Trenker. Hans Schneeberger, a gifted cameraman, seemed to be interested in her as well. Riefenstahl’s faithful companion, Harry Sokal, also got in on the act. She claimed to have been taken aback when she learned about Sokal’s financial stake in the film, and she was convinced that he was out to use his position for the sole purpose of seeing her as often as possible. However, once it became apparent to Sokal, who would continue to invest in Fanck’s and Riefenstahl’s films, that all men were after Leni, he withdrew his financial support. “I noticed a suspicious gleam in the eyes of all three men [Trenker, Fanck, and Schneeberger] whenever they looked at their future leading lady or partner. And they looked at her incessantly.” From then on, he declared that his only interest was in the film, not in the lady. “Riefenstahl needed all three men, Fanck even on two levels: as an author who wrote a starring role expressly for her, and as a director to present her well on screen. Trenker, who was already a star at the time, could reject the unknown novice as a partner, but could also be magnanimous enough to share the spotlight with her. And it was up to the cameraman to present her beauty in the proper light, in the truest sense of the term. . . . She still seemed to be looking at the three of them equally favorably, with a slightly more positive attitude toward Fanck, who was, of course, the most important one at the moment.”88 Riefenstahl’s rejection of Sokal was a blow to his vanity. She had ditched him as a lover to replace him with the next man who might prove more useful to her career. He may have continued to emphasize how much he valued her as an artist, but at the same time he seized every opportunity to portray her as a schemer.
Riefenstahl filmed under difficult circumstances: The crew
was small and the shooting extremely complex because of their dependence on the weather. Moreover, the director, lead actor, and producer were in love with her, and she was in no position to spoil things with any of them. It was a risky game: Her affairs could help step up her success, or they could spell the end of her work with Fanck. Fanck gave her access to the camera, let her select images, instructed her in the use of various focal distances, showed her the effect of color screens, and taught her how to work with lenses, all because he desired her as a woman and wanted to be close to her. In 1974, she said in an interview, “I soaked up Fanck’s and his cameraman’s experience until it became second nature.”89 The films she would make with Fanck in the years to come reflected the transformation of their productive yet explosive relationship as well as her evolving self-image as an artist.
Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives Page 10