In the latter half of the 1920s, Riefenstahl split her time between Berlin and the mountains.
Yes, I love the mountains, love them passionately. I see them as symbols of struggle: the dangers, the resistance of the summits, I see the zealously repelling walls, the artful slyness of the snow cornices, all frozen over. I see the wild, romantic aspect of the green ravines, profuse with water, the magic of the calm cold mountain lakes, the great, great isolation, and the struggle, over and over again. That is strong, scintillating life, and life is beautiful.90
While shooting The Holy Mountain, Riefenstahl decided not to continue with dance and to pursue film instead. A cover picture in the magazine Frau und Gegenwart in 1927 reveals that in her role as a dance artist, she saw herself as a combination of femme fatale and priestess. This photo was a final reminiscence of a dream that had not come true but would never die. Shooting films with Fanck demanded all her time and energy. She accepted his offer to act in his next film as well, with Trenker and Schneeberger at her side. The Great Leap was a burlesque on skis. With two men courting her, Riefenstahl proved that she had learned to ski quite well. The interplay of camera and movement was the focal point of the film. In 1925, Fanck had published a groundbreaking new ski manual with photographs by Sepp Allgeier. Miracle of the Snowshoe: A System for Skiing Correctly, and its Application to Alpine Cross-Country Skiing contains little text but more than a thousand cinematic images. This book describes the Arlberg technique, which was developed by Hannes Schneider. This technique simplified skiing and was largely responsible for making it a sport for the masses.
Riefenstahl could finally savor the feeling of being desired by all the men on screen. Fanck’s eroticism was limited to landscape and bodies; there is no trace of makeup, silk stockings, monocles, or cigarette holders in his films. He portrayed Riefenstahl as a woman who owes her attractiveness to her well-trained body and her joy in movement. It almost seems as though Fanck made the film expressly to call attention to Riefenstahl’s erotic power and to humiliate Trenker and Schneeberger, his two competitors in real life. Trenker played Tony, the village fool. He pursues Gita, the goatherd (Riefenstahl). She is only using him, but he appears not to notice her indifference to him. And Schneeberger, as Michael Treuherz, gets to show off his muscular naked torso, yet his character is afraid of women and sex.91 But no man can outshine Riefenstahl. To escape her bothersome admirers, she rolls up her sleeves, knuckles down, and scales steep rock faces. Fanck no longer casts her as a transcendent dancer, but instead as an appealing tomboy with supple feline movements. One titillating scene has her blissfully biting through a thick rope, wearing a diaphanous shirt that is soaked through, to help Schneeberger free himself. In The Great Leap, Riefenstahl projected a new image: she wears hoop earrings, short skirts, a fur vest that accentuates her curves, and dark eye makeup. She is lively, jaunty, and sexy. Once again, however, her acting talent was underwhelming. In The Great Leap, Fanck demanded extreme physical effort from his leading lady. Not only did she have to spend hours splashing about in ice-cold mountain brooks, but she also had to swim through a forty-degree lake clad in nothing but a coquettish little tunic. “We spent several days tumbling about in the mountain brooks of the Dolomites. Dr. Fanck has the wicked knack of finding the very coldest water, with the temperature hovering at about forty degrees. He even claims that this is still much too warm—and that we ought to be happy that it is not unmelted ice.”92 Fanck also sent her to work on her climbing skills with Schneeberger. As a former dancer, she had a highly developed sense of balance, and her dancing on pointe had given her strength in her toes. She enjoyed climbing, but she dreaded the barefoot training that made her feet bleed. She considered this torment unnecessary, but Fanck insisted on it. If she wanted to work with him, she would have to grit her teeth and do as she was asked.
It was an outsider, Schneeberger, who ultimately won Riefenstahl’s heart. His colleagues described him as a very friendly, even childlike man. Schneeberger’s story was similar to Fanck’s. He had recovered from a severe hip ailment in the mountains. During the war, he had been a pilot decorated with the highest medal awarded for military valor. Before that he had studied architecture, like Trenker. Schneeberger, a short, venturesome man, was a superb athlete. When he skied, it looked as though his skis were dancing over the snow. Riefenstahl enjoyed the ways in which they complemented each other: “Although Schneeberger was seven years my senior, he liked being led: he was the passive partner, I the active one. Our life together was harmonious. We loved nature and sports, and above all our profession. We were not city people who liked parties or social obligations.”93 Trenker resigned himself to the situation and married in 1927, but Fanck continued to bombard Riefenstahl with love letters.
Upon her return to Berlin, she moved to a larger apartment in a new building at Hindenburgstrasse 97 in Wilmersdorf; her work on Fanck’s films had earned her enough money to move from Fasanenstrasse. Her listing in the Berlin directory now read “Leni Riefenstahl, Actress.” Her sixth-floor apartment came with a roof garden and a dance studio. Fanck bought her a grand piano for the studio. She entertained famous men in her new home; supposedly Erich Maria Remarque, Walter Ruttmann, and Ernst Lubitsch were guests there.
Although The Great Leap had been a success, no other offers were forthcoming.94 She was difficult to cast because no other director made films like Fanck’s. Riefenstahl could be effective only if the focus was on bodies and adventures; her acting skills were limited, and her tension was only magnified by the camera.
People keep saying: Leni Riefenstahl is a mountain climber, not an actress. I suffer no end from this preconception. After all, I was a dancer, and have lived only for art—and now I’m thought to be nothing but a pure athlete? I love the mountains, and I love sports, but an artistic will to form burns within me most of all, and has to have an outlet, or else I cannot live. So now I am trying with all my might to fight this preconception. I’ve been battling in vain, week after week, month after month—rejections every which way—no one wants to believe in me.95
She wrote the director G. W. Pabst a card from her winter vacation in St. Moritz, in the hope that he would rescue her from this situation. If Fanck was the only director who would cast her in a movie, she would have to make sure that another director would join up with Fanck—someone who actually knew how to direct his actors.
Pabst had had his first success in 1924 with The Joyless Street, which made Greta Garbo famous. Perhaps Riefenstahl was hoping that he would bring about his next miracle with her and that she would emerge a star. In addition to Fanck, who was fanatical about achieving authenticity, she chose a director known for tormenting actors in order to achieve genuine emotional scenes. Riefenstahl’s bold choice signaled her readiness at long last to be taken seriously as an actress.
The third member of this group was Harry Sokal, who now owned a production company on Friedrichstrasse. As a producer, he insisted that Riefenstahl be cast in the lead role even though she was supposedly a “box office handicap.” The Great Leap was to blame. The movie was meant to be amusing, “but Leni, who doesn’t have a spark of humor in her, was coy whenever she was supposed to be funny, and the film became a total loss for Ufa.”96 Pabst brought in his seasoned screenwriter, Ladislav Vajda, to coauthor the screenplay for The White Hell of Piz Palü with Fanck. It was quite a coup to sign on former fighter pilot Ernst Udet for this film. Udet, who would be known to later generations as the model for Carl Zuckmayer’s The Devil’s General, was a crowd pleaser. As many as fifty thousand spectators would come to his aerobatic displays. For some of his admirers he was a symbol of the brave German past, and for others, a modern hero of technology. And Riefenstahl had a man at her side who was already a star, which was sure to work to her benefit.
Two tragic love stories are interwoven in Piz Palü: At the beginning of the movie, we see a young couple (Dr. Johannes Krafft and his wife Maria) with an elderly mountain guide attempting to climb Piz Palü. Krafft t
urns a deaf ear to the guide’s warnings. His wife, who has placed her trust in her husband, quickly falls into a crevasse, and the ice becomes her coffin. Many years after this dreadful event, a newlywed couple comes to spend a few days in the Diavolezza hut beneath Piz Palü; their arrival is the start of the actual plot of the movie.
As they are sitting in the hut, the door is flung open and a stranger enters. He sits down at the table with them. This stranger is Dr. Krafft, who had set out into the mountains with his wife all those years ago. Since her death, he has been wandering about restlessly. While he tells his story, the viewer sees images of the dead woman lying in her “grave of ice” alternating with close-ups of Maria Maioni (Riefenstahl), who is listening to him spellbound. With her full lips, bright eyes, and low-cut blouse, she seems to personify life itself. Krafft needs someone to accompany him when he ventures out to scale the north face, which has never been conquered. Night falls, and the three are alone. Krafft tells Maria that she should lie down between them. At daybreak, when Krafft sets out, Hannes (Maria’s husband) decides to go with him. He leaves Maria a letter that tells her he wants to show that he, too, is capable. She wakes up, of course, and hurries behind them. Krafft wants to send her back, but he takes her along so as not to lose any time. He is intent on triumphing over the mountain. The three of them begin their climb, Krafft in front, Maria in the middle, and Hannes bringing up the rear. Then Hannes insists on going first, and Krafft lets him. Hannes stumbles and falls. When Krafft goes down to save him, he hands the rope over to Maria. The mountain begins to roar, and the temperature falls. The three are stranded on a ledge, and they cannot move forward or backward. Krafft’s leg is broken, but he continues to brave the icy snowstorm, swinging a lamp in the darkness. He tenderly massages Maria’s feet with snow. Hannes, who is insanely jealous and freezing cold, pounces on Krafft. There are enormously impressive images of the two half-frozen men staggering and fighting with each other in extreme slow motion in the raging storm. With Maria’s help, Krafft is able to chain Hannes to the cliff. Udet, who reads about their plight in the newspaper, tries to save them. In a series of daredevil maneuvers, he flies quite close to the ledge on which the three are holding out, but he is unable to get to them. Krafft gives his jacket to Hannes and creeps behind an icy mountain ledge to die. Maria and Hannes are rescued once Udet spots them from the sky. He cannot land on the rocks, so he shows the mountain guide where they are located, and the mountain rescue service lowers them ropes to bring them to safety.
In Piz Palü, it is ice that dominates. Gustav Diessl gave one of his strongest performances in Piz Palü, playing Dr. Krafft as an introverted man determined not to surrender to his fate. Krafft may have an icy exterior, but he is a hotheaded man who has trouble reining in his ambition and his sexual desires. The movie suggests that women need to acknowledge the superiority of men. Fanck was wary of bold, intrepid, attractive women. He had fallen for Leni Riefenstahl and hoped she would become “a real woman” who accepts a man’s natural dominance.
The role of Maria Maioni offered Riefenstahl a chance to show myriad facets of herself. Maria is alternately affectionate and imperious, loving and strong, but she is also despairing and feels that her life is over. Paul Falkenberg, a close associate of Pabst’s, considered Piz Palü the only good film Riefenstahl ever made.97 Maria is sporty, elegant, and matter-of-fact, a strong, self-confident woman who has nothing in common with the juvenile pathos of the dancer Diotima.
The movie took six months to shoot. Pabst’s assistant director, Marc Sorkin, subsequently expressed his admiration for Riefenstahl’s single-minded devotion to the project:
Most of the cast and the help came down with pneumonia. But Pabst and Fanck, they must have had a secret sadistic drive: and you can see that in the picture. . . . All night long we were drinking hot wine and punch, just to keep on breathing. That is why the film is so good: you can see all the harshness of the weather on the faces of the people. And I must say that Riefenstahl was wonderful; never mind what she did later—I know she became a Nazi and all—but in this picture she was driving herself as hard as anybody, and more. She worked day and night. Schneeberger was in love with her—and she with him, by the way—and they were a good team. She worked harder than anybody. Even Pabst had to admire her: he said, “It’s terrible, what a woman!”98
Fanck never went easy on his crew or on himself. He sent his cameramen up to an altitude of 3,600 meters in temperatures of twenty degrees below zero to take pictures of icy rock faces. Richard Angst began to suffer from frostbite, and they had to turn back. Allgeier described working with Fanck as “flirting with death.” For Fanck, flirting with death was the key to success, while Pabst focused on authenticity of feelings.99 He studied his actors carefully, looking for signs of sexual jealousy and hatred.
This film focused squarely on sadism and professions of love on icy peaks. Pain was Riefenstahl’s constant companion in film, as it had been in dance. In this movie, she would be hauled up along an ice wall with avalanches plunging down onto her. Fanck chose a wall on the Morteratsch Glacier that was nearly seventy feet high and had his crew spend days piling up chunks of ice and snow along its top rim. Riefenstahl was afraid of these shots, but Fanck assured her that she would be pulled no more than a few yards and then everything would be over. She had the ropes attached to her, was hoisted up, and was instantly subjected to a torrent of ice and snow.
Since my arms were bound up in ropes, I couldn’t shield myself from the powdery snow. My ears, nose and mouth were filled with snow and chunks of ice. I screamed at the crew to lower me, but it was no use; despite what Fanck had promised, they hoisted me all the way up the wall of ice. Nor did they stop when I reached the sharp icy edge: I was pulled over it, and I arrived at the top, in great pain, and weeping with rage at my director’s brutality. Fanck responded with delight to the excellent footage.100
No matter how much she focused on her torments in later accounts of this filming, what mattered most to her at the time was maintaining her place as the only woman up at the summit and not being sent back down. Fanck could depend on her to test the limits of her ability in her quest to please him.
Fanck got to know Riefenstahl quite well during the years they worked together, and he knew with certainty that she would do anything for success. Because her relationship with Schneeberger was falling apart, Fanck saw cause for hope. Every night, Riefenstahl would find love letters and poems from Fanck hidden under her pillow. She was in the unenviable position of being marooned with Fanck and his men in a hut high up in the mountains and hence unable to avoid him. Any candid statement of her feelings for him as a man might jeopardize the entire film project. By this point, she could hardly stand the sight of him. In her book Struggle in Snow and Ice (1933), she wrote that alcohol was the only way to endure shooting this movie. “I can tell you that I hated Fanck,” she confessed to Ray Müller decades later.101 She could not afford to act on this feeling as a young woman because Fanck was the only person who wanted to put her in the limelight. Riefenstahl felt that she was completely and utterly at Fanck’s mercy, and she was well aware of how much she could learn from him, so she stayed on. Even off-camera, she had to bear up under the antics of the men. One night, she woke everybody up with a scream: one of her fellow mountaineers had put a dead calf wearing a nightcap into her bed.
The White Hell of Piz Palü, which cameraman Richard Angst called “the last great silent film in the world of film production as a whole,” was a success. The premiere, at the Ufa Palace in Berlin, was greeted with cheers, and reviewers heaped praise on Riefenstahl’s performance. “Leni Riefenstahl, whose acting was her best yet, blended feminine grace with a gamine-like courage and agility,” the B. Z. am Mittag reported, and the 8 Uhr Abendblatt in Berlin gave her similarly high praise: “Leni Riefenstahl, this woman with the lovely willful head of a young eagle, has major scenes that emphasize her physicality.”102 The Berliner Morgenpost was delighted by the images but muted in its
praise of the actors, who seemed mere accessories for the scenery: “Leni Riefenstahl and Ernst Petersen . . . do not get in the way.”103 But the real surprise came from the United States. Fanck received a telegram from Douglas Fairbanks in Hollywood congratulating him on the movie and calling it one of the best he and Mary Pickford had ever seen.104 Piz Palü was the first German film to be shown at the huge Roxy Theater in midtown Manhattan. This movie and Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Moon were the big box-office hits of the 1929 film season.
Even so, Riefenstahl did not want to make any more mountain films, in part because her partner of about three years, Schneeberger, had left her for another woman. Schneeberger must have been her ideal companion; they shared a passion for mountain climbing, skiing, and camera technology. She indirectly blamed Udet for the breakup of her love affair. Of course, the notorious womanizer had tried his luck with her when they first got to know each other, but she had rebuffed him, with the explanation that she had been sharing “the happiness of a perfect love” with Schneeberger for the past three years. Udet then began to try to lure Schneeberger away from her. The two men had quite a bit in common; they had both been pilots in the First World War. Udet made arrangements to room with Schneeberger in St. Moritz. Riefenstahl stayed behind with the rest of the crew while Schneeberger had fun with the jovial war hero. At some point he apparently fell in love with one of the elegant ladies who always flocked around Udet. “Udet was a Bohemian—he has brought my friend into this life. And so I have lost him. I have lost my friend through Udet.”105 Schneeberger had no intention of coming back to Riefenstahl, who regarded this breakup as a dramatic defeat. “The pain crept into every cell of my body; it paralyzed me until I tried to break free with a terrible scream. Crying, shouting, biting my hands, I staggered from one room to the next. I took a letter opener and slashed my arms, legs, and hips. I didn’t feel these physical pains; the mental ones burned like fire in hell.”106 She killed off her love for this man and focused more squarely on her career than ever before.
Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives Page 11