But if the film was to be “non-political,” where could its genius go? Into picturesque travelogue? Eisenstein and Tisse were in Mexico by December 5, 1930. They went to a bullfight; they observed earthquakes. They were arrested for having the wrong papers. They aroused suspicions among peasants who believed the camera could see through women’s clothes. And gradually Eisenstein’s eye became captivated by the sights of Mexico. A script emerged and it is clearly a list of things seen:
The grotesque laughing of the stone heads becomes still more grotesque in the cardboard “piñata” faces—Christmas dolls. And then becomes voluptuous in the suffering smile of the Catholic polychrome saints. Statues of saints that were erected on the sites of pagan altars. Bleeding and distorted like the human sacrifices that were made on the top of these pyramids. Here, like imported and anemic flowers bloom the iron and fire of the Catholicism that Cortes brought. Catholicism and paganism. The Virgin of Guadalupe worshiped by wild dances and bloody bull-fights. By tower-high Indian hair-dresses and Spanish mantillas. By exhausting hours-long dances in sunshine and dust, by miles of knee-creeping penitence, and the golden ballets of bull-fighting cuadrillas…
As you might imagine, the shooting expanded with every fresh piece of exotica they saw. Eisenstein would not quit Mexico until February 1932! He fired cables back to the Sinclairs asking for more money. He sent bits of footage that they found striking but incoherent. In the end, over $90,000 went into the project. As Sinclair grew more anxious, he wrote to Stalin, asking for advice. The answer came back, grim and misspelled (in November 1931):
Eisenstein loose [sic] his comrades confidence in Soviet Union. He is thought to be deserter who broke off with his own country. Am afraid the people here would have no interest in him soon. Am very sorry but all assert it is the fact…
Eisenstein tried to return to the United States, but by April 1932 he and Tisse were on the boat back to Russia. Upton Sinclair looked at the footage and asked Sol Lesser to attempt to edit it. Lesser had just acquired the screen rights to the Tarzan character, but he did what he could to achieve Thunder over Mexico, a film cut from the Russians’ material, but organized without their input. It opened in Los Angeles in March 1933, picketed by local Communists who claimed Sinclair was interfering with the purity of Eisenstein’s work. In 1940 the scholar Marie Seton re-cut it as Que Viva Mexico!, but Eisenstein would never deliver his own vision of the material.
Nearly every shot in Que Viva Mexico! is a knockout, yet the film is no more than an assembly of sumptuous, lurid, and often cruel still photographs. Does it say anything useful about Mexico? Well, yes, but it also testifies to visitors being attracted by the sunshine, the dust, and the savage iconography of an unfamiliar culture. Years later Eisenstein admitted it was a catastrophe.
The Soviet Union lived up to his gloomiest expectations. Any revolutionary enthusiasm had passed. An All-Union State Institute of Cinematography had been placed over all production, and its boss was Boris Shumyatsky, who would become a stifling influence in Eisenstein’s life. The Party was by then afraid of films, so it controlled everything and ensured a drastic reduction in the number of Soviet films being made. In the years from 1935 to 1937, Soviet Union production dropped into the forties, and then to twenty-four films a year. Couple that with the restrictions on foreign movies coming into the country and you can see how, in this most severe period, “entertainment” was hardly recognized. Lenin’s notion of film’s importance had been reduced almost completely to propaganda.
Eisenstein was in disgrace as terror mounted in Moscow. Projects were considered—notably a documentary on the history of Moscow—but nothing materialized. So he taught and wrote more articles, though it was evident now that he was not free to leave the country. Then, in late 1935, he was allowed to develop a script for Bezhin Meadow (taken from Turgenev) with Isaac Babel as a cowriter. Shumyatsky allowed this picture to proceed. Shooting started in 1936. But in the spring of 1937 it was stopped, and Eisenstein felt the necessity to publish an article admitting “The Errors of Bezhin Meadow.” A year later Shumyatsky himself was put before a firing squad.
The intrigue was dense and paranoid, but in 1937–38 Eisenstein was permitted to develop what would become Alexander Nevsky, a spectacular historical epic, beautifully shot, with a score by Prokofiev, yet almost without thematic interest. It was a picture that summoned a spirit of Russian patriotism and military solidarity, and it opened in November 1938. The Party approved of it. The public liked it. It is a statuesque, inspirational, but heavy-handed version of something like the Errol Flynn The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), and as historically preposterous, but without the romanticism that made Flynn and his director, Raoul Walsh, such a team. In 1939, Eisenstein was awarded the Order of Lenin.
He seemed to be rehabilitated. But the purges were endless. In 1940, both Meyerhold, Eisenstein’s former mentor, and Isaac Babel were shot. More than 680,000 people were tortured and killed. There was a film project on the Ferghana Canal, in Uzbekistan, but that was interrupted so that Eisenstein could hurry back to Moscow to direct Die Walküre at the Bolshoi Theatre as a concession to the cynical, short-lived pact with Germany signed in 1939.
Once the Soviet Union joined the war with Germany, in October 1941, the Moscow film studios were moved to Alma-Ata, beyond Tashkent, near the China border. It was there in 1943 that Eisenstein began to shoot Ivan the Terrible, his first concerted film with actors, and with Nikolai Cherkasov (his Nevsky) as Tsar Ivan IV. The patriotic need of the moment seemed to liberate the venture, and for Eisenstein there was clear progress. Here, at last, he was making a developed story about a few people, albeit lofty figures very crudely caricatured. Was he trying to take on some vestiges of dramatic realism?
But this was only the first part of Ivan. In 1945–46 he shot Part II, with its gaudy color sequences. It was only after he had cut that film that he suffered a serious heart attack, in February 1946. But then, as he recovered, he learned that the Party was uneasy with Part II and suspicious that the looming figure of Ivan had been used to make a baleful portrait of Stalin. So Part II was never released in Sergei’s lifetime. He died on February 11, 1948, only a few days past fifty. His last months had been spent in hiatus, resting as best he could and writing the autobiography that would be called Immoral Memories.
With “Immoral” he didn’t seek to trade on the regular meaning of that word, though there are stories that his homosexual life was unrestrained, like his taste for pornography. What he meant was that his memoirs “will not moralize. They will not set themselves any moral aims nor preach any sermons. They will not prove anything. Not explain anything. Not teach anything.”
That sounds surprising coming from a man who could be so didactic and doctrinaire. Was there a complete confusion in Eisenstein or was he changing? Why be unduly frightened by complete confusion? He insisted that he did not understand himself very well, but “life had passed at a gallop, without a backward glance, in constant transit, leaving one train to chase after another. My attention riveted all the time to the second hand.”
If only all his films had been as open and momentary. His memoir is less a book than notes toward a book, full of life and his anguish at the thought of quitting life, and it may be the first essential book written by a filmmaker. Today, Eisenstein doesn’t mean as much as he meant in the years just after his death. His influence is hard to find. But the model of an untidy life, and his pioneering of the director as helpless outcast—those things survive, along with his smile and that corona of hair. We love the man.
“Leaving one train to chase after another!” Surely when Sergei went from New York to Los Angeles he took the Twentieth Century Limited, that brimming metaphor for smart America in the Depression. And surely Eisenstein was enough of a constructivist still to love trains, the sounds of the wheels and the thrill of such rapid alteration. Didn’t he enjoy the people on the ship who had wagered on knots? On a train, you can bet on how closely the schedule will be met
, or how many impassive Indians you’ll see on the range watching the train go by, or settle into a three-day poker game with the blinds down. On a train, life becomes the dream of tracking shots.
Transportation is a minor key to the movies. Do you recall the Europa, the German liner that carried Eisenstein across the Atlantic? Here it comes again, as ready to serve state cinema as glamorous careers, as ready to be a vehicle of destiny as a ship of fools. In 1938 another film person took the same Europa across the sea, with three prints of her latest movie, a small entourage, and seventeen pieces of luggage. She was booked as “Lotte Richter,” but her real name was Leni Riefenstahl, and we are not supposed to love her.
Helene Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl was born in Berlin in 1902. There would be rumors that on her mother’s side there was Jewish blood—Hitler officially denied it, but Goebbels (who never liked her) encouraged the dirty thought. Devoted to her parents, she was regarded as solitary and a dreamer. She wrote poetry, about nature more than human nature, and she was ambitious to be a dancer. There was something odd in her eyes (it never left her), but she was somewhere between pretty and handsome, and she had a good body, which she was prepared to display (topless) in some early film roles, notably Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit (1925), which translates as Ways to Strength and Beauty. It was a film meant to endorse health, exercise, and anything else you had in mind. A knee injury curtailed her dreams of dance, but she was still excited to be an athletic figure on the screen. And so she met Dr. Arnold Fanck, a man against the grain of German cinema in the 1920s in that he made open-air mountain films thrilling to the spirit and purity of the heights, and often finding a beautiful maiden up the mountain.
Fanck discovered Leni, trained her, made a star of her, and took her as his lover. Leni never flinched from any request. Thus, by 1931, she had appeared in The Holy Mountain (1926), The Great Leap (1927), The White Hell of Pitz Palu (1929), Storms over Mont Blanc (1930), and The White Rapture (1931). But she wanted more, and she studied Dr. Fanck more closely than he appreciated. She saw that he was making films about the mountain, whereas she would concentrate on the girl. Despite Fanck’s objections, and enlisting men as significant as Béla Balázs and Carl Mayer (from Sunrise) to do the writing for her, she proceeded to star in and direct The Blue Light (1932), where she plays Junta, a mountain girl who knows the secret of the light on top of the mountain. Is this meteorology, physics, or magic? Or might it be revelation? It is one more film about light and the grace wherever it falls.
The Blue Light premiered on March 24, 1932, in Berlin, at the prestigious Ufa-Palast am Zoo. Many people went to see it, including Hitler, who took it upon himself to meet Riefenstahl and tell her that as and when he came to power (not long now), “You must make my films.” Maybe he said that to a lot of pretty women (as well as to Lang), but the competition among female directors was not great.
Hitler meant what he promised. Once he was chancellor, he proposed a Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg and told Goebbels that Riefenstahl was to direct the film of it. Her biographer Steven Bach established that Goebbels never passed that message on: he was jealous of his own authority and may have been disconcerted by the idea of a woman director. So Leni heard of the decision only at the last minute, leaving the hour-long Sieg des Glaubens (Victory of the Faith, 1933) to suffer from haste. “In the end,” writes Bach, “Victory of Faith was more than a sketch but less than a portrait. Still, it was something new, a tentative joining of fiction and reality techniques in a trial run whose importance lay less in what it accomplished than in what it anticipated.” Hitler was so pleased he gave Leni a Mercedes convertible.
Victory of the Faith was a rehearsal, as well as a lesson that “documentary” was a myth. The screen could not tell fact from fiction, and it was hell-bent (or heaven-bent, if you prefer) on ending the distinction. In 1934, there would be another rally in Nuremberg, and enough had been learned from the first film to control (or direct) the crowd. There would be no more scenes of drunkenness, aimless wandering, or ordinary, drifting human behavior (including unattractiveness). No one should look bored or vacant. Solidarity and purpose were the imperatives of the work. And, if necessary, the production could film a scene again and again until they got it “right.” In real life, the alleged material of documentary, there is no such thing as a “right” way. But in fiction, there has to be. Leni Riefenstahl was setting out now to make a picture in an epic, or more American, style.
The rally in Nuremberg was a self-sufficient event, and a Nazi Party function. Riefenstahl was charged to make the movie of it, and she was allowed to shape or stage the rally for the cameras. Yet her own company, the credits claimed, produced the film, albeit with an advance of 300,000 reichsmarks from Ufa (not yet a nationalized company) in return for the distribution rights. This is important in that Riefenstahl claimed and received royalty income on the film for decades, even after it had been banned in Germany. She lived until September 2003 and never mounted another film after Tiefland (begun in 1940, but released only in 1954). She published a few books of her photographs—on handsome African tribes such as the Nuba—but she survived on Triumph of the Will (getting residuals way ahead of most American directors).
The rally lasted six days and Riefenstahl knew its program from the outset. She also had 16 cameramen, 16 camera assistants, 9 aerial photographers, and another 29 newsreel cameramen at her command. There was a lighting crew of 17—in all a crew of more than 215 people. Riefenstahl wore a white coat (to be recognized as the authority); only Hitler was more noticeable. She laid tracks and built crane-shot mountings. When it came to the platform speakers, she was able to have them in a studio for refined close-ups.
But any filmgoer knows this from the movie itself, and from its stunning opening. “Stunning” here is not fascistic, I hope. The film critic word is a simple response to the way film and the screen are used. It is a glorious day in Nuremberg as Hitler’s aircraft comes down out of the pearly black-and-white sky. The music (by Herbert Windt) is as rousing as any score by Hollywood’s Max Steiner (and Steiner was born in Vienna). There is a palpable blast of acclamation when Hitler is seen—the soundtrack was advanced and impeccable. He is lifted like an angel to an open car and is then filmed from impossible (or undocumentary) but glorifying angles as his car advances. When his hand goes up in his own limp salute, light spills on his palm. Such things are not accidental. They are movie. We are watching a sequence in which a rather odd, ratlike man is standing in for Gable or Gary Cooper—the film, the triumph, is Hitler’s dream. But beyond dispute, Riefenstahl had the “talent” and even the love to envisage it and bring it to the screen as an edited whole.
Triumph of the Will opened at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo on March 28, 1935. The front of the theater had been dressed by Albert Speer, the official Nazi architect. After a series of ovations, Hitler presented Leni with a bouquet on the stage. The press called the film “A Symphony of the German Will.” The Party paper said it was “the greatest film we have ever seen.” In the first three weeks in Berlin, a hundred thousand people saw the picture. It broke box office records all over Germany. It would be folly to regard that as just a Party boast. In 1935, Germany was alive with the Hitler cult, and this was the masses’ best chance to see and hear him up close. He was a star, and his aura was enough to make audiences overlook the scary thugs and typecast degenerates who shared the platform with him. No political leader had so grasped a mass medium to create his reputation.
Ufa said the film had covered its costs in two months. It played not just in theaters, but also in churches, schools, and public halls. We do not have to like it now, but the public loved it then, and there can be no doubt but that the picture did a lot to foster German support of the Nazis and to build the confidence of the leaders. Casablanca did some of the same things for Americans in 1942–43.
Perhaps that comparison seems offensive to some readers. But no one ever charged that Leni Riefenstahl was a war criminal. She was investigated several times aft
er the war, and at worst she was identified as a “follower” of the Nazi cause. When she came to America in November 1938, the press greeted her at the docks and asked if she was Hitler’s girlfriend. She flirted with that question, just as she may have flirted with the Führer himself. It’s more important to observe, from the movie, that she loved Hitler in ways that left actual relationship immaterial. But we all of us fall in love with people on the screen.
Riefenstahl went on to make Olympia, a film derived from the 1936 Olympic Games in Germany. (It was in an attempt to sell that picture that she came to America in 1938.) Olympia is dottily beautiful. It is mountain light at ground level, a hymn to physical perfection but a rather inept record of what actually happened in the sporting events. If Leni had made only the Olympic film she would be an arty curiosity, one of the people enamored of dance and the body given a camera (or fifty cameras).
Triumph of the Will is something else. You can say it shows her genius. Far more dangerous, it reveals the nature of the medium. That Riefenstahl was blackballed for decades, that the film cannot be shown in Germany still—these reactions are trauma turned into stone. Riefenstahl was not a Party member. She was not active in the war. Triumph of the Will comes before so many deadly stages in Nazi history. It’s true that Riefenstahl never properly disowned her influence, or Germany. But Eisenstein went back to Russia after Mexico well aware of its crimes. They both ended up outcasts and they had earned that horrible privilege. Sergei is more fun than Leni, smarter and more talented. But they both fell afoul of film’s tendency to adore storm trooper impersonality and the panache of uniforms. Riefenstahl looked away from some things, no doubt, but Eisenstein left Trotsky out of October. State film is a disaster and it undermined both of them, just as it had allowed their talent to flower.
The Big Screen Page 13