jürgen fauth’s muckworld

For once, a life worthy of a memoir. Leni Riefenstahl tells the gripping story of her rise from dancer and star of silent mountain films during the Weimar Republic to Triumph of the Will, Olympia, and “Hitler’s filmmaker,” followed by her long fall after the war, the Nuba, scuba. Riddled with contradictions, dubious statements and suspicious omissions, the book is also a thorny tangle that raises complicated questions about moral responsibility, political culpability, aesthetics, and ambition. Leni’s extreme unreliability (I had the uncanny sense that she started lying around page 5, about a playground incident) adds a layer of uncertainty that makes the book even more intriguing, down to the heartbreaking (or calculated?) last sentence.

After the war, when landmark achievements and intimate meetings with the Nazi elite–Goebbels, Göring, Hitler, Speer–give way to frustration and a string of canceled projects, the book slows down considerably. As Riefenstahl faces increasing hardship, it becomes difficult not to admire her dogged vitality and feel a certain degree of empathy for her. Regardless of your opinion on her life, work, and guilt, this book is bound to muddy some certainties. I’ll have to look at the two new biographies to see how some of her assertions hold up (not well, apparently), and I’m rewatching The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl for yet another take, but I don’t hope to come to terms with the confounding implications of the case Riefenstahl any time soon. Riefenstahl died in 2003, at the age of 101.

Leni Riefenstahl, A Memoir. 1987. ****

Previously on Muckworld:

• The Blue Light
• The White Hell of Pitz Palü
• Triumph of the Will

Leni

• Leni Riefenstahl - Official Site
• Leni Riefenstahl’s Photography at Fahey/Klein Gallery
• Leni Riefenstahl on Wikipedia

The New Biographies

• Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl by Steven Bach
• Leni Riefenstahl: A Life by Jurgen Trimborn
• Sleeping with ‘Hitler’s filmmaker’
• Clive James’ dismissive review in the Sunday Times
• Michikio Kakutani’s review

The diving sequence from Olympia:

I lucked into an advance copy of David Lynch’s book about “meditation, consciousness, and creativity,” and it’s splendid. Composed of short sections, the book is equal parts inspirational guide to using your creativity, anecdotal autobiography, and advocacy for Transcendental Meditation. In simple, direct language, Lynch graciously shares what he has learned about living “the art life” and his techniques for “catching” and developing ideas. There are brief sections on all of his major films (including INLAND EMPIRE) and proud stories about meeting Fellini and hearing that Stanley Kubrick considered Eraserhead his favorite movie. I ripped through this in a day but I’m looking forward to savor individual bits again and again–a generous and inspiring little book.

• David Lynch Official Site (with daily weather report)
• David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace
• Catching the Big Fish on Amazon.com
• YouTube video of David Lynch with Cow

I bought this book as a joke, an afterthought, just because I’d already spent twenty minutes in the dusty Prenzlauer Berg used book store where the salespeople were playing Warcraft in the corner. “Kinski’s always good for a laugh,” I figured, and forked over my three Euros. Little did I know that the joke would blossom into a full-fledged obsession. I’d grown up with an idea of Kinski based mainly on the German TV shows I saw during the 80s: Gottschalk, talk shows. Whenever Kinski was on (and he seemed to be on a lot), he could be counted on to rave and rant and make a public spectacle of himself.

We watched Woyzek in high school, and it freaked me out. Since, I’ve seen Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, Nosferatu, and countless of the two hundred B pictures, Edgar Wallace and Karl May adaptations he appears in, and Herzog’s mean-spirited My Best Fiend. Still, Kinski’s artistry seemed to consist of Kinski just being Kinski, a megalomaniac who could outcrazy everybody on screen because he was a madman offscreen, too.

No longer. I can’t say that I understand him after reading his outrageous, boundless autobiography, but at least it’s possible now to imagine what the world looked like from inside Kinski’s head. As he puts it, everything about him was too too: he felt too much, loved too intensely, reacted too quickly, fought too viciously; a raging, fucking, screaming beast of a man whose emotions were too close too the surface, whose appetites where too ravenous, who had no sense of proportion. Put him in a TV studio and ask him idiotic questions about his international success or the endless bad movies he appeared in, and he would show his disdain, question the intention of the hosts and refuse to answer. He talks too quickly and he pounces too early, but you can’t deny that he has a point.

Rewatch his films, and you can see it there, right on the surface: every twitch of his soul is written on an unbearably intense face, threatening, seductive, almost too alive. The agony, the joy, the madness–if our senses weren’t so dull compared to his, we would appear mad, too. It’s no surprise that before the backdrop of mid-20th century German mainstream culture, a creature as fearless as Klaus Kinski should seem completely nuts.

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Phil Lesh’s autobiography isn’t as idiosyncratic as Dylan’s, but it’s almost as fascinating–even if you’ve heard most of the GD legends & lore laid again and again. How many accounts of Altamont, the first Human Be-In, the Acid Tests, the Discovery of the Name, and the Lunar Eclipse at Gizeh can you take, really? As far as I’m concerned, this stuff is always delicious–and Phil’s got a unique voice that comes through loud and clear, adding a new persepective to things. The book starts out as lots & lots of fun, everybody trippin’ the Haight and forging the group mind with psychedelic abandon…. and then, of course, the inevitable decline takes over the second half, as the drugs isolate the band members from each other and Jerry’s health begins to fail. His liver transplant and the years since 95 are covered but don’t get a lot of space.

His final words: “There never will be another band like the Grateful Dead.”

The first part of Bob Dylan’s autobiography is pure greatness. Fearless, witty, grandiose, coy, grumpy, hilarous, Bob keeps assembling his own legend but hell, it still feels like he’s mumbling right into your ear. Fantastic anecdotes, great aphorisms, odd insights, quirky character sketches, nutso metaphors, and some shit for which they’d beat you out of writing class with a stick. He’s a mythological character, and this book works hard to sell the idea that he is one of the Great American Heroes, connecting him with everybody he namedrops–Robert Johnson, Woody Guthrie, Rimbaud, Kerouac, Whitman, F Scott Fitzgerald, and scores of others.