Leni
July 17th, 2007
The last word on Leni Riefenstahl seems always just out of reach. After her Memoirs, Steve Bach’s new biography provides a desperately needed corrective to Leni’s own lies, evasions, and half-truths. Anybody who has seen The Wonderful, Horrible Life knows what an extraordinarily maddening, talented, obsessive, domineering, and flirtatious creature Leni was even in her nineties–and she lived to 101. For artists anywhere–but especially Germans–Leni remains endlessly perplexing. The questions raised by her life go straight to the core of history, morality, ambition, power, and cinema. The dry statement issued after her death by the German government barely scratches the surface:
Leni Riefenstahl symbolizes a German artist’s fate in the 20th Century both in her revolutionary artistic vision and in her political blindness and infatuation. No one would deny that with her talent she developed cinematic methods that have since become part of an aesthetic canon. Her career also shows that one cannot lead an honest life in service of the false, and that art is never apolitical. (297)
Steven Bach. Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl. 2006. ****
- Reviews: New York Review of Books, Guardian, Washington Post, New York Times, New Yorker
- Susan Sontag’s 1975 essay “Fascinating Fascism.”
- At GreenCine: Leni, Obits.
- Jodie Foster’s Riefenstahl project
- Previously on Muckworld
Down the Highway
March 13th, 2005
Howard Sounes 2001 biography of Bob Dylan is kind of shitty. The factual information is interesting enough (I hadn’t followed Dylan’s secret marriages and backstage habits), and I particularly enjoyed the anecdotes of recording sessions, but whenever Sounes attempts to interpret a song lyric or a particular Dylan quote, he reveals the worst kind of lame pop psychology and shallow thinking. His biases show, and they’re not very appealing. Worst of all, he speculates what “Bob” might have felt at this or that point of his life, and his insights are usually embarrassing cliches. I’d dig up some fun examples, but I can’t be arsed. There must be better straight-up biographies of Dylan; this was just the one the librarian handed me when she couldn’t find the one I’d ordered. Oh well.
