When Leni Riefenstahl died a few years back, at the ripe old age of 101, her legacy was still up for grabs. Riefenstahl did a lot of big things in her life, some of them admirable and some quite awful. She rose to fame as a movie star in 1920s Germany and finished out the century photographing vanishing African tribes and exotic deep-sea creatures.
But what Riefenstahl will be forever remembered for is something more profound and far more troublesome. Although she claimed never to have officially joined the Nazi party, Riefenstahl immortalized them in grand style in the two greatest propaganda films of all time.
In the early 1930s, Leni Riefenstahl was enlisted by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels to direct Triumph of the Will and Olympia, two prickly masterpieces that, back in the day, did much to popularize the Nazi agenda. These beautifully crafted motion pictures were all the more remarkable, and insidious, because they were propaganda films that transcended then-known definitions of propaganda. Making full use of cinema's greatest weapon — the power of the image — Riefenstahl crafted two enormously potent and poetic works of art, albeit works of art that just happen to have a moral underpinning that's dubious at best (Olympia), pure evil at worst (Triumph of the Will).
These films aren't much easier to talk about today than they were 70 years ago, a conundrum that goes double for Riefenstahl (who, to her dying day, regretted nothing). The toughest thing to wrap your brain around is just how good these movies are, how nearly mystical in their reverence for a human ideal, and yet how loathsome. (You might say that the films unintentionally hold up an interesting mirror to the phenomenon of Nazi Germany itself — the pinnacle of European civilization listening to Brahms by day, making lampshades out of human skin by night.)
The cinema has come a long way since Leni Riefenstahl, but we haven't made much progress reconciling the deeply problematic ideologies of an Olympia or a Birth of a Nation with their obvious artistic merits. Seven decades after Riefenstahl's celluloid love letters to Hitler, nearly a century after D.W. Griffith revolutionized cinema while glorifying the KKK, we're still trying to figure out if the movies demand some sort of morality. That muddled relationship between the movies and the world is a touchier topic than ever.
Much as I'd like to blame the whole mess on Michael Moore, his movies offer about the only clarity you'll find here. Love him or hate him, it's basically impossible to talk about Bowling for Columbine or Fahrenheit 9/11 without weighing in on the filmmaker's politics (it's almost as an afterthought that we take into account whether the films are honest and effective in communicating those politics).
This issue is far trickier when discussing a film that cloaks its politics in the subtleties of art, like, say, Syriana or Munich. Moore's movies, which put the political cart before the cinematic horse, are simply more transparent than most, which makes them easier targets.
The thing is, all movies are on some basic level political — even a Pretty Woman or a Die Hard comes with its own political and moral baggage, should we choose to look for it. Sometimes it's just plain silly mentioning that baggage, of course, but sometimes it's unavoidable. And in some instances, failing to talk about a movie's political agenda, especially when it's potentially dangerous, is not just irresponsible but immoral.
I took some heat recently for taking to task a film called Paradise Now, a flawed but sporadically fascinating Palestinian production that has garnered considerable attention (and a Golden Globe) for putting us up close and personal with a couple of suicide bombers. The film does a good job giving a human face to Palestinian misery but, despite its vaunted "objectivity," does double duty as a thinly veiled rationale for mass murder, folded so carefully into the body of its narrative that it does its dirty work on an almost subliminal level.
The film's terrorists are conflicted, true, but they're also sympathetic and strangely heroic, while their victims are worse than evil — they're faceless, denied even the basic humanity the movie grants its killers.
Regardless of where you stand on the whole mess in the Middle East, it seems pretty clear that one is supposed to walk away from Paradise Now thinking how awful it all is but, when push comes to shove, no one is innocent. That sort of reasoning may be existentially appealing in an abstract sort of way, but it doesn't cut it in the real world where there sometimes really are innocent people who continue to die for all the wrong reasons. Paradise Now has much going for it, but the slippery slope of the film's morality flies just under the radar, disingenuous and potentially toxic.
So that's what I wrote, and that's when the fur began to fly. Letters were written to this paper complaining that "political bias" had no place in a mere film review, and even suggesting that I stop writing about films having to do with Palestinians. This would be a shame since I firmly believe that, flaws and all, Palestinian filmmaking is among the most promising national cinemas emerging today.
But there's the rub. Films like Paradise Now or Divine Intervention or Ticket to Jerusalem offer moments of magic as heady as some you'll find in a Riefenstahl production — but each of them, sometimes with a subtle wink and sometimes with self-righteous bile, also waffles on whether the killing of innocents is OK. That ambivalence may strike some of us as appropriate, in theory, and others as appalling. But there are others in the potential global audience for these movies who'll be inclined to interpret their messages in rough ways that, here in the real world, won't do any of us any favors.
I'm not saying that Paradise Now is necessarily going to generate legions of copycat killers (although, as I'm writing these words, somebody has just blown himself up in a Tel Aviv mall, not far from the movie's ground zero, and casualties are still being counted). As much as I find aspects of Paradise Now disturbing, I'm glad the film was made and I'm glad that it's being seen. As long as it's being seen with eyes and minds wide open.
We're all political creatures, after all — from the person making the film, to the audience member watching it, to the critic reviewing it. And though some will tell you that life is life and the movies are the movies, and never the twain shall meet, that's the biggest fantasy of them all.
This article appears in Jan 25-31, 2006.