Triumph of the Shill: The Brand-Management Legacy of Leni Riefenstahl
Last night in New York City, while some were celebrating the shimmery, multivalent photographs of Paul Graham, biographer Steven Bach settled in to talk about a more… strategic image-maker: Leni Riefenstahl, a.k.a. “Hitler’s filmmaker,” who died in 2003 at age 101.
The Center for Communication-sponsored seminar at New York University began with footage of Riefenstahl, then pushing 90, spinning lies of various sizes about herself and her career. Bach, the author of a new Riefenstahl biography and a former film studio exec, proceeded to set the record straight in the course of his conversation with David Schwartz, chief curator for film and video at the Museum of the Moving Image.
With her 1935 film Triumph of the Will, Riefenstahl blazed a trail for visual branding (or propaganda, if you prefer). “Leni’s assignment was not to aestheticize a political rally but how to aestheticize the Fuehrer and all that means at a time when everyone in Germany is a little bit shaky after this guy has just been murdering [all of his political enemies],” said Bach. “Triumph of the Will was the movie she made to make Hitler safe for Germany.”
In discussing Riefenstahl’s complicity in the Nazi program, Bach highlighted her extraordinary ability to create mythical images and her editorial genius. The masked figures in Triumph of the Will, for example, are a metonym for the Nazi ideology that turned people into faceless machines to glorify the Fuehrer. “If you look at the film for an agenda, it’s not there,” he said. “It’s in the power of the image, all those flags and those appeals to patriotism that are not alien to us today.”
After Triumph of the Will, which Bach calls a step-parent to all American political films, Riefenstahl made Olympia, about the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Clive James has called the film “by far her most palatable cinematic achievement,” and Bach emphasized that this was not the work of a lone directorial genius. “There isn’t a sports photographer alive who doesn’t owe his career to this film–to Leni and her team of 150 photographers.”
