Leni Riefenstahl's film "Triumph of the Will" forced tens of thousands of people to join fascism Leni Riefenstahl deserved to be talked about, at least by the fact of her century. At least the fact that he still shoots movies in extreme conditions - to ...

The film Leni Riefenstahl "Triumph of the Will" forced tens of thousands of people to join fascism

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Yeni Riefenstahl deserved to be talked about, if only by the fact of her century. At least the fact that he still shoots movies in extreme conditions - for example, under water. Let's agree: in order to dive with scuba gear and a camera at the age of 99, not only indestructible health is required, but also unique fortitude.

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The new wave of interest in the figure of the fighting Frau is not at all connected with her unparalleled love of life. Riefenstahl's visit to St. Petersburg last summer nearly sparked a boycott of the Message to Man documentary film festival, where she brought her new film. Public outrage had, to put it mildly, some grounds. Whatever you say, the appearance not just anywhere, but in Leningrad, not of anyone, but of Hitler's first image maker, and even as an honored guest, is an event that can shock not only the blockade.

And six months later in Moscow, in the club of documentary film lovers (created recently by the efforts of the writer Maria Golovanivskaya), a rather scandalous screening of Leni Riefenstahl's infamous film Triumph of the Will took place. Circles from this sharp show have been spreading around Moscow for a month now. Actually, the unrest began even before meeting with the beautiful: the liberal Moscow intelligentsia in the building of the former city committee of the Komsomol, now the office of the oil corporation, is watching the first and main fascist film in the history of cinema - not a weak schizophrenic! Before the discussion began, the president of the club read out a letter from one of the amateurs refusing to attend the session: “Elderly Jews will sit in the hall and watch the members of the NSDAP rage on the screen at their congress. It's disgusting and scary."

To which Viktor Shenderovich remarked: they say, if elderly Jews were on the screen, and members of the NSDAP raged in the hall, it would be much worse. Perhaps. Although I do not think that the National Socialists, in such peaceful circumstances as a movie show, would have gnawed each other's throats so passionately.

All Germans, Brecht wrote, are smart, honest, and, to top it off, National Socialists. But no one has all three qualities at once. If a German is smart and a National Socialist, he is not honest. If he is an honest National Socialist, then he is not smart. If a German is smart and honest, then he is not a National Socialist.

A good half of the Moscow liberals who ran into the mansion of the oil crown to watch "Triumph of the Will" will easily include any idea, including the fascist one, in any set of qualities, not excluding intelligence, conscience, courage or talent. Today, the advanced liberal public is showing particular tolerance towards talent. The fact of art acquires not only intrinsic value, but also an end in itself. Ethical categories do not work here in any way and, as it were, lose their meaning altogether. It is in this approximately plane that the squabbling and split in the ranks of the liberal public lie today, up to the rupture of close friends. It is unlikely that the hundred-year-old Frau Riefenstahl guesses how sharp and fresh her unkind name acquires at the eleventh decade.

The sixth archival film festival in Belyye Stolby turned out to be rich in "great centuries": Lyubov Orlova, Erast Garin, Leonid Trauberg, Boris Barnet, Cesare Zavattini, Leni Riefenstahl. In this block, Gosfilmofond showed her last pre-fascist film Blue Light (1932), after which the second star of the German screen firmly connected her fate with Hitler, automatically taking the position of the first. For at about the same time the incomparable Marlene Dietrich left for America, and never again—never again! - did not return home. Actually, not so incomparable. The "blue light" shed on Riefenstahl shows that the scale of the stars is quite comparable, and Leni's directorial discoveries (who started out as a ballerina) are not inferior to her acting brilliance. Beautiful, young, richly gifted, plus an excellent athlete: she climbs the rocks like a wild cat, easily overcoming negative angles.

True Aryan. Isn't this a label for a resurgent Germany! Fuhrer in ecstasy. Leni Riefenstahl is drafted under the banner of National Socialism. The impressionable beauty herself is fascinated by Hitler. She doesn't have the strength to refuse. The film "Triumph of the Will" - about the Nuremberg Congress of the NSDAP, filmed in 1934, it would seem, forever excluded the director from the artistic context due to the incompatibility of villainy with genius.

But bright aphorisms are often superficial, and time, as it turned out, worked for her. Generations have changed.

“Elderly Jews”, who are watching today a grandiose agitation, an enthusiastic ode to totalitarianism, where Hitler is assigned the role of not even a prophet, but Providence himself, evaluate the film, imagine, from an aesthetic position. They talk about the setting of light, angles, plasticity. As if there was no Nuremberg trials. As if her famous foreshortenings and chiaroscuro were not recorded as a “separate line” in the book of crimes against humanity. As if they did not excommunicate the truly Aryan Frau from the cinema for forty years.

What is happening around Riefenstahl at local get-togethers is a symptom of a completely alarming diagnosis. A powerful campaign is being carried out to rehabilitate her name. Conciliatory quotation marks everywhere: “an amazing document, which was considered to be an “apology for fascism” ... “for many, this great woman director will remain “Hitler’s accomplice”. Dear people call: "On the eve of the centennial anniversary of the classic of German cinematography, it is worth being more tolerant and more objective" ...

A conceptualist poet dearly beloved by me, wise as a rebbe, explained to me: “Art is made not only by the writer, but also by the reader. Any text can change under the influence of time. To do this, we just need you and I to agree to regard it as art. The propagandistic picture becomes a fact of art, if only in the absence of both the object and the subject of propaganda. A hundred years later, the bearer of an idea turns into a bearer of style. Although, personally, as a human being, of course, Marlene Dietrich’s behavior is more sympathetic than Leni Riefenstahl’s behavior.

And in my opinion, Leva, the opposite is true. Just the factor of "behavior" puts the figures in their places over time. Work for propaganda has not yet passed without a trace for anyone, we don’t know - with the experience of our socialist realism. Attempts to wave to the regime, as a rule, end badly for artists. Smart and honest cannot become a National Socialist: nature does not order. A great artist organically cannot lie. Well, it just can't, that's all.

The brilliant Mandelstam wrote a nasty panegyric to Stalin and was severely punished. The regime does not like obvious lies. Terrible words about fingers, "like worms", in a sense, humiliate him less than the humiliated lie of a genius.

The case of Leni Riefenstahl is different. Well, first of all, she's a woman. Secondly, she is a woman in love. And the film is her exclusively female and loving film. In the past, a good ballerina, she understood the expressive power of a gesture, a sign. 36 operators are placed by her so that the cameras not only capture the gesture, but fill it with majestic content: we see, as it were, materialized Will, which conquers the country like a woman.

In fact, it is almost a ballet. And it is false just to the extent and insofar as ballet is false: the most conventional art. Riefenstahl turns Germany into a stage, the people into a corps de ballet, the Fuhrer into a conductor, and she herself soars among the flagpoles like a Valkyrie... However, this is already from the field of opera.

For my taste, the style here is no more than that of Grigory Alexandrov in the film "The Bright Path", only instead of the "ZIS" flying over the Kremlin, the plane flies over the Reichstag. Higher, and higher, and higher... By the way, the song is German. And in "Triumph" it sounds with might and main, bringing it closer to Stalin's bullshit until it completely merges.

No, guys, who cares, but I didn’t agree with anyone to consider this hybrid of Chinese ballet from the late Mao era, the chronicle of the growing Soviets and Wagner’s opera to be great art.

The fact that Frau Leni, like her Germany, gave herself up to fascism out of love - not out of fear, but out of conscience - only once again brings to mind Brecht. Besotted was the ongoing mystery. But didn't she create this mystery herself? It matured only after the war. But after all, she didn’t come to Hitler as a “young girl”, a thirty-year-old artist, armed with the vision inherent in artists. Only a year older was Marlene Dietrich, who understood everything and did not forgive. Either honest and smart, or...

Of course, time has deprived Leni of the halo of the "evil genius." And probably, she really got her way, as the supporters of tolerance and objectivity say. And she is, whatever you say, an outstanding woman: at the age of 67, taking a 17-year-old boy as a husband and living with him for thirty years and three years is not even ballet. This is aerobatics. These are steel arms-wings and instead of a heart - a fiery motor. As it is sung in our common song with the Fuhrer.

But with quotes, I would not be in a hurry. Leni Riefenstahl has a lot of admirers not only in the circle of documentaries and gerontophiles. Grabs them and her friend Adolf. Both the object and the subject of propaganda are far from being included in the Red Book. I'm afraid that the good frau somehow deceived time in an unprecedented way. That, in a sense, Leni Riefenstahl is immortal...

Such is the triumph of the will.

"Bliss!" said my friend, as the lights went on in the hall. And to me, a bit tight, like many elderly Jews, I heard in my ear: "Kampf."