Pabst and Riefenstahl

We can quibble over the definition of fascism, but our collective gut seems to be telling us that something very much like it is coming our way—and not just in the U.S. At Literary Hub, David Renton is rereading Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935) and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), while at Little White Lies, Sam Moore is revisiting Mussolini’s Italy and Franco’s Spain as depicted in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom (1976) and Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006).

Earlier this year, the Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Roxborough and Patrick Brzeski felt compelled to put together a list of the “Best Anti-Fascist Films of All Time,” and Montclair Film artistic director Tom Hall has been devoting his newsletter to “No Authority,” a series “about the lessons of representation of authoritarianism and resistance in cinema.” Andres Veiel’s Riefenstahl, a reckoning with the director of such landmark Nazi propaganda films as Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938), is currently in theaters in the UK and touring Australia as part of that country’s traveling German Film Festival.

When Riefenstahl premiered in Venice last fall, the Guardian’s Xan Brooks called it “a textured, complex portrait that feels close to definitive; a slice of dark history that speaks (eloquently, implicitly) to present-day tensions.” Last month, Eliza Apperly spoke with Veiel and producer Sandra Maischberger for the Guardian, noting that as they were working on the film, they “observed in parallel a renaissance of the filmmaker’s imagery and its attendant ideology. From Donald Trump’s raised fist to the organized bodies of Moscow military parades, the mediascape was increasingly occupied by the choreography, motifs, and perspectives that characterize Triumph of the Will. To those in the film community—and beyond—who defend Riefenstahl as a ‘pure artist’ or foreground the formal appreciation of her imagery, the documentary insists, as Maischberger puts it, that ‘there is no innocence in the use of these aesthetics.’”

“For me,” Veiel tells Apperly, “it was important that [Leni Riefenstahl] is not just a nasty Nazi. She is a human being. That makes her even more dangerous, because she comes out of the middle of our society. I wanted to understand her, but not to exonerate her responsibility.”

Riefenstahl makes an appearance in Daniel Kehlmann’s latest novel, The Director,as “the villainous monster that I think she was,” as Kehlmann tells Gal Beckerman in the Atlantic. But the woman who spent decades after the fall of the Third Reich denying her complicity in its rise is a minor character in The Director, which is much more a reimagining of the life of G. W. Pabst, whose career flourished in the 1920s when he directed Greta Garbo in The Joyless Street (1925), Brigitte Helm in The Loves of Jeanne Ney (1927), and Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box (1929) before codirecting (with Arnold Fanck) The White Hell of Pitz Palu (1929), starring Leni Riefenstahl.

Along with Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau, Pabst was “one of Weimar cinema’s big three—the most cosmopolitan as well as politically engaged of the trio,” as J. Hoberman points out in the New York Times. Pabst leaned left during these years. “Red Pabst, as he was called early in his career, made a brilliant adjustment to sound with the antiwar film Westfront 1918 (1930) and The Threepenny Opera (1931),” writes Hoberman. “But he was a bad fit in Hollywood.”

The language and cultural barriers proved too daunting, and the one film Pabst made in Hollywood, A Modern Hero (1934), flopped. Kehlmann gives Pabst a conceivably justifiable reason to head for Austria in 1939, a year after the Nazis had annexed the country to form a “Greater Germany.” His ailing mother needed seeing to, and when war broke out, he, his wife, and the son Kehlmann has dreamed up for him were trapped. Goebbels made an offer that Pabst evidently believed he couldn’t refuse, and he ended up making two historical dramas, The Comedians (1941) and Paracelsus (1943), for the regime. At one point in the novel, Pabst realizes that the starving extras he’s directing for a concert scene have been trucked over from a nearby concentration camp.

“The idea that complicity is not a line that one jumps across,” writes Gal Beckerman, “but rather an accumulation of rationalizations, fascinates Kehlmann: the wishful thinking that the threat is sure to end soon; the worries about how best to keep one’s children safe; the need to continue working; the self-protective modesty of telling oneself, What difference could I possibly make?”

“Every single step he takes is kind of defensible, but he still gets to a place that’s completely unacceptable,” Kehlmann tells Beckerman, who notes that Kehlmann’s Pabst is “a man who never actively chooses to embrace his Nazi benefactors. Instead, he allows his resistance to them to steadily erode.” In the Los Angeles Times, Julia M. Klein calls The Director “an engrossing meditation on the exigencies of art and the dangers of artistic complicity.” For J. Hoberman, the novel is “a marvelous performance—not only supple, horrifying, and mordantly droll, but fluidly translated [by Ross Benjamin] and absolutely convincing.”