Genius, bully, documentarist, fabulist, whiner, egomaniac, embezzler, Riefenstahl was the archetypal film-maker. Never before the 20th century had the means of recording events so commandingly shaped the events themselves. The Triumph of the Will advertised the 1934 Nuremburg rally, with rigged footage and preconceived camera-placing, but then the rally itself was factitious, a staged show with beer- bellied extras disguised as Teutonic knights and Hitler as Thomas Mann’s Mario the Magician topping the bill. (By the way, Bach seems to think that Mann left Germany because he was Jewish).
In one of his letters, in the 1880s, Flaubert forecast that the waxwork show would be the popular art form of the future. He was wrong, but not absurd: the Nazi rally used living waxworks, who marched, drilled and applauded like cued automata. Film was Hitler’s natural accomplice; it glorifies fraudulence and, whatever its qualities and seductions, it cannot think. Hitler’s close-ups were his apotheosis. His director was almost as important to his vanity as he was to hers; their chaste romance (hand-holding only) was narcissism à deux.
The Triumph of the Will may stand as a superb warning against megalolatry, but although Hitler came and went, the triumph of the media has grown and grown. Modern political success is mainly a matter of looking and sounding right to the camera and the microphone. If there will never be another European demagogue like Leni’s Hitler, it is because realistic hesitation (Blair is a master) and walkabout shows of sincere concern for ‘ordinary people’ work better on today’s cameras and sound-equipment than premeditated rodo- montade.
Whether or not Leni was ‘really’ a genius is hardly worth debating; she was indefatigable (film-making too is a mara- thon) and, by the insolence of her ambition, she turned photo-opportunism into the art form of our time, the triumph of emotion over thought and of shadows over substance.
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