Stenio
Solinas
Potsdam
- The whole Leni Riefenstahl is included in few, dazzling verses of Goethe. 
“Und
Schlag auf Schlag!/ Werd ich zum Augenblicke sagen:/ Verweile doch! du bisdt
so schon!/ Dann magst du mich in Fesseln sclagen, / Dann will ich gern zugrunde
gehn!/ Dann mag die Totenglocke schallen,/ Dann bist du deines Dienstes frei,
/ Die Uhr magh stehn, der Zeiger fallen, / Es sei die Zeit fur mich vorbei!”
(“Let's shake hands!/ If I must say to the instant /: Stay! You are so beautiful!
/ then throw me in chains, / so I will accept the end!/ So ring the knell,
/ then, expiring your promise,/ stop the clock, fall down the hand, / finish
for me the time!”). This is the pact signed by Faust and Mephistopheles, but
the director of Olympia didn't know it or she did not remember it. So it was
attempted to stop the instant, in his beauty, in the splendour of the form,
in the purity of the gesture, in the power of the action. The hell ended.
Along the halls of the ex Orangerie of Potsdam all ages spectators crowd orderly
in front of the monitors where are passed, continuous cycle, the two pictures
she directed and starred (“The damned belle “, 1932, “Lowland”, ended in 1944,
confiscated and then screened only ten years later) and the documentaries
marking her for all her life (“The triumph of will “, 1935, “The day of the
freedom. Our Wermacht”, 1935, Olympia, 1938). The show devoted to her develops
through two long paths going over again her life and career, from the first
tests as dancer and that succeeding one another projects never carried out,
featuring his activity during the post war. In a little hall it is screened
the film-interview Macht der Bilder that Ray Muller shot about her, a frail
old little woman at the Maldives not always walking lively, but that moves
as girl underwater, among giant mantas that seems to fly as birds of other
planets. Which nature she is, it is well understand since the first question
of the operator: “Soft lights are ok over me...”. The picture is dated 1994,
Leni was ninety-two. Last year, at 96, she has been in Papua-New Guinea for
new diving series. There are images showing the feminine fascination better
than any analysis of the man-woman relationship. There's no ambiguity in the
beauty of Riefenstahl, and nevertheless it is understood how she was more
modern as to his own times, as regard to the model of her own times. A take
of “White Bliss “, the 1931 picture of Arnold Fanck, shows her with a white
snowsuit, with her initials embroidered, making disappearing all the odd one
aesthetic of the current skiing. In “S.O.S. Iceberg”, by Franck the same,
with the aviator cap and goggles is perfect; a photo by the “Time” in 1936,
while she is intent on tying skis, the knee-length sock folded up,with shorts
and a low-necked body is the celebration of seduction. The shot showing her
on the set of Olympia on a moving carriage, with a round-necked jumper, fold
up sleeves, flared trousers, white sandals, proves she could act as a model
for a Jill Sander's or Giorgio Armani's dress, sixty years later.
A
feminine body and a mind, a male will and thought. In this dichotomy it is
condensed the success and the tragedy of Riefenstahl, of her public life as
well as her private one. The first man of his life rapes her, he's forty,
she less more than twenty; Glenn Morris, the American golden medal decathleta
at Berlin and then the cinematographic Tarzan, after the prize-giving tears
her the blouse and kisses her breast in the stadium: the will live a passionate
story. His future husband, Peter Jacob, almost breaks down the door of her
room and then takes her by force... Other flirts, already spent or kept still
to come, shows always a clash of personalities, a fight not to make oneself
subjugated, an acceptation of the law of the jungle. Within work, this need
to impose oneself concurs to realise masterworks that are disquieting in their
lights and shadows succeeding one another, in accomplishing form and distorting
it before reaching perfection. The romantic and sentimental films she directed
and starred before the documentaries that will sanction her grandeur and that
will prepare her execration, are in film format what the paintings of Caspar
David Friedrich were in art. Nature as the primordial element, whose recall
one cannot withstand, the loneliness of human beings, the fascination of extremes
and contrasts.
The
fleeting moment Riefenstahl tried to stop with the cine camera, the beauty
beat by the harmony of bodies, politics deemed as aesthetic, the triumph of
composition, masses moving in unison, perfect movements, order and measure
follow one another in the images and in the films at the exhibition, a tribute
to a protagonist of this century compelled to survive herself, even unable
to neglect herself or to contradict herself, closed in that handful of years,
when occurred the rise to power of Hitler and the transformation of a talent
into an instrument, more or less aware of, of the regime. With ruthless sincerity,
an American magazine will sum up the problem in the fifty: “Are you a talent
director and do you work for Hitler? So you are a nazis. Do you work for Stalin?
So you are a genius “. After half century from the end of the Second World
War the debit and credits accounts, that of sins and good actions, maybe can
start without hysteria and without preconceptions. And so it must be admitted
that it was not Leni Riefenstahl's fault. The matter is that the beauty is
not democratic.
Mensile di scienza medica e attualita`