A Fascist in Africa, a Fascist Under the Sea
Leni Riefenstahl’s photobooks
The People of Kau and Coral Gardens by Leni Riefenstahl
Anyone who has ever sat through Triumph of the Will, at school or willingly, might concede that while Leni Riefenstahl could, in her day, put together a project of some complexity, assemble the outputs of many moving parts, she likely knew nothing of art and had no feeling for it.
These two books, produced in the old Nazi’s retirement and while she was still, in the words of some, hustling for a return to conventional film-making, might jeopardise that conclusion. But only for a moment.
The books are very interesting. When the war ended and the Hitler regime collapsed into failure and ignominy and occupation, many of its supporters went to ground in the new and divided Germany. Others managed, via means licit and not, to get out. Riefenstahl stayed put long enough to be arrested, long enough to be interrogated, tried, labelled a fellow traveller of the former regime. Long enough to get her denials really polished. Denials of knowledge about, for instance, German mass murders that have only been conclusively disproven this decade, in 2024.
Many thought it odd that someone who endorsed, who did the enthusiastic and effective work of, a regime like Hitler’s would retreat from postwar Germany to Africa. Her other choice, seeking solace under the sea, makes more sense. But that is what Riefenstahl did. She went to what was then Sudan and what is now South Sudan and the remains of the Republic of the Sudan. Looking there for a primate people on the way out — life as it was, unburdened perhaps by the modernity that had failed Riefenstahl in her own life. The Nuba people, of which there are many, were her target. Their most visibly tribal practices were what Riefenstahl most desired to photograph.
Perhaps it was because their way of life appeared to be declining that Riefenstahl believed herself to understand these people.
I will not say, because it is not true, that this is a bad book. I won’t say it contains no beauty. Some of the pictures here are stunning. Riefenstahl complains at length in the introduction that the Nuba people didn’t want to show her all that much of themselves and their practices. But she still managed to take pictures of their brilliant bodypaints, their handicrafts and storied tools and weaponry, their art, their physiques — which Riefenstahl talks about extensively — the pretty faces of their youths.
The Nuba, Riefenstahl writes, believe that beauty is goodness and goodness beauty. If they live to be old enough that their bodies are no longer beautiful, she claims, they hide away from the remainder of the tribe, so that their presence does not detract from what ought to be wondrous and bright and made of youth and life. Riefenstahl, who once starred in a bizarre 1925 film, Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit (Ways to Strength and Beauty), about woo woo naturalism and a little light bodybuilding, plainly approves of this idea.
Riefenstahl though, too, that these young Africans were very beautiful, and to her credit, the ones she was able to photograph are, or certainly appear to be.
There is some of the spirit of Triumph of the Will even in Coral Gardens. It’s a photobook about undersea life, quite innocuous in its own way. Some of the pictures are luminous and excellent. But when Riefenstahl gives a biographical introduction to the work, an introductory essay in which she sets out her stall, she talks about being the oldest woman ever to be successfully trained to dive by her scuba school — having lied about her age to be admitted. When she announced her (incorrect) age (or was it when she qualified as a diver?), people clapped. It was a triumph of her will to dive, at any rate.
Many of the pictures here are fine and some are excellent. One believes, of most underwater photography, that it has all been done. Some of Riefenstahl’s work seems original. But not much.
Riefenstahl had been a swimmer and a dancer, and then an actress, before she had ever picked up a camera. They way she talks about dancing in The People of Kau is a little peculiar. Dancing as a fertility ritual and as a test of fitness is not unknown in anthropology. But the Nuba that Riefenstahl observes will not permit her to see a particular dance, in which the young men present themselves to the very young girls, and the girls then, in the course of their part of the dance, appear to choose their future husbands by means of a signal gesture.
Riefenstahl was not permitted to see this and it ate her up. Thanks to some good luck, Riefenstahl was able to catch sight of this dance, at great distance and in failing light. Her delight at being able to see, far away and at night, a dance between what she called ‘maidens’ (girls) and ‘warriors’, young men possibly a little older, is palpable. Riefenstahl does not really photograph this practice, but she is in raptures about its beauty and importance.
Riefenstahl describes this ritual almost as if she is observing the mating patterns of a tropical bird: the careful grooming and arrangement of its feathers, the sounding of its song, and the beginning of its dance.