Leni Dearest

Since the earliest I can remember, I find myself in interesting, odd situations that have come to be known as Seinfeld moments. They are bizarre, yet low key, situational circumstances that had they been written by Larry David and acted out on the small screen by Jerry, Elaine, George or Kramer would bring about the type of hysterical laughing that causes one to shoot soda through your nose.

Last night was a quintessential Seinfeld moment. My friend, Monica, invited me to see a silent movie. In Seattle, the Paramount Theater runs various silent movie series where they have a guy playing an authentic Wurlitzer organ through the entire movie and have someone narrating the titles if they aren’t in English. This was going to be a very cool experience.

We had dinner, and made sure we got to the theater in time to grab good seats. Monica had purchased tickets for the series of three movies not knowing what the movies were or their content. When they handed us the program, we found out Monica’s film trio were German existentialist pictures, which seemed very interesting. She had missed the first one due to a nasty snowstorm that paralyzed the city, but we were at the second one in the series.

I was looking through the program reading the description of our film, The White Hell of Pitz Palu, while a professor of theater arts introed the film. The movie was made in 1929…okay, definitely authentic. It was considered the ultimate mountaineer movie of it’s time…hmmm, pre-Cliffhanger or all those ski films from the ‘80s, I can believe it. In the role of the female lead is a young Leni Riefenstahl…okay Leni, what the fuck!

My horrified gasp must have been noticeable, because Monica immediately turned to me with wide eyes exclaiming, “What?” For those of you who aren’t familiar with the name Leni Riefenstahl, let me fill you in. This beautiful, doe-eyed gal we were about to watch for a full two hours might have been climbing the snowy caps of Pitz Palu in 1929, but by 1935 she was producing, directing, writing and editing Triumph of the Will; the film that served as the ultimate tool by the Nazis to deify Adolf Hitler and the entire Nazi movement. Leni Dearest would end up becoming the unofficial filmmaker for the Third Reich spreading Hitler’s propaganda, and defending her work and involvement until her death in 2003 at the age of 101 (bastards do tend to live forever).

Monica asked if I wanted to leave, but I opted to stay. I knew how much she was looking forward to this experience, besides I’m open-minded, and Leni wasn’t a Nazi at that point. There should have been a device recording the running commentary in my head during the movie, again, it would have been the stuff Jerry could have made a mint on.

When Leni appears on the screen playing the young newlywed, I looked up thinking, so young, so sweet, little did they know she end up being a Nazi whore. The scene where she, her new groom, and the experienced mountain climber are trapped on an icy hill freezing made me smile as I thought, too bad the bitch really didn’t freeze to death on that hill. Maybe I was being a touch judgmental, but after the fall of the Third Reich, Leni came out publicly saying she was never a member of the Nazi Party (she just let them finance her films, and had an intimate working relationship with Hitler), and she stood by her work (because, damn it, those shots of SS marching lockstep were lit just perfectly). Leni Dearest also said she was never anti-Semitic, but they always say stuff like that when the Nazi Hunters come a knockin’.

I’m sure there are tons of film geeks out there who would love to tear me a new ass for ripping on Leni given her reputation as a filmmaker, so I’ll admit it, after two hours of watching black and white shots of the icy Alps with anticlimactic organ music playing in the background, I am unable to separate the woman from her legacy as a Nazi spin machine, and I guarantee I’ll never sit through another Leni Riefenstahl movie again. Thankfully, I have the sense of humor that prevented me from yelling, “fucking Nazi bitch” as the film came to a close.