Joshua M. Tyree on Leni Riefenstahl’s last documentary…
Leni Riefenstahl’s final film begins with graceful images of the deep—colourful fish and all sorts of magnificent creatures—filmed by Riefenstahl over decades of dives with her cameraman, assistant, and companion, Horst Kettner.
Underwater Impressions, a documentary released a few days before Riefenstahl’s 100th birthday in 2002, is a non-narrative exploration of coral reefs, replete with remarkable images of the splendour of nature. Could this be the same director who had made the short film Day of Freedom at the 1935 Nazi Party Rally where the Nuremberg Laws were previewed, and the now infamous Triumph of the Will? And how is one supposed to view Underwater Impressions, assuming that one wishes to view it at all?
Ray Müller’s 1993 biographical documentary on the filmmaker, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, reveals a brilliant and narcissistic cinema pioneer—“one of a dozen or so creative geniuses who ever worked in the film medium,” wrote The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael. After defining the political propaganda film with Triumph of the Will (1935), Riefenstahl went on to establish durable parameters for another long-lived genre, the sports film, with Olympia (1938), her Nazi-funded depiction of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.
According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Riefenstahl witnessed a massacre early on in the invasion of Poland and used Roma inmates from the Maxglan-Leopoldskron labour camp as extras on her film Tiefland (1934-1954). Although she never joined the Nazi Party, denazification hearings labelled her a Nazi sympathizer (Mitläufer). Riefenstahl released no films between Tiefland and Underwater Impressions (2002), instead producing collections of still photographs about traditional African cultures, The Last of the Nuba (1974) and People of Kau (1976).
A skeptical psychoanalyst might detect in Underwater Impressions a metaphor for the flight from responsibility, since deep-sea diving provides a sort of temporary or illusory freedom from the human world. Diving apparently gave Riefenstahl relief from persistent back pain. But the bottom of the ocean is also one of few places on earth where it is virtually impossible to hear anyone criticise you, where nobody asks you to speak, and where the past ceases to exist for a little while. It’s fascinating to witness one of film’s greatest editors drowning out all of life’s sound and fury—cutting history and even traditional storytelling from her work.
In the film’s opening underwater sequence, the camera invites the viewer to discard her or his cynicism, first by revealing a marvelously coiled fuzzy sea creature shaped like a giant umbilical cord, then by passing through its coils and loops, as if it were a pilgrim passing through the gates of a mythical Kingdom of the Sea, in a matchless display of shape and color. This mesmerizing effect is spoiled a bit by the film’s soundtrack, New Age synth that is supposed to evoke wonder, but instead recalls the “relaxing” kind of music heard at a spa.
It’s impossible to watch Underwater Impressions without the divers and swimmers of Olympia in mind. The technical breakthroughs of Olympia were equally revolutionary when it came to underwater photography. During the 1960s, when Riefenstahl’s reputation as an image-maker was beginning to be rehabilitated by filmmakers and critics, she was viewed as a pure aesthete, …