View films and extracts via the filmography at the end of this post.
RIEFENSTAHL: A GERMAN FILMMAKER IN THE BAHAMAS
In 1979, a footnote to the film history of German fascism was written in The Bahamas. On the occasion of her 77th birthday, German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl (1902 – 2003) travelled to the archipelago to continue work on her last film, the documentary UNDERWATER IMPRESSIONS (2002). During a career spanning five decades, Riefenstahl had attracted controversy for two artistically remarkable but politically noxious films made under the Nazi regime: the Nazi Party rally documentary TRIUMPH OF THE WILL (1935) and her two-part film essay on the 1936 Olympic Games, OLYMPIA (1938). In her influential essay ‘Fascinating Fascism’. Sontag famously drew lines of connection between the cult of physical health, flawless beauty and racial community animating Riefenstahl’s earlier films, and her later work on exotic or ‘primitive’ worlds. Riefenstahl, Sontag suggested, showed ‘contempt for all that is reflective, critical, and pluralistic’: an attitude that placed her work, she concluded, in a line of descent from Nazi ideology and fascist art (Sontag 1980: 89).
Four years on from Sontag’s essay, Riefenstahl might have hoped to find refuge from political controversy in Bahamian underwater worlds. She was to be disappointed. In summer 1979, the CBS news anchor and investigative journalist Dan Rather travelled to The Bahamas to watch Leni Riefenstahl at work. Rather also pursued Riefenstahl for comment on the decades-old dispute between supporters for whom she remained one of cinema’s ‘greatest filmmakers,’ and detractors who saw in her ‘an evil genius who helped celebrate a brutal regime’ (Rather).
RIEFENSTAHL MEETS DAN RATHER
‘You were not a friend of Hitler’s?’ Rather asks in his Bahamas interview. ‘No, never’, replies Riefenstahl. ‘You were not Hitler’s pinup?’ (Rather). ‘No, not a little bit’ (Riefenstahl). ‘Or his mistress?’ ‘No, not a bit.’
In fact, as Rather eventually points out (see image left), it is a matter of historical record that Riefenstahl was a close associate of the Nazi elite. Equally well-documented are the untruths she was found by a German court to have told of the persecution of Roma extras used in her ‘gypsy’ melodrama Tiefland (Lowlands), a film Riefenstahl made during the ‘Third Reich’, but released in 1954 (Bach 2007: 294).
Broadcast on the CBS news magazine 60 Minutes in March 1980, Rather’s interview adds a further voice to the clamour from those who sought from Riefenstahl some statement of responsibility for her films’ part in bolstering Nazi racial violence. Riefenstahl’s defence was that she made films in the service of art, not politics. A throwaway statement to Rather calls that distinction into question. As she dives ‘to about 70 feet to feed her favourite grouper’, Riefenstahl remarks, ‘Nothing can touch you from the outside down here.’
RIEFENSTAHL’S UNDERWATER IMPRESSIONS: BAHAMAS FILMMAKERS RESPOND
Riefenstahl’s observation highlights the connections linking her last film with her previous work. Photographs from Riefenstahl’s underwater travels surfaced first in the coffee-table photograph volume Wonders under Water (1991), and later, in the film whose premiere coincided with Riefenstahl’s 100th birthday, UNDERWATER IMPRESSIONS (2002). A 45-minute compilation of footage shot variously around Papua New Guinea, Kenya, Tanzania, Indonesia, and archipelagic nations including the Maldives and The Bahamas, IMPRESSIONS is presented by Riefenstahl in her German-language TV premiere introduction as a portrait of the underwater world ‘as I have experienced it.’ Contrived to inspire wonder at the beauty and ‘purity’ (Riefenstahl’s term) of the oceans, the film replaces expository voice-over with a melodious score by Eurodisco composer Giorgio Moroder. Visually meanwhile, UNDERWATER IMPRESSIONS arranges spectacular sea-floor colour footage in patterns linked by formal correspondences between shape, line, colour, light and movement. Carefully orchestrated constellations of colour, shape and movement heighten the sense of a marvellous, internally integrated but also separate world. We penetrate that world courtesy only of Riefenstahl, the diver we intermittently glimpse onscreen, and whose avowed intention is to move her audience action over a dying ocean realm. The motivation seems a first glance laudable, as does Riefenstahl’s call in her onscreen introduction for marine parks to preserve undersea treasures for posterity.
The Bahamas National Trust, indeed, initiated just such a venture when its North and South marine parks were launched in 2002, the very year of UNDERWATER IMPRESSIONS’ release. But Riefenstahl’s film was widely viewed as a film mired in a tired aesthetics that turns its face from history, offering instead a nostalgic fascination with threatened exotic worlds. Reviewers wrote of the film’s hollow beauty: it was undeniably stunning, but ‘essentially trivial’: ‘the world’s most beautiful screen saver,” quipped one writer; film historian Eric Rentschler named it mischievously the ‘Triumph of the Gill’ (Bach 2007: 293).
The film jars, then, with Bahamian titles more alert to the history of the Atlantic Ocean around the Bahamas islands. Lavado Stubbs’ 2021 BODIES OF WATER evokes the melancholy of an oceanic beauty that is tethered in Caribbean memory to slavery and the Middle Passage. Kristal ‘Ocean’ Ambrose and Stubbs examine in PLASTIC WARRIORS (2019) the sea’s desecration in the age of climate crisis; and in Kareem Mortimer’s PASSAGE (2013), the sea brings the terror of refugee flight. The last and more joyful word, however, goes to Bahamian poets. For Bahamas ‘Mother of the Arts’ Meta Davis Cumberbatch, the sea evokes not Refenstahl’s white European fantasies, but a black Caribbean sense of ‘kind’ Nature. ‘Shackled?’ writes Cumberbatch (Busby, 2019: 27). ‘No shackles can bind me!…Nature is to me quite kind/The air, the sky, the land, the sea.’ A similar riposte to Riefenstahl is Patricia Glinton Meicholas’ ‘Movable Blues’ . For Glinton-Meicholas, the sea is a liquid medium that evokes shared experience as it dances to ‘a long crescendo’ of Afro-Bahamian blues. ‘I have salt in my veins,’ writes Glinton-Meicholas, ‘rocked by waves…swept up by tides…And when at last I feel/the deep pulse of the ocean/we roar together/pounding out the beat’ (Glinton-Meicholas, 2001: 60).
© Text: Erica Carter, 10.11.2022. Images: DVD cover, Impressionen unter Wasser; Leni Riefenstahl with Adolf Hitler, n.d. Alamy
Films and transcripts
60 Minutes, Vol. XII, No. 29, March 30,1980, CBS.Inc: Dan Rather (transcript): ‘One of Hitler’s Favorites’.
UNDERWATER IMPRESSIONS (Impressionen unter Wasser, Leni Riefenstahl, 2002) : trailer
PASSAGE (Kareem Mortimer, 2013)
BODIES OF WATER (Lavado Stubbs, 2021)
Leni Riefenstahl biography and filmography (German and English): filmportal.de
Further reading and links
Steven Bach, Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl. London: Little, Brown, 2007.
Meta Davis Cumberbatch, ‘A Child of Nature (Negro of the Caribbean)’ in Margaret Busby, ed., New Daughters of Africa. An international anthology of writing by women of African descent. Oxford: Myriad Editions, 2019: 27
Patricia Glinton Meicholas, ‘Movable Blues’, in Glinton Meicholas, No Vacancy in Paradise. Nassau: Guanima Press, 2001: 60
Olaf Möller, ‘Underwater Impressions. Leni Riefenstahl, Germany 2002,‘ Film Comment, Jan/Feb 1993; 39:1, p.76.
Leni Riefenstahl, Wonders under Water. London: Quartet, 1991
Susan Sontag, ‘Fascinating Fascism,’ in Under the Sign of Saturn. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1980: 73-108 (orig. The New York Review, February 1975)
Nicole Starosielski, ‘Beyond fluidity: A cultural history of cinema under water’, in Stephen Rust, Salma Monani & Sean Cubitt, eds., Ecocinema Theory and Practice. Taylor and Francis, pp. 149-168
Bahamas Film Culture Project 
