Producer: Sandra Maischberger Archival Producers: Monika Preischl and Mona El-Bira Director: Andres Veiel Screenplay: Andres Veiel Distributor: Kino Lorber
Grade: B
Andres Veiel’s documentary about German actress-director Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003) is biographical, in the sense that it covers her life from childhood to death (the home movies showing her stern father’s method of teaching her to swim stand out, for his girth if nothing else). But though it doesn’t stint on showing her early career as dancer and actress—it even includes excerpts from a late-in-life reunion with some childhood girlfriends, their giggly conversation almost surreal—its emphasis is on her work as a director/editor, particularly on “Triumph des Willen” and “Olympiad” in the 1930s, films that are still regarded as masterpieces of propaganda, unfortunately in the service of an infamous regime.
Even more specifically, Veiel focuses on Riefenstahl’s insistent, often positively desperate, claim in the years following World War II that those brilliant but notorious films were works of art, not Nazi propaganda, and that she’d never been an apologist for Hitler’s regime, of whose crimes, she said, she was unaware at the time. Veiel systematically challenges that self-serving explanation, coupling her statements immediately with evidence that invalidates them.
He does so through a skillful combination of clips from interviews Riefenstahl did in the postwar years, often on TV talk shows, and a great mass of material—home movies, audio recordings, letters, photos, drafts of her memoirs, and much else—from Riefenstahl’s estate, which became available after the death of her much younger husband, Horst Kettner, in 2016. (He was forty years her junior.) Some of the most disturbing material is in the form not of her outrageous protestations of naïveté about the Final Solution but the supportive telephone messages she received from people who sound like unregenerate Nazis. Yet even more horrifying are the revelations about her employment of Roma extras from transit camps in her version of “Tiefland” in 1940, and her subsequent claims of ignorance about their afterward being sent to death camps, and her insistence that a group of Jewish workers be removed from locale she was using in that film, which, whether she intended it or not, led to their execution.
The accumulation of such damning material puts the lie to Riefenstahl’s portrait of herself as an artist rather than a collaborator, and points up her attempt to rewrite the history of her relationship with Hitler and Goebbels, as well as with Peter Jacob, the committed Nazi officer to whom she was married briefly in 1944-1946. Yet was there an element of self-delusion at work as well as an effort to fool others? That’s a question the film cannot answer.
Nor can it entirely explain Riefenstahl’s fascination with the Nuba people of southern Sudan, whom she photographed for glossy books in the seventies. Was this another part of her attempt at rehabilitation, or a continuation of the idolization of physical beauty she’d shown in “Olympiad”?
The argument that Veiel makes in “Riefenstahl” is certainly not new, but his presentation has a comprehensiveness that’s impressive, especially in terms of the inclusion of materials that have become available only recently. And the form in which he casts it—eschewing talking-head commentators, he’s content to limit himself to somber if obviously critical narration linking together the clips and stills—is certainly stylish, even if some of the technique is rather arty, like the motif of having Riefenstahl repeatedly “age” through a procession of photographs. (Of course, Riefenstahl’s work was itself ostentatiously arty, so that’s entirely defensible.) Presumably the work of cinematographer Toby Cornish was given over to the creation of these transitional elements; more important, certainly, is the editing of Stephan Krumbiegel, Olaf Voigtländer and Alfredo Castro, who, together with Veiel, were responsible for giving shape to the cinematic text. The score by Freya Arde contributes to the mood without becoming a distraction.
Veiel won’t have the last word about Leni Riefenstahl; she pretty much saw to it that no one would, given the mounds of material she left behind on film and the page, and the claims about her and the supposed innovations she made to the medium that she made herself and that scholars have debated endlessly over the past century. But his work represents a major contribution to the biography of a filmmaker at least as notable for the context in which she worked as for the result.