Was Leni Riefenstahl, director of the Third Reich-commissioned documentary Triumph of the Will, a card-carrying Nazi? Or just an artist who seized a fulfilling opportunity?
German director Andres Veiel, with lucid patience and a questing curiosity, probes the controversial filmmaker in Riefenstahl (Kino Lorber, $23.96 Blu-ray), a documentary borne out of the bequeathing, in 2016, of 7,000 boxes of material from Riefenstahl’s estate to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. Veiel and his editing team received this trove of material, from early headshots from Riefenstahl’s acting career to private Super-8 records and never-before-seen notes, letters and film excerpts.
This abundance of ephemera allows Veiel to paint the most precise picture yet of his subject’s politics. Riefenstahl, of course, cannot speak out anymore in her defense — she died in 2003, at 101 — but as the documentary reveals, she had copious opportunities to set the record straight during her nearly 50-year exile from filmmaking. Indeed, Veiel doesn’t need to bolster his argument with contemporary talking heads reflecting on Riefenstahl’s legacy. Supplemented only with his occasional voice-over narration, Riefenstahl is composed entirely of artfully collected archival footage, including the hours of television interviews she granted to journalists throughout Europe and the United States after the war.
The evidence of her Nazi sympathies is as mountainous as the rock faces Riefenstahl famously scaled in her early silent pictures. She describes her first encounter with Adolf Hitler as being “captured by a magnetic force.” In 1938, Hitler sends her birthday gifts, to which she responds, “I am always thinking of you.” She marries a Nazi soldier in 1944. She defends Albert Speer, minister of armaments and war production for Nazi Germany, later convicted at the Nuremberg trials, as “a good person. … I don’t care if he’s a National Socialist or a Jew.” (i.e., “very fine people on both sides.”) As late as 1965, she’s still deploying the “I was just following orders” defense, while claiming ignorance of the Shoah. Later in her life, she complains about the number of anti-fascists in Switzerland spoiling her ski vacation.
Questioned about all of this — including the damning accusation that she used detainees from work camps, who were later murdered at Auschwitz, as extras for one of her films — she decries such claims as so much fake news, and threatens to sue the reporters spreading it, resorting to a familiar authoritarian playbook.
For someone who claims to harbor no antisemitism, you want at least a modicum of contrition from Riefenstahl, an attempt to thread the needle between pride in her achievements as a filmmaker and regret that she hitched her wagon to a genocidal cause. But she’s easily triggered. The harder the questions from her interlocutors, the more firmly she digs in. Occasionally, she storms off sets, once erupting, in what feels like Veiel’s dramatic climax, with “I am not responsible for what happened!” Her stubbornness illuminates her complicity.
Veiel could have offered a more evenhanded appraisal of Riefenstahl’s legacy by focusing more on her technical innovations. After all, Triumph of the Will is an undoubtedly instructive and important historical document, both for its groundbreaking camerawork and propagandistic intentions. No documentary film course is complete without her work. The clips Veiel inserts from Triumph of the Will and Olympia, her Nazi-commissioned, magisterial accounting of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, are examples of awesome theater and multi-sensory spectacle.
And in fairness, the viewer’s sympathies lie solely with Riefenstahl when she describes this movie’s biggest revelation: that she survived an attempted rape from Joseph Goebbels. It’s a reminder that the violations perpetrated against women in the early film industry transcend borders and politics.
But even Riefenstahl’s postwar creative work is marred by racism. Beginning in 1962, Riefenstahl made the first of several treks to Sudan, away from prying eyes and prying questions, where she produced photography books of the local tribes — coffee-table exotica for the privileged West. Newly unearthed video of her time in Africa shows her growing frustrated when the locals don’t comply with her vision. She comes across as a meddling ethnographer, a contradiction in terms that is, frankly, as old as Nanook of the North.
Allowing its subject to hang herself with her own rope, Veiel’s postmortem prosecution arrives at the only logical conclusion: If she looked like a duck and quacked like a duck, she was probably a duck.