For some problematic filmmakers, the intellectual task is to “separate the art from the artist.” And then there are the intellectual hurdles one must overcome to appreciate Leni Riefenstahl aesthetically. The Nazi propagandist was an absolute technical innovator, particularly with her multi-hour documentary portrait of the 1936 Olympics, “Olympia” — she established tropes for capturing sport for cinema and television ever since, with the use of a narrator, slow motion, unique camera positions (including a hot air balloon), and crowd reactions. The problem is that many of these crowd reactions focus on Adolf Hitler.
And that doesn’t even take into account Triumph of the Will, Riefenstahl’s documentary about the Nazi Party Rally in Nuremberg in 1934, which clearly portrays Hitler as a heroic figure, shot from below against the sky. Or the well-documented fact that she was perhaps his favorite filmmaker and that they spent a lot of time together. That she did more than anyone else to glorify and popularize the Nazi regime in film.
It is therefore remarkable how clearly glowingly she has been praised by certain film historians and even mainstream critics and entertainment journalists over the past nine decades. Pauline Kael said of Triumph of the Will and Olympia that they were “the two greatest films ever made by a woman”. Roger Ebert, in his review of a 1993 documentary film about her, which Riefenstahl herself had initiated, said it was “the story of an extraordinary life, the reconstruction of the career of one of the greatest film artists, the recording of an ideological debate, the portrait of an astonishing old woman”. She was a guest at the first Telluride Film Festival in 1974. Quentin Tarantino told Der Spiegel: “She was the best director who ever lived.”
With his new documentary film “Riefenstahl,” Andres Veiel is determined to offer a different perspective: Anyone who glorifies her does so at their own risk. In collaboration with producer Sandra Maischberger, who gained access to Riefenstahl’s estate after the director’s death in 2003 and the death of her partner in 2016, Veiel constructs a narrative that shows how she actively cultivated Riefenstahl’s warm welcome in the decades after the end of the Second World War. And many people believed her.
Veiel jumps back and forth in the timeline of her 101-year life, but much of the structure consists of discussing biographical details about her career as a state-sponsored artist in the Third Reich and the aggressive public relations campaign she launched over decades to answer every possible complaint. Riefenstahl never denied that the Holocaust or other atrocities had taken place, and she expressed disgust at everything that was supposedly revealed to her only at the end of the war about the actions of Hitler’s regime. She insisted that she was only interested in art, not politics, and that she was willing to accept funding from the Third Reich because it was willing to provide her with unlimited resources. That she was simply hopelessly naive. And that is why her art can be separated from Nazi ideology. She was, as the occupying Allied forces discovered in the late 1940s, just a Nazi “fellow traveler.” Not a Nazi herself.
Yet Veiel and Maischberger make a convincing case that she was, in fact, a Nazi until the end of her life. Maischberger was given access to over 700 boxes of archival material that had been in Riefenstahl’s possession: she had recorded phone conversations with her friend, the Nazi architect Albert Speer, in the 1960s and 1970s that show her nostalgia for the old days; we see her notes in which she classifies hate mail she received into different categories based on the sender (one category was actually listed as “Jews”); we see notes in which she gives different accounts of key moments in her work for the Third Reich than in her memoirs, as if she were trying to organize her story; letters in which she talks about her values being “murdered” with Germany’s defeat in the war. And then Veiel intercuts this material with extensive interview footage from the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, during which she waged a vigorous defense campaign. In an appearance on the talk show The Later the Evening in 1976, she defended her desire to focus only on “beauty” and beautiful people in her films, and firmly denied the idea that she had ever been interested in filming disabled people. She then kept many of the letters she received and recorded voice messages left for her by people praising her views.
This is a hugely important revelation. Of course, there were millions and millions of Germans who had supported the Nazis still alive in 1976, but Riefenstahl seems to have been a catalyst for them to say more openly that they themselves still showed no remorse for what had happened during the Third Reich.
And there’s the lie. Maischberger, a journalist, interviewed Riefenstahl in 2002 and says she immediately realized the director had lied to her. Veiel juxtaposes interview clips of Riefenstahl with other footage that completely contradicts her claims. In the 1960s and 1970s, she was fascinated by the Nuba people of Sudan and wrote several photo books about them. When an interviewer asked her if she felt she was polluting their culture by spending so much time with them, she said she had only photographed them from a distance with a telephoto lens, which is very easily refuted by the photos themselves.
Veiel even argues convincingly that she was well aware of the atrocities of the Third Reich, providing a chronology of her work as a war photographer for the state in late 1939, after the Wehrmacht invaded Poland. She abruptly gave up her work shortly thereafter. There is evidence that German soldiers who received orders from her to release a photograph she wanted to take instead massacred Jews and other people who would have been in her picture, and that she witnessed this.
If Veiel’s film has a flaw, it’s that it doesn’t connect the dots as obviously as it probably should. Particularly when it comes to the idea that Riefenstahl wasn’t just an artist who happened to accept Nazi commissions to continue her work, but only made art because she was a Nazi: why else did she stop making films altogether after the war ended? Was it because of her “murdered ideals”? That’s a judgement you can reach from watching Riefenstahl, but one you have to formulate for yourself. Veiel narrowly misses making an absolute judgement.
It would also have been worthwhile to justify why Riefenstahl’s images – her whole concept of beauty, human figures flattened into symbols, and that an image that is simply captivating is enough to justify anything – are connected to the images that have power today. Many of her techniques are still around, and some are still used for nefarious purposes, especially as the far right regains power. Veiel doesn’t quite say why it is so urgent to look at Riefenstahl today, why it is so important to get the facts about her straight. As symbolic and stylized as her images were, they were never meaningless.
That is why, with Riefenstahl, one cannot “separate the art from the artist”. Her art was an expression of who she wanted to serve, who she wanted to glorify. Her defense of her films for the Third Reich amounts to claiming that they were pure art objects that existed for themselves and had no meaning. That would be emptiness at best, idiocy at worst. But of course that is a lie: the message behind them is the only reason these films exist.
Grade: B
“Riefenstahl” celebrated its world premiere at the 2024 Venice Film Festival. The film is currently looking for a US distributor.
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