Review of “Riefenstahl”: Documentary about Nazi chronicler

No matter how hard we may try to banish the ideology reflected and reinforced in Leni Riefenstahl’s films from our cultural life, we cannot escape its aesthetic influence.

At each Olympics, NBC’s innovations are based on common visual goals: allowing the camera to follow races more fluidly, slowing down the action to showcase bodies in motion, and discovering angles that redefine the way we watch events.

Everything goes back to the grammar that Riefenstahl developed in 1938. Olympicsjust as much of what we consider to be the aesthetics of political power finds a model in her work of 1935. Triumph of the willYet, in acknowledging these connections, we are forced to confront the same questions again and again: What did Riefenstahl know or not know about the regime and the messages she captured in her films? To what extent can her art be separated from the service she devoted to it?

This insight is not new. Riefenstahl’s commissioned works for the German Nazi government and her friendships with various Nazi figures developed when she was in her thirties and forties. She lived to be 101 years old, and although she disappeared from public view for a time, she still gave an unflinching version of the autobiography she wanted to present in many interviews. Critics (and defenders) have constantly sought to expose or reveal Riefenstahl’s truth.

This means that by this point, one could have probably already seen a lot of films, interviews and documentaries about Leni Riefenstahl, so even 20 years after her death, it is difficult to say or understand anything “new”.

Andres Veiels Riefenstahlwhich premiered at the Venice Film Festival, comes to a hackneyed conclusion based on evidence that has largely not been shown before. It is a documentary that enters into dialogue with each of Riefenstahl’s interviews, in response to the version that Riefenstahl himself tells in Ray Müller’s The wonderful, terrible life of Leni Riefenstahlwhich appears in both clips and unreleased outtakes.

I often got stuck in the familiarity and deliberate confusion of the story that Veiel and producer Sandra Maischberger told, and at the same time wondered what sense a completely unprepared viewer could make of this woman and the long shadow she still casts.

The mess, as I said, is partly the point. Veiel is working with some 700 boxes full of film reels, pictures, draft memoirs, letters, audio recordings and more that made up Riefenstahl’s estate after the death of her long-time partner Horst Kettner. As narrator Andrew Bird explains, some parts of the estate were carefully organized, others were in chaos.

So it is a documentary in the purest sense: an attempt to force a narrative around a collection of documents. There are parts that feel directly burdensome. Riefenstahl’s long-repeated positive stories about the Roma extras she rescued from an internment camp for her film Lowland are countered with evidence that most of these extras were sent later (not by Riefenstahl himself) to Auschwitz and murdered. Veiel and his editors like to catch the archivist Riefenstahl in lies like this one about the notorious Nazis she knew and was close to, and then display her seemingly feigned outrage in subsequent interviews, with the implication that once we see what her lies look like, we will recognize them in other interviews on other topics.

If we think we know what Riefenstahl looks like when she lies, doesn’t it somehow make more sense to play those lies without sound or in ultra slow motion, so that their intended message is lost and only her suspicious body language remains? Veiel and co. certainly think so, as it is a technique that is used repeatedly in the documentary. The about-face is fair, considering how Riefenstahl used comparable techniques to portray athleticism in OlympicsOne could theorize that the documentary suggests that Riefenstahl was to public cover-up what Jesse Owens was to sprinting—a comparison that is only worthwhile because Riefenstahl’s buddies hated him so much.

Some of the analysis of the posthumous material feels significant, as when Veiel is able to show information that was part of various memoirs and has been redacted. Some of it is disturbing, such as audio recordings of calls she received from supporters after a particularly difficult German television interview, in which praise was offered that sounds disturbingly like modern anti-Semitic media subversion. And sometimes you just feel Veiel trying to make Riefenstahl look silly (and human), as in a very Judy Blume-esque conversation about puberty between Leni and several childhood friends.

Although the documentary likes to make elegant and artistic connections between disparate pieces of material—repeatedly, photographs of Riefenstahl at different ages are cut with appropriate cuts, with her piercing eyes in the center of the frame—it is just as likely to throw a letter or conversation onto the screen because, overall, it was devastating, regardless of context or chronology.

This is not a documentary that gives Riefenstahl much credibility as an artist, with only Olympics to get even a cursory formal exploration, but it might convince people who don’t know their work that they don’t want to bother with that credibility anyway. I’m not sure that’s a broad enough discussion, but maybe I’ve just Riefenstahl Fatigue.