If there is an overriding question posed by Andres Veiel’s admirably thorough, at times obsessive look at the life and work of Leni Riefenstahl, it is how history can become fuzzy and fake over time, given the determination of an extraordinary woman who lived to be 101 to rewrite her role in Nazi cultural propaganda, while she rebuffs the endess attempts of journalists and talk show hosts to pin her down to some semblance of the truth.
Made primarily for German audiences who have their own background and beliefs, Riefenstahl may not be a readily recognized name for younger international viewers. Film students are probably familiar with the two troubled masterpieces she wrote, directed and produced, Triumph of the Will (1935) glorifying Hitler’s crushingly immense Nuremberg rally, and the two-part Olympia (1938) celebrating the idealized bodies of Olympic athletes (and by extension, rejecting the disabled). These films are exemplary in using awe-inspiring technical perfection in the service of a message of evil – in other words, art and beauty are no guarantee that truth is being spoken.
And so it proves to be with the lady under investigation. We meet her, appropriately, on burned-out pieces of film stock, her youthful beauty frail but eternal. Her early work was starring in so-called mountain films, idealizing the unfazed determination of a heroine pitted against wild, dangerous, magnificent nature. Several excerpts from The Blue Light, the first film she directed as well as starred in, show her in a ragged skirt climbing a cliff of outcropping rock, which (she recounts) led some to comment that if the Brownshirts ever saw this scene, she would become their idol. Prescient words; in 1932 she remembers first hearing of Hitler; his fervent speech at a rally left her sweating and trembling.
The two soon met and became friends, though probably not more than that. Hitler admired her film work and is said to have called her “the ideal German woman”; her career rocketed skywards when he selected her to direct a propaganda film at the 1933 Nuremberg rally, which became Triumph of the Will. Rather than concentrating on the documentary’s many innovative techniques and effects, Veiel excerpts Rudolf Hess’s stirring endorsement of Hitler as a guarantor of peace and the crowd’s united, seemingly spontaneous cry, “One people. One Fuhrer.”
Numerous interviews with Leni over the years are excerpted, notably Ray Muller’s 1993 The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl. In one of her many tiffs with interviewers, she is confronted by a journalist over the Pied Piper effect of Triumph of the Will, a film “against all of humanity”, and she simply denies she had any propagandistic intentions, insisting she was just riding the National Socialist zeitgeist like everybody else in Germany. “I was no resistance fighter.” It’s a frustrating subterfuge and she repeats it ad nauseum as the film goes on documenting her efforts to be remembered with shine and gloss, not as the Nazi sympathizer and social climber she really was.
Employing three editors to tame a long lifetime of footage, Riefenstahl returns time and again to memoirs, personal archives, tape recordings, photographs and interviews with Riefenstahl, only to find her an able denier of the historical record. She is particularly keen to avoid any taint of politics. In one unforgettable TV interview, she sits side by side with a self-possessed woman of her own age who states she clearly remembers knowing about, and being sickened by, the crimes and horrors of the Nazi regime back in the 1930s. Riefenstahl, instead, denies all knowledge of the facts – she was too busy “working” to notice people around her were being deported to concentration camps or shot in the streets. Their strident TV quarrel has an incredible ending: after the show, Leni gets sacks of mail from viewers who are completely on her side and who say she is expressing their feelings, exactly.
Making no effort to downplay his subject’s magnetic appeal, Veiel takes the viewer on a tour of her charmed life of success. She was briefly married; later, she lived with Horst Kettner, her partner in life and work, who was 40 years younger than she was. It appears to have been a happy union, extending to the director’s late-life excursions to Sudan to photograph the Nuba people. Another admirer was the minster of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, who became so infatuated that, per Leni, he twice tried to take her by force, and the chief Nazi architect Albert Speer, who remained a lifelong friend even after serving 20 years of prison after the war.
As Riefenstahl reflects, she should have died before the war began, when her career and fame were at their peak. After that the story gets ugly. Hitler soon enrolled her in another propaganda film. While she was shooting a street scene of Lowlands in occupied Poland, she was handed fifty Sinti and Rom prisoners, many of them children, from an internment camp to act as extras; afterwards there is written proof that they were sent to Auschwitz and murdered. But Riefenstahl denies the evidence before her. Another incident involving a work gang of Jewish prisoners seems to have had an equally lethal finale – again denied by the director. But she abandoned the film and soon resigned from doing war propaganda.
Of course, even in her golden years, there was the disappointment that the world premiere of Olympia had to be postponed due to Hitler’s invasion and annexation of Austria, but it was made up by a lavish event and roses to Leni from the Fuhrer tied with ribbon bearing the Nazi swastika. (An interesting footnote: Olympia played in competition at the 6th Venice Film Festival in 1938, winning the Best Film Award ex-aequo with Luciano Serra pilota.)
Director, screenplay: Andres Veiel
Producer: Sandra Maischberger
Cinematography: Toby Cornish
Editing: Stephan Krumbiegel, Olaf Voigtlander, Alfredo Castro
Music: Freya Arde
Sound: Matthias Lempert
Production companies: Vincent Productions
World Sales: Beta Cinema
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Non-Fiction out of competition)
In German, English
115 minutes
