Leni Riefenstahl, who died in 2003, aged 101, remains forever google-able as “Hitler’s favorite director” for her daringly innovative documentaries The Triumph of the Will, about the Nazi rally in Nuremberg in 1934, and Olympia, about the Berlin Olympics of 1936. Acclaimed and infamous in equal measures —was she a pioneering genius, a Nazi propagandist, or maybe both? — Riefenstahl remains a subject of fascination and debate over whether her talent can be separated from her political views.
What exactly those views were, what Riefenstahl knew about Hitler and the Holocaust and when she knew it, is key to this debate and the subject of countless books and documentaries. It’s the question at the center of Riefenstahl, the new documentary from German filmmaker Andres Veiel (Black Box BRD).
The documentary screens out of competition at the Venice Film Festival, the same festival where, Leni Riefenstahl won a gold medal for The Triumph of the Will in 1935 and the top prize, the Coppa Mussolini, for best film for Olympia in 1938. Beta Cinema is handling worldwide sales on Riefenstahl.
Veiel had access to Riefenstahl’s personal archives for the film, some 700 boxes of diaries, correspondence, private photos, and recorded phone calls. While he covers some familiar ground, the film is an attempt to do what no Riefenstahl documentary has done to date: Provide a psychological portrait of the director, and, through her, of what Veiel calls the “seductive nature of fascism,” both the 1930 variety and the updated versions of today.
“What we found in her archives seemed so current, so relevant to what’s happening right now, whether it’s her view of a form of heroic nationalism, her celebration of the beauty of the superior, of the victorious, or her contempt of the weak and the sick,” says Veiel. “It gave us a deep insight into a prototype of fascism, a chance to understand something about the rising right-wing movements we see now, not only in Germany, but across Europe, and in the United States as well.”
Veiel considers the subject of whether Riefenstahl was a true Nazi believer, or just an opportunist, to be settled.
Leni Riefenstahl (right) during the filming of Olympia in 1936
Vincent-Productions
“She was not an opportunistic artist, she was very deeply involved in the [Nazi] ideology, not only in her aesthetic, by celebrating strength and heroism, and her contempt for the weak, the sick and the so-called foreign, but in real anti-semitic beliefs…We found an interview she gave in 1934 with [British newspaper] The Daily Express, where she said read [Hitler‘s autobiography] Mein Kampf already in 1931. ‘After one page, I became an enthusiastic national socialist,’ she says. Something she denied her whole life.”
In correspondence and recorded phone calls with friends and colleagues after the war, including with Hitler’s architect, the fellow “Nazi artist” the architect (and WW2 Minister of Armaments) Albert Speer, Riefenstahl shows no sign of remorse or a change of heart. She only regrets that her style, and the old ideology, have fallen out of favor.
“In one of them, she actually says: ‘It will one or two generations [to rehabilitate Nazism in Germany],” says Veiel. “And now it is those two generations later and you see the right rising again.”
Much of Riefenstahl is focused on the director’s life after World War 2 when she was pronounced a Nazi sympathizer by the Allies (though she was never a party member) and struggled to find work as a director. Riefenstahl shows the documentarian clearly felt she was the victim of her story. In a key scene, we see footage of Riefenstahl on a German talk show in the 1970s, where she is confronted by a presenter, and German contemporaries, who question her claim to have not known anything about the Holocaust. Riefenstahl does not waver, protesting she knew nothing about the concentration camps until after the war.
“At one point she turns to the audience and — remember, she was an actress originally, [in pre-war German “mountain movies” like The Blue Light]— and she has tears in her eyes. She’s the perfect victim,” says Sandra Maischberger, a producer on Reifenstahl and a well-known German TV presenter, who interviewed Reifenstahl on the occasion of her 100th birthday. “The response was immense. She received loads of letters and phone calls from viewers in support of her. When I saw that, it was a real shock to me. I lost faith in my fellow Germans. How could so many viewers, at that time, fall for her lies? It felt like a diagnosis of post-war Germany of the 60s and 70s.”
“There were 500 viewer letters and I read every one of them,” says Veiel. “All of them were celebrating Leni Riefenstahl. That talk show, and the viewer response to it, sparked a kind of renaissance for her, a rebirth in post-war Germany. Leni Riefenstahl, the artist, began being celebrated.”
That celebration continued, almost until her death. Legendary New Yorker reviewer Pauline Kael, called Triumph of the Will and Olympia “the two greatest films ever directed by a woman.” The inaugural Telluride Film Festival, in 1974, honored Riefenstahl as a pioneering “feminist” filmmaker and a role model for women directors. At different times, Jodie Foster, Paul Verhoeven, Steven Soderbergh, and Madonna were all interested in shooting her biopic. (Riefenstahl reportedly told Verhoeven she didn’t Foster was “beautiful enough to play me” and suggested he instead cast Sharon Stone.)
All the time, Riefenstahl continued to defend her version of her history, fortifying her legend as the naive genius unaware of the dark side of Nazism. Ray Müller’s 1993 documentary The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl — was made with her approval and editorial control. It won the International Emmy for best arts documentary. Veiel’s film features several clips from The Wonderful, Horrible Life, including unreleased footage of Müller’s interviews in which Riefenstahl, objecting to his line of questioning, refuses to continue, and screams at him to stop filming.
Riefenstahl director Andres Veiel
Arno_Declair
If anyone dared challenge her version of events, Riefenstahl shows, the artist was also quick to sue. In 2002, a year before she died, Riefenstahl took documentarian Nina Gladitz to court to prevent the release of Gladitz’s documentary Time of Darkness and Silence. The TV doc featured interviews with Roma and Sinti who worked as extras on Lowlands, a feature adaptation of Hitler’s favorite opera that Riefenstahl began working on in 1940 (she would eventually finish it in 1954). Reifenstahl handpicked the extras from a nearby concentration camp. She would later claim they had all survived the war. In fact, nearly 100 of them are known or believed to have been gassed in Auschwitz, a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of Romani people murdered in the Holocaust.
When Gladitz’s documentary was played in court, Riefenstahl interrupted the screening, screaming “Lies! Lies!” Faced with the evidence, however, she withdrew her original claims. But because Gladitz could not prove one allegation, that Riefenstahl has personally promised to save the Sinti from the camps, and because Gladitz refused to edit that interview out of Time of Darkness and Silence, the film never aired.
“Of course, she knew about Auschwitz, and she knew [the Romani extras] were killed, and she just denied it,” says Veiel. “She denied it her entire life with a strange mixture of repression, of denying, and of lying.”
By drawing a psychological portrait of Germany’s most infamous propagandist, Veiel hopes Riefenstahl also provides an insight into the enduring, frightening appeal of fascism.
“It’s a story about how easy it is to get seduced,” he says, “because there are elements of her story that sound like a dream for any filmmaker: Imagine getting an unlimited budget to make your movie! I can imagine the appeal. I have to think of my father, who was a general in the war. He was close to [Nazi SS leader Heinrich] Himmler in the Russian front and had a lot of advantages. He was seduced. So this is a very personal question that I have to wrestle with.”