Curiously, for a woman who directed a movie called Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl seemed to lose control over her own person when she first met Adolf Hitler.
“I had hot sweats,” the German filmmaker said of seeing the future Führer speak at a rally in 1932. “I was somehow captured, as by a magnetic force.”
Embedded in that description is a self-defense: She may as well have said, “I wasn’t to blame, I couldn’t help it, I was overwhelmed by Hitler’s presence, like millions of other Germans.”
The new documentary Riefenstahl, premiering today at the Venice Film Festival, argues the German filmmaker carefully crafted a narrative absolving herself of responsibility for becoming Hitler’s favored cinematic propagandist.
“In a way, it is a detective story, because she is lying,” director Andres Veiel tells Deadline. “She’s manipulating.”
Leni Riefenstahl crouches beneath a camera.
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After Germany’s defeat in World War II, when it was no longer helpful to be identified with the Nazis, Riefenstahl consistently described herself as an apolitical artist who merely took, in her words, “assignments” from Hitler and his circle. Like documenting the Nazi Party Congress of 1934 in Triumph of the Will or celebrating the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin – a spectacle meant to showcase Hitler as a world titan – in Olympia.
For his documentary, Veiel undertook a forensic examination of the filmmaker’s archives, which are maintained by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin. He says Riefenstahl tried to scrub the archives of inconvenient materials that contradicted her public narrative, but nonetheless clues remained. One example – an allusion in her files to an interview she did well before the war with the British newspaper Daily Express. Riefenstahl disposed of the press clipping itself, but Veiel tracked it down from the original source.
“I got the interview from Daily Express, and that was interesting,” he notes. “Why? Because in 1934, she gave this interview to a British journalist and she said, ‘Listen, in 1931 when I was shooting The Blue Light, I bought Mein Kampf,’ — the book of Hitler, the Bible of Hitler, you could even say – ‘and after reading the first page, I became an enthusiastic National Socialist.’”
‘Riefenstahl’
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Riefenstahl promoted other distortions regarding her work. She often claimed Triumph of the Will was simply about “work and peace.” In Veiel’s film, she is seen denying that Triumph included anything expressing “resentment against race, against Jews. Nothing.” But then Veiel cuts to an excerpt of the film where a high-ranking Nazi official intones, “[He] who doesn’t take care about the purity of the race will fail.”
Says Veiel, “It’s part of the film. But she says, no, it’s not there.”
Leni Riefenstahl prepares for an interview at about the age of 100.
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Riefenstahl, who died in 2003 at the age of 101, long called herself a victim, complaining that after the war she could no longer make films. And she regularly told journalists that after Germany’s defeat, the Allies locked her up for a lengthy term. “’I had to stay for three years in prisons and internment camps,’” Veiel quotes her as claiming.
“Nobody makes a fact check,” Veiel says of journalists at the time. “In fact, she was four weeks, not even in a prison, it was like a hotel. She went into the casino, and she got tea.”
Riefenstahl’s falsifications in service of shaping her image speak to the present moment, Veiel says.
“We see it with our populist leaders. They just lie,” he says. “It becomes the truth. And that’s a very, very dangerous and attractive way of turning lies into truth. And she’s a prototype.”
With her arresting visual aesthetics, Veiel maintains, Riefenstahl created a template for autocrats on how to project power.
“When I started the film three years ago, I asked [myself], what is the topicality?” the director recalls. “And then we had the start of the Ukrainian war, of the attack by Putin, and suddenly I saw images of a parade in Moscow in May 2022. And it was Leni Riefenstahl. It was Putin shown from a low angle like the hero is portrayed and the marching bodies.”
‘Riefenstahl’
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Riefenstahl didn’t simply make “pretty pictures.” Her glorification of the body, especially in Olympia, provided a visual analogy to Nazi propaganda about racial purity and Aryan superiority. In an interview seen in Veiel’s documentary, Riefenstahl is asked whether she would have ever considered making a film about “cripples” instead of the splendidly athletic. Her face takes on a dark, almost angry look and she seems to dismiss the idea outright, before catching herself and retreating to the trope that with Olympia she had just been doing her best to fulfill a cinematic assignment.
“That’s one of the reasons I was convinced to make the film — to reconstruct this connection between politics, ideology, and art. And her art. And it is connected,” he says. “It is connected by the contempt. And that’s something which is so important — behind this celebration of the strongest is always the contempt of the weak. And that’s part of her ideology.”
Director Andres Veiel during the 67th Berlin Film Festival on February 16, 2017.
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Veiel sees a parallel between this way of thinking and that of another ex-world leader who has expressed concerns for supposed peril to America’s gene pool. “I heard Trump in a speech talking about the migrants destroying, spoiling the American blood. It’s fascism pure,” he says, adding, “We go into the past in Riefenstahl, but with this film, we talk about the present and the future… In the findings of the archive, we just felt so much topicality.”
It would be hard to argue Leni Riefenstahl wasn’t remarkably successful in cleansing herself of the stain of Nazi collaboration. Hollywood has shown a particular willingness to embrace her storyline that she was just an artist and should be judged solely on that.
In an interview with public radio’s Fresh Air in 2009, Quentin Tarantino opined, “Leni Riefenstahl was the one person Goebbels had no control over in the filmmaking community of Nazi Germany, and they despised each other. But because she was Hitler’s favorite, she could do what she wanted. She was the only filmmaker that did not have to cow down to Joseph Goebbels. But even then, you know, that was all before the war, all right?”
Francis Ford Coppola reportedly went to dinner with Leni Riefenstahl at the very first Telluride Film Festival in 1974, where the German director was honored for her work. Judith Thurman, in a 2007 New Yorker piece, wrote “Madonna, then Jodie Foster, aspired to star in her life story, but Riefenstahl judged neither to be worthy. George Lucas praised her modernity and acknowledged the indebtedness of Star Wars to Triumph of the Will.”
Veiel says with his film he wanted to go beyond the superficial – to probe not just Riefenstahl’s lies, but “the necessities behind and the structure of it, the structure of lying, the structure of denial and the necessity behind the longing, even the yearning of keeping up a legend. And people who want to believe the legend — that’s the other side of the point. There’s not only her need to stick to a lie, it’s also the necessity of millions who want to have a hero, a clean hero. And that’s even more disturbing.”
