Director – Andres Veiel – 2024 – Germany – Cert. 15 – 115m
*****
An unsettling, deep dive into the indisputable artistic talent, evasive personality and self-reconstructed memory of Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl through her personal archive of some 700 boxes – out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 9th
Sepia / yellow images. A woman walking by the sea. Incidental music suggesting a reaching, a striving. Out of focus images of crowds lining the streets, coming into focus to proclaim, “Heil, mein Fuhrer.” The lighting of the Olympic flame, the firing of a gun at a track event. Leni Riefenstahl, as a young woman, examining hanging strips of 35mm film at the editor’s bench. And then an extract from a talk show: would she do it differently if she could live her life again? What were her mistakes? Her close association with Hitler? She hesitates – you can almost feel her squirming, trying to find a way round the question. She starts talking about her first film as director, The Blue Light (1932), a mountaineering picture in which she did all the rock climbing stunts herself. She didn’t know of Hitler at this point, she says. “If the Fascists saw you”, she was told, “you would become their hero.”
She talks about being overcome the first time she heard Hitler speak at a rally, in 1932. A series of lovingly composed portrait photographs of her – and she really was a strikingly beautiful looking woman – dissolve into one another as she ages to a woman in 1979, when footage has her being interviewed for a CBS talk show. More dissolving portraits introduce us via a pull out form a single portrait photo to her 700 boxes-strong archive, laid out before the camera in a successive shots of grids (with accompanying male voice-over from actor Andrew Bird) of photographs, cans and rolls of film, and other items. “Some are meticulously ordered, others are not,” says the voice. “For some things to be remembered, others must be forgotten.”
A sequence of the Nuremberg Rally from her Triumph of the Will (1935) captures vast crowds faultlessly executing a breathtaking spectacle with flawless, clockwork precision, culminating with the camera rising slowly into the air to emphasise the effect. Interviewed in German on German television, she talks about art and politics being polar opposites. “So you don’t believe art and politics affect each other,” she is asked. In a clip from The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (Ray Müller, 1993), she sits at her editing table excitedly explaining how a sequence of the parade was put together in the editing, with the music in perfect sync.
There is a twinkle in her eye; she is emotionally overcome by… what exactly? The rally itself? The precision involving all the participants to make the ceremony happen? Her memory of filming the occasion? The regime the event represents? The making of art? Is she so obsessed with / subsumed in the latter that she somehow can’t see that she is producing an image of the Nazi state for mass German and international consumption, to bolster it up, reinforce its image as it wishes to be seen and not showing distasteful aspects of itself it would rather were kept hidden? The practitioner of the mediation process of the media becoming so enthralled by the process of mediation that she somehow forgets what it is she is mediating?
We are introduced to Riefenstahl’s partner from the late 1960s onwards, 40 years her younger, Horst Kettner. We see parts of Joseph Goebbels’ speech from Triumph of the Will, introduced by a shot of a film can containing the negative and a couple of strips of printed film) and the subject of his obsession with her comes up. “Twice, in his apartment, he wanted to take me by force,” she says. We see Ray Müller, in footage for his documentary, asking her about this and she gets very upset, asking him to stop recording / filming.
She spent ten years writing her memoirs, including other encounters with men who forced their intentions upon her. Accounts of such incidents don’t change – there’s a suggestion in the voice-over that both she may have been in a number of abusive sexual encounters, and her writing down of other memories shift around in different drafts. There are quotes for her about her father teaching young Leni, age five, to swim by throwing her in a river. In a conversation with a publisher she recorded on audiocassette, she reveals that later, when she was 12 or 13, he beat her severely and locked her up for half a day for stealing some chocolate. (She and others used to steal as kids.) She still didn’t think she’d done anything wrong. These incidents are never mentioned in her published memoirs or by her in subsequent interviews.
In another tape, she talks about meeting architect Albert Speer, who she recognised as a soul mate and who would later design the Nuremberg Rally grounds. Later, the Reich Ministry of Propaganda grants her a budget for her documentary about the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin Olympia (1938), then the most expensive documentary project ever undertaken. Riefenstahl, using a crew of 30 cameramen shooting events at different points in the ceremony, captures some incredible footage. For instance, divers are portrayed, not leaving the diving board, not entering the water, but as godlike beings in between, flying, rolling and tumbling through space. Her star cameraman Zielke came up with a memorable prologue of a nude male body throwing a javelin by the sea. He worked himself to exhaustion, and although Riefenstahl expressed clear admiration for his artistic abilities, and was kept informed of his progress, she never visited him in hospital. He was forcibly sterilized in 1937 in accordance with Nazi legislation.
The film’s proposed premier was cancelled, she was told, on account of the Austrians parading in the opening ceremony because Germany had subsequently, in 1938, invaded Austria. She followed Hitler around and managed to persuade him to premier the film on his birthday. He sent her roses when the film played the Venice Biennale, and she sent him a gushing letter about his ability to bring joy to others, which leaves a nasty taste in the mouth when read to us in English translation by an actress on the soundtrack.
Once war broke out, her rising star began to fall. She was assigned as a war correspondent, but couldn’t cope with the realities of war and asked to be excused. She threw herself into producing, directing and starring in narrative feature Lowlands (released 1954) based on a favourite opera of Hitler. She continued to deny knowledge of the Holocaust, although she took a number of Roma (including many children) from internment camps as extras for Lowlands, many of who were later exterminated in camps although she later claimed they were all still alive. The flow of the current documentary is interrupted by an extraordinary image of Leni holding up her hand in front of her face to ask an interviewer to stop asking her questions.
In 1962-3, she want to Sudan and visited the Natu people for the first time. She made several more visits, seemingly captivated by their purity, their innocence. As the voice-over pints out, if you go to Africa, no one asks questions about your past. Finally, she is shown as she would like to be remembered: an old woman revisiting the mountains where The Blue Light was shot. The footage was shot by Kettner.
The arresting title sequence at the start and its accompanying images and sounds very much set the tone for this documentary about the controversial director who as a talented and headstrong young woman carved out for herself a strong filmmaking career under the Third Reich, then spent the rest of the Twentieth Century denying that she really knew what was going on under that regime. That first period was before the advent of television (not to mention home computers and mobile phones), when moving picture theatres had been around a while, but recorded sound on film prints was quite new.
The thing that’s most frightening about all this is that Riefenstahl seems to have no idea about her complicity in the Third Reich, in the sense of helping to deliver images of it to the outside world that promote it, that are selective: Asked in the context of Olympia whether she would have made a film about disabled people, she is horrified; that’s not what the Olympics is about. It’s not that far from there to the glorification of physical perfection at the expense of the imperfect, or of turning a blind eye when people you know are carted off to hospitals and forcibly sterilised.
As her treatment of cameraman Zielke showed, she was a demanding person to work for, and didn’t always reward the efforts of those who worked for her in ways you might imagine. But then, in her earlier, 1920s mountaineering films as actress, she pretty much gave her all far more than seems reasonable – certain scenes could easily have gone wrong and got her killed. Which is not to justify her later treatment of others one iota, but it IS to say that, on some level at least, she had a hard time of it. And then there is the harsh treatment by her father, and her treatment at the hands of sexual predators high up in the Third Reich, which she attempted to excise from the way she was later viewed.
At one point, she has a furious outburst at a story that she witnessed the killing of some 22 Jews, saying, “that’s not true”. Whether it’s an historical incident she has buried so deep in her psyche that she no longer believes it happened is impossible to say categorically, but, as here presented, that’s what it looks like. As another woman on a German talk show, similar age, similarly blue-eyed and blonde, the Nazi ideal of beauty, says to her about doing what she was asked by the State in making Triumph of the Will, she could simply have said, “no”. Had that been the case, she might never have made her mark as the filmmaker of dazzling technical prowess that she undoubtedly was, but at the same time, she wouldn’t have presented the world with a sanitised, health-obsessed image of the Third Reich as something remarkable to be envied and venerated.
The film wisely doesn’t veer outside the subject of Riefenstahl’s life and historical context to comment on, for instance, the rise of the present day far right, but then, it doesn’t need to. The lessons of how to construct fake news, in the simpler time before television or the internet, can all be found here. Leni Riefenstahl stands as an horrifying and stark reminder of what individual human beings are capable of, with the backing of and in complicity with extremist regimes. She may have been an extraordinary artistic talent, but that doesn’t give you carte blanche to carry out your artistic practice under the direction of an extremist regime.
Leni Riefenstahl remains an engima, an extraordinarily challenging figure who went allow with things she really shouldn’t have, and then portrayed herself in later years as if she had done no such thing, possibly to the extent that she herself believed it. Full marks for all involved in the extraordinary documentary for trawling through her archive once it became public domain, and allowing her moving and static images,her letters and other artefacts to tell her story. It’s a challenging watch, which doesn’t always make for easy viewing. Hopefully, you’ll come away knowing more about both her and the Nazi regime, and being encouraged to ask some difficult questions which may prove helpful in the current, far-right-friendly, global climate. After all, in terms of far right propaganda, she is the woman who effectively wrote the original playbook.
Riefenstahl is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, May 9th.
Read my alternative review for Reform magazine here.
Trailer: