From the terrifying commencement of Trump’s second presidential term to the ongoing assault on Palestine by Israeli forces, it is impossible to ignore the modern world’s evolving social and political shifts towards conservative thinking and nationalist ideas. Following the worldwide devastation of the Second World War, the conclusion of which celebrated its 80th anniversary earlier this year, many believed that global society could never descend into such horrors again. Yet, here we are in a world where neighbors are seen as outsiders and people’s lives are ruined by the minutiae of legal documentation.

For his latest work, Riefenstahl, theater director and documentarian Andres Veiel examines the complicated legacy of one of his native Germany’s most infamous historical figures: Leni Riefenstahl, whose career skyrocketed when she became Adolf Hitler’s most cherished filmmaker through works of Nazi propaganda like Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938).

A figure now relegated mainly to the pages of film history textbooks, Riefenstahl’s successes of her younger years gave way to a postwar existence dedicated to distancing herself from the Nazi Party’s inner circle, the same detail that sustained her career and made her one of the most distinguished female filmmakers of her time. Utilizing a vast array of archival materials from the Riefenstahl estate with a masterful hand, Veiel’s efforts through the documentary deliver a topical vision of an enduring yet contradictory figure who denies their complicity in the structures of power that profit them.

Film reels, letters, photographs. Voicemails, television interviews, and memoirs. Riefenstahl explores its subject through these remnants of the past, much of which was organized and categorized by Riefenstahl herself. The documentary’s form is loosely devoted to chronicling Riefenstahl’s career, which exploded with her directorial debut, 1932’s The Blue Light, a Mountain film that spoke to the zeitgeist of the German people as nationalism ramped up following the Treaty of Versailles. The Blue Light quickly became one of Hitler’s favorite films, putting Riefensthal on his radar as his star rose and his propaganda machine cast its corrupt enchantment over Germany. The documentary’s focus then shifts to the centerpieces of Riefenstahl’s work: Triumph of the Will, a 1934 film of the Nuremberg Nazi Party rally, and Olympia, which recorded the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Veiel inserts archival interview footage in which Riefenstahl glowingly reflects on these two enormous works, which she repeatedly claims were “jobs for hire” from Hitler’s top brass; she would have done the same for Churchill, Stalin, or FDR...

Supported by a softly disquieting string score, Riefenstahl then transitions into the downswing of its suspicious subject’s time in the spotlight, initiated by her brief stint as a war correspondent assigned to photograph the German invasion of Poland in 1939. Despite photographic evidence and documented military reports, Riefenstahl went to her grave denying the atrocities she provoked during the early Nazi incursion, when German soldiers massacred thirty Polish Jews in Końskie after she requested to have a town square cleared for filming purposes. Arrested after the war ended, Riefenstahl was ultimately deemed a “fellow traveller” and was not charged for her collaboration with the Nazi’s. Riefenstahl then devoted much of her life to clearing her name, shaping her legacy, and escaping to other parts of the world to make documentaries, most notably in Sudan.

Through its ruminative, sparing use of voiceover (Andrew Bird narrating) and ingenious excavation of archival materials, the documentary powerfully investigates the contradictions that Riefenstahl seemed to uphold throughout her century-spanning life. Clips from television interviews from the 1960s and 1970s show Riefenstahl continually reinforcing the notion that her work was purely aesthetic, never political, and that she lives in an artistic universe that makes no space for the socio-political concerns of reality. Yet, the nationalistic spirit of her early work, which portrayed the German spirit as an unremitting spiritual force in a period where the country was suffering from the aftermath of World War I, is what drew the Nazi’s to her, almost perfectly aligned with their concepts of a “greater Germany.” Then, Triumph of the Will and Olympia were both explicitly designed to portray the German people in a superhuman light, as the supposed pinnacle of humanity, the Aryan race. This persistent denial was a landmark in Riefenstahl’s efforts to distance herself from her past, a haunting reminder of humanity’s capacity to disown its own moral responsibilities, which Riefenstahl underscores repeatedly.

While Riefenstahl’s aesthetic considerations portrayed the German people in Hitler’s divine vision, her later work –– photographs and films shot in Southern Sudan –– depicted the Nuba peoples in a very different, questionable manner, which Veiel chooses to accentuate through the archival materials he employs. Footage shows Riefenstahl moving through Nuba communities with a disturbing privilege, throwing candies out to children as if they were animals, staging wrestling matches for the sake of her photographic interests. While she had a sense of reverence for their outward beauty, Riefenstahl spoke about and viewed black people almost as objects: in one clip that captures her reflecting on Jesse Owens during the filming of Olympia, she described black bodies like “big cats” when in motion.

Riefenstahl never attempts to humanize the life of its subject, but the documentary does work to capture other facets of her history unseen in past depictions. Riefenstahl was commonly portrayed in the media during her lifetime as a femme fatale, a reductive characterization of a powerful woman who was perceived as having used her femininity to achieve such an influential position. The documentary bypasses similar descriptions, instead concentrating on a decades-spanning romance with Horst Kettner, who was forty years younger. Denoting a troubled childhood marked by an abusive father, the documentary points to this trauma as a marker in Riefenstahl’s unremitting attempts to be in complete control of her legacy, regardless of how her tempestuous desperation to clear her name was seen by the onlooking world.

Immediately, the immensity of the Riefenstahl estate archives hauntingly nods to similar methods of organization and documentation employed by the Nazi Party during their devastating twelve-year regime, and Veiel’s refined construction of his latest work powerfully taps into this connection, eternally entwining Riefenstahl’s with the infamous entity that both skyrocketed and sank her career. In a contemporary landscape with dictatorial nationalism on the rise, where artistic expression is increasingly shaped and controlled by political power, Riefenstahl serves as a potent warning of the paradoxical figures that can flourish during such tumultuous times, those who choose to simultaneously benefit from the reigning forces while ignoring the offenses that may have gotten them to such positions of power.

4/5

Germany | 2024 | 115 minutes | German with English subtitles

'Riefenstahl' had its world premiere at the 2024 Venice Film Festival. Kino Lorber will distribute the film theatrically in North America beginning September 5. Click here for more information about 'Riefenstahl.'

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