Enthralling and unnerving, Riefenstahl doesn’t seek to provide simple answers to that question; instead, it asks us to explore her life before 1932, her life during the Third Reich’s power and the woman who emerged from the rubble of war. Andres Veiel’s Riefenstahl is released in UK & Irish cinemas on May 9.
Who was Leni Riefenstahl? A silent film actress and a masterful and groundbreaking director? Or a propagandist who lied about her beliefs and artistic drive throughout her life. It’s a knotty question that director Andres Veiel and producer Sandra Maischberger set out to explore in 2017 following the death of Riefenstahl’s much younger partner, Horst Kettner. Following his death, the Riefenstahl estate and her archive of papers, photos, recordings, and films were suddenly opened to scrutiny like never before, with over 700 boxes of historical documents available for exploration, revealing the life and work of a filmmaker and deeply controversial figure. Would these boxes finally provide insight into Riefenstahl’s true self, beliefs, and the roots of her filmmaking? Or, like in life, did Riefenstahl meticulously and carefully craft her archive to fit the public persona she had built post-World War II?
Born in August 1902 to Alfred Riefenstahl and Bertha Riefenstahl, Helene Bertha Amalie or “Leni” Riefenstahl would become one of the most controversial figures of the 20th Century, an artistic enigma who courted public attention on one hand while defending and rewriting her past on the other until her death in September 2003, aged 101.
With mixed success, Riefenstahl began her career as a dancer in the early 1920s, before finding her calling as a silent film star who worked with director Arnold Fanck, a trained geologist who specialised in risky mountain movies, such as The Holy Mountain (1926). Riefenstahl was a risk-taker in her pursuit of artistic perfection in a male-dominated post-World War I era. She was willing to face peril for her art and determined to be the new face of German cinema. It was The Blue Light (1932) that would cement her place as a star, but it was her filmmaking partnership with Adolf Hitler and her volatile, and often unclear, relationship with Joseph Goebbels that cemented her notoriety.
Riefenstahl would go on to film the Nazi Party convention film Der Sieg Des Glaubens in 1933, followed by the film Triumph of Will (1934), which cost 300,000 Reichsmarks and featured an unprecedented eighteen cameramen. Then, in 1935, Riefenstahl was commissioned by Hitler to produce and direct Tag der Freiheit – Unsere Wehrmacht, a film celebrating the power and strength of the Wehrmacht. By this point, many would argue that Leni Riefenstahl had become the chief propagandist of the Third Reich; her films centred on Hitler’s obsession with the perfect Ariyan race, the words of Mein Kampf brought to life through expertly edited and shot movies that were designed to inspire confidence, nationalist fervour and obedience to the Führer’s vision of a new German empire.
In 1936, a new film, Olympia, was commissioned to mark the Olympic Games in Berlin with an unheard-of budget of over a million Reichsmarks. Riefenstahl’s film was groundbreaking, employing new techniques that continue to be used today. Her obsession with the male form, beauty and chiselled perfection once again took centre stage with no place for weakness. However, for all the technical expertise of Olympia, there are also chilling segments, from worldwide athletes parading in front of Hitler with the infamous salute, many of whom would see their countries invaded by the Third Reich in the coming years or at war with Germany, to the fate of Willi Zielke who shot the groundbreaking “Prologue” in Greece before falling ill and being admitted to a mental hospital where he was forcibly sterilised.
Riefenstahl would then take the role of a War correspondent in Poland as Hitler invaded, unleashing the horror of his plans. It’s here where we begin to ask ourselves whether Riefenstahl was a mere artistic director of Hitler’s propaganda campaign or an active participant and supporter of Nazi ideology, mass murder and ethnic cleansing. Unlike Hitler’s architect and urban planner, Albert Speer, who also saw himself as an artist, Riefenstahl never accepted a direct role in the Third Reich’s murder machine. Speer would oversee the Central Department for Resettlement, evicting Jewish tenants from their homes before becoming the Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production, where he oversaw slave labour. However, Riefenstahl had no direct position in the government; she was merely an observer and artist, right? That’s how Leni Riefenstahl would like us to remember her role, but the truth is far more complex.
There is no doubt that Leni Riefenstahl was an eyewitness to the horrors of the Third Reich during her time in Poland, leading her to ask to leave her position. Yet, for the rest of her life, she would maintain that she had no idea what was happening and had never witnessed anything of the horrors unfolding. This persistent denial interests Veiel as he focuses on the splintered soul of a woman who, in interviews following the war, pronounced that “Art was the opposite of politics,” and that she was simply an “artist” commissioned to produce work. Riefenstahl offers us a captivating portrait of artistic endeavour, denied complicity and a fractured facade, a meditation on the uneasy relationship between art and ideology.
Riefenstahl acknowledges her trailblazing work in a male-dominated world while asking us to examine whether it was art or propaganda, or both. Her artistic journey carries interesting parallels to celebrated American directors like Frank Capra. Capra would direct Why We Fight, a series of seven propaganda films produced by the US Department of War that Riefenstahl had directly inspired. Like Leni Riefenstahl, he was a director for whom the relationship between artistic vision and political and social views remained tangled and challenging to unpick. However, unlike Capra, the questions surrounding Leni Riefenstahl are far more disturbing. Was she an active and passionate Nazi who believed her art could help Hitler, before then creating an iron wall of denial when Berlin fell?
Enthralling and unnerving, Riefenstahl doesn’t seek to provide simple answers to that question; instead, it asks us to explore her life before 1932, her life during the Third Reich’s power and the woman who emerged from the rubble of war. These three highly crafted personalities sat uncomfortably together in a fragmented woman unwilling to acknowledge her role in history beyond the films she created.
It is possible that Riefenstahl’s belief in Hitler’s ideology lasted until her dying day, but it is also possible that she held a guilt she could not and would not face. I have my views on which side of the line Leni Riefenstahl was on, and they are only strengthened by her time photographing the Nuba tribe in Sudan during the 1960s. However, whatever you walk away from Andres Veiel’s exquisitely crafted documentary believing to be the truth, one aspect of his film disturbingly reflects our modern world: the more you craft a lie, the more it becomes your personal truth, and the more you repeat it, the more you convince others. These behaviours, alongside nationalism and a belief in division, are the foundations of far-right politics. And far from being confined to history, they are very much alive in our 21st-century world.
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