Andres Veiel, “Riefenstahl” (2024)
Gaining access to 700 boxes of archives of the work of notorious German film director Leni Riefenstahl (1902 – 2003), who made and produced Nazi propaganda films “Triumph of the Will” and “Olympia”, director Andres Veiel and his research team have produced an incredibly detailed documentary about the woman that not only reveals how fully willing and complicit she was in advancing the agenda of the German Nazi state she served but also the extent to which she lied, not only to others, but to herself about the nature of the beast she served, and the effort she put in trying to remake herself as a photographer and portray herself as an innocent victim of the system and ideology she wholeheartedly embraced and continued to believe in even after the Nazi state’s crimes in all their abysmal brutality were exposed.
The film follows a fairly loose chronological narrative, starting with Riefenstahl’s early work as an actor, starring in a series of mountain films made by director Arnold Fanck, and going on to direct her first film “Der Blaue Licht” (“The Blue Light”) in 1932, catching the attention of Adolf Hitler. Offers of film-directing work started coming Riefenstahl’s way in 1933, culminating in the 1934 film “Triumph of the Will”, showing the Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg in that year, and “Olympia”, a documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. After war breaks out in September 1939 with Germany’s invasion of Poland, Riefenstahl is sent to Poland as a war correspondent and becomes involved in a controversial incident in which she witnesses German soldiers execute 30 civilians. She leaves Poland not long afterwards and declines to make any more films for the Nazi government.
For the rest of her life after the downfall of Hitler and Nazi Germany, Riefenstahl attempts to salvage her reputation and resurrect her film-directing career without much success, and later turns to photography and travels to the Sudan to photograph Nuba people. This part of Riefenstahl’s life takes up much of the documentary, as in interview after interview, talk show after talk show, Riefenstahl continually and consistently tries to paint herself as an innocent who knew nothing of the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany and did what she was told to do out of fear for her own life and safety. However, what Veiel finds in the archived material and drawing from other sources including fellow German film-maker Ray Müller’s documentary “Die Macht der Bilder: Leni Riefenstahl” suggests very strongly Riefenstahl must have had some knowledge of what was happening, and moreover may have (or should have) known that some Romani and Sinti people she used as extras on a film project would later be taken to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex where they were executed.
The film not only exposes Riefenstahl as a manipulative liar but also reveals how strongly she identified with Nazi ideals of physical beauty and athletic perfection, applying these ideals in her photography work with the Nuba people. Riefenstahl’s own comments about how she would never take photos of crippled people or people somehow less than physically perfect say something sinister about her view of humanity when viewed in the context of what she did throughout her career as a film director. It would seem that for Riefenstahl – and for many others like her, of her time and since then, right down to the present – human individuals are only worth considering as physical objects without flaws, including psychological, spiritual and moral flaws as well as physical flaws. The intense body worship present in “Olympia” can be seen in the photographs taken of the Nuba people.
Another damning aspect in the documentary’s portrayal of Riefenstahl is Riefenstahl’s attitude towards the place of ideals such as beauty, harmony and perfection in the real world where such ideals may clash with the hardships and stresses of everyday life. Tellingly, Riefenstahl’s work with the Nuba people appears disinterested in their trials in accommodating and adapting to the encroachment of Western civilisation, and how it might affect their culture and general well-being. Riefenstahl’s pursuit of “purity” and “beauty” in a hermetic context, cleansed of all polluting reality, is a pursuit that allows her to overlook the suffering and violence that such pursuit, whether by herself or others, frequently entails.
In our current age, with fascism on the rise across the Western world, and popular culture in the West just as obsessed with body worship and perfection as Riefenstahl was – a perfection all too often obtained through exploitation, suffering and violence – this documentary, though focused on an individual whose career reached its creative peak nearly 100 years ago, turns out to be relevant to our own times. Riefenstahl’s lies and denial of the truth, even of the real world she lived in, end up as delusion and a pathetic claim to victimhood, two features which are also very typical of current Western societies as they rush headlong into wars against nations and civilisations they refuse to understand, learn about and come to terms with.