There seems to be no hope of ever escaping Leni Riefenstahl, the Hitler idolater who keeps rising like a zombie sphinx from the ashes of history. Best known as the director of “Triumph of the Will” (1935), her Führer-glorifying propaganda film, Riefenstahl died in 2003 at 101. Hers had been quite the run, filled with outsize highs and lows as well as reinvention and dissimulation, especially after World War II, when she tirelessly tried to rewrite her role — and deny complicity — in Nazi Germany. She was simply an artist, she insisted, and therefore blameless for having done her part to promote National Socialism.
In his coolly damning documentary “Riefenstahl,” the German filmmaker Andres Veiel joins a persistent cohort of skeptics and detractors who have long challenged Riefenstahl’s self-serving identity as an innocent artist. Hers is a story that, on one level, began in 1932 when she first heard Hitler speak at a rally and was “fascinated,” as she wrote in her 1987 memoir. That year saw the release of her feature directing debut, “The Blue Light,” a drama in which she starred as a mysterious mountain nymph who lives free and wild, and scampers up cliff-faces in a penumbra of diaphanous light, bare legs flashing. The film is kitsch; of course, Hitler admired it and its lissome star.
The rest is infamous history. “Fate smiled on her in the person of Adolf Hitler, and she smiled back,” as Steven Bach puts it in his essential 2007 biography “Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl.”
After meeting Hitler, Riefenstahl directed a clutch of state-sponsored movies, including “Triumph of the Will,” which burnished his image. (It won a few prizes at the Venice Film Festival.) She went on to direct “Olympia” (1938), a slab of a movie about the 1936 Summer Games in Berlin, which elevated Hitler’s international profile and is now best remembered for his startled reaction to Jesse Owens, the Black American track star, winning a race. In 1940, Riefenstahl began production on “Tiefland” (“Lowlands”), another star vehicle for her in which she played a dancer desired by two men. She ran over-budget on that production, as she reported to the minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, who was in charge of film.
Veiel revisits this period in “Riefenstahl” efficiently with minimal narration and shrewdly edited archival material that includes assorted interviews with her across the decades. He sketches in her early years, including as a Reich filmmaker, and lasers in on Riefenstahl’s postwar campaign to clean up her reputation. She had her work cut out for her. During legal denazification proceedings mandated by the Allies, Riefenstahl was cleared of any crimes but classified as a “fellow traveler.” Even so, one remaining hurdle for Riefenstahl was that her name was emblazoned on notorious Nazi propaganda films; another issue is that she was always eager to take credit for her work, at least when it was convenient for her.
It turned out that Riefenstahl’s life was riddled with messy inconveniences, including accounts that, while making “Tiefland,” she had used Roma prisoners as extras, selecting them from a transit camp described by Bach as one of “the holding pens for the Holocaust.” He writes that it took decades before documentation of this episode emerged. That said, in 1949 a German magazine reported that she had used the inmates. She sued for libel and won. With forensic clarity, Veiel revisits Riefenstahl’s use of these poor souls and what befell them, as well as another harrowing episode from the production of “Tiefland.”
In his account of the libel trial, Bach quotes a newspaper account of Riefenstahl’s behavior during the proceedings: “She did all the talking.” That line could serve as part of her epitaph. Riefenstahl never shut up, as one after another interview in the documentary makes abundantly, sometimes ludicrously clear. There’s some grim comedy in watching Riefenstahl smile and flirt with various interlocutors, and try to wave off questions about what she did and what she knew. Veiel repeatedly cuts from her delivering some outlandish statement to images from “Triumph of the Will” that undermine and contradict her. This contrapuntal approach generally works; not all Riefenstahl researchers have been as thorough.
Again and again, Riefenstahl hid behind the fig leaf of art and claimed that she had no interest in politics, even as her movies served Hitler both at home and abroad. She created a revisionist autobiography for herself, one in which she was merely an innocent artist, a claim that’s been parroted by too many others, including film critics, historians, programmers and other moviemakers. Veiel’s documentary is a welcome addition to the historically grounded rebukes to Riefenstahl and her apologists, including bad feminists. In the end, the only way to swoon over her technical prowess, camera moves, lionizing images of Hitler and nicely shot swastikas is to feign ignorance of the horrors that were already unfolding in Germany and would soon engulf the world.
embed trailer
Riefenstahl
Not rated. In German, English and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
The post ‘Riefenstahl’ Review: Hitler’s Favorite Filmmaker Revisited appeared first on New York Times.
