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Propagandists for evil, when exposed, have their work cut out for them. After the Nazis were defeated, “Triumph of the Will” director Leni Riefenstahl, stripped of her Third Reich protections but saved from prison by a sympathetic tribunal, realized she’d need to become her greatest propaganda subject yet: selling the world that she was merely a persecuted naif taking a commission — someone who cared only about art, not politics. Hitler’s favorite filmmaker was a victim of history, not one of its ideological profiteers (or so she claimed).
“Riefenstahl,” Andres Veiel’s scrupulous, powerful documentary about the documentarian’s efforts to rehabilitate her image and art — a biography folded into an investigation — amounts to one big “not so fast” of a response. It answers Riefenstahl’s carefully chosen narrative, a fable of disillusioned purity, with an equally forensic counternarrative exposing her childlike narcissism about the impact of her talent. More disquietingly, she reveals a selective ignorance regarding the circumstances that brought her power and recognition.
And at its most abhorrent, “Riefenstahl” reveals a pernicious denialism too significant to ignore. She once used a concentration camp’s children as movie extras, then denied knowing they were later taken away by train and killed. Veiel’s inquiry becomes a time capsule from the 20th century with creepy echoes in our current era of corrosive dissembling.
A big reason all the unpacking in “Riefenstahl” is so convincing is because it was made with access to her estate: a vast, tellingly compartmentalized archive of private, never-before-seen film and photos, cassettes, folders, letters and memoir drafts. It uses a conventional documentary approach, yet it also boasts artfully thematic touches too. Backlit filmstrips fly by at various speeds, images edge out of focus and (twice) Veiel gives us a montage of Riefenstahl’s photogenic face across time, morphing from glamorous youth to vibrant old age, connected by a sameness of expression that demands our return gaze. Occasionally we get a spare, clarifying voiceover about timelines and facts, but mostly Veiel lets his juxtapositions make the case, expertly stitched together by the editing team of Stefan Krumbiegel, Olaf Voigtlander and Alfredo Castro.
Excerpts from her defining works — the rigorously preplanned “Triumph of the Will” and “Olympia” and, in her 60s, photographing the Nuba in the Sudan — are appropriately contextualized to show how nothing was merely observed in Riefenstahl’s beautifying ethos. Just as revealing are snippets from numerous talk shows, the footage sometimes decelerated to spotlight her physical discomfort at being challenged, which amounts to a stylistic clapback of sorts to her legendary use of slo-mo to glorify bodily strength.
There is also remarkable unused footage from Ray Müller’s queasily accommodating 1993 profile “The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl.” Nearing 90, Riefenstahl is seen shouting down Müller over inconvenient details about her friendship with Goebbels. Müller is also heard being sympathetic to her off camera, proof our foremost Hitler apologist had no problem, decades later, making new allies.
That reality is most disturbingly evidenced in audio of phone calls from indignant pro-Riefenstahl defenders after a combative appearance in the 1970s on a show in which the filmmaker squirms next to a same-aged German lady who calls her work “Pied Piper” movies, describing them as “against humanity.” Later, one supportive caller, in high dudgeon, dreams of a German future with a “return to morality.” How Riefenstahl agrees with him is pointedly chilling.
“Riefenstahl” is made of these grim realizations. But what it best clarifies is that art-making is the culmination of countless decisions: She read “Mein Kampf” and became smitten. She heard what was said at rallies about Jews. She picked worshipful camera angles. And she chose exactly what she wanted us to see and not see.
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