Riefenstahl – Film Review
by Hugh Maguire

Director – Andres Veiel
Writer – Andres Veiel
Stars – Ulrich Noethen, Leni Riefenstahl, Heinrich Breloer

Without even a modicum of interest in the past, this documentary film is utterly compelling.  A wealth of visual material across decades brings the past to life.  The frightening reality of current international power politics gives everything an alarming immediacy which even the director may not have anticipated.

Living to a ripe old age of 102 and even now some twenty-plus years after her death, Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003), the innovative German filmmaker, internationally celebrated in her heyday, and reviled in later years, remains as controversial today as ever. Rising to prominence in Nazi-era Germany, she brought a new creative eye to cinema, technically and aesthetically, and employed her remarkable skills to bear on a range of projects – most famously/ infamously on Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938).  The former captured the scale of the Nuremberg Rallies of 1934 when some 700,000 members converged on the city and the Zeppelinfield for the Nazi Party Congress. The latter celebrated the 1936 Olympics hosted by Berlin.  Emphasising the history of the Olympic Games and the beauty of the human body, the overt implication being of course that the Classical idea of beauty and fitness was alive again once more in Nazi Germany.  Both were overt propaganda films to state the obvious.

Therein lies the problem with Leni!  No one has faulted her creative genius and subsequent influence, but her closeness to a vile regime tainted her reputation with immediate effect following the collapse of the Third Reich in 1945.  Riefenstahl remained a creative force until the end of her long life, but a massive component of her creativity may well have been expended on curating her own narrative and legacy, distancing herself from the odious regime, Hitler and his lackeys.  Her closeness to the regime was well known and she never distanced herself from other ‘creative’ peers, notably megalomaniac architect, Albert Speer (1905-81).  Speer was masterful at curating his narrative, presenting himself – like Riefenstahl, as an apolitical technocrat or creative unaware of the full horror of the surrounding atrocities.

Through her meticulous archiving, and the acres of film footage, and documentary material, there are three certainties in this film.  Riefenstahl was a meticulous, inspirational, craftswoman and creative force who had a lasting influence and legacy on cinema.  Riefenstahl, a film star beauty in her day, had one enormous monstrous ego – and in actual fact this, what might be called ‘Triumph of the Ego’ allowed her survive the ominously perverse Nazi era machismo but also the relentless assault on her legacy (rightly or wrongly) over fifty subsequent years. Despite the all too obvious slant of the director there remain niggling questions on her culpability.  Do we excuse the artist and, despite the propagandist?  To condemn her is to condemn the Wagnerian background music of the era.  French historical painter, Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), one of the ‘greats’ of the French artistic canon, was a friend of not overly saintly Robespierre (1758-94). Are her greatest detractors male?   Did she have to compromise to succeed as a woman?  There are many complex questions to be interrogated.  Perhaps the most sobering takeaway is the scenes of delirious crowds cheering their fuhrer and their calls to make Germany great again, all blinded by their faith in one seriously delusional man.  Again, this gives the work a resonance that was not intentional but makes the viewing all the more rewarding.