The infamous and virtuosic Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl made the two documentaries she became legendary for, “Triumph of the Will” (1935) and “Olympiad” (1938), nearly 90 years ago. She herself lived to 101 (she died in 2003). The controversy that has surrounded her first reared its head more than six decades ago, catching fire in the mid-1970s, when Susan Sontag published her influential and accusatory essay about Riefenstahl entitled “Fascinating Fascism.”
Ever since then, there has been a hot-button ferocity to what we might call The Riefenstahl Question. That heightened quality — like the question itself — refuses to die. The question is: Is it fair to brand this Nazi filmmaker a Nazi collaborator? She made her films for Hitler, who she was personally chummy with, so there’s no doubt that on some level she made a deal with the devil. But what was the deal? What, exactly, did she know?
The debate about Leni Riefenstahl has been parsed in books and articles, in television interviews, in Sontag’s indictment, and in the fantastic three-hour-long 1993 documentary “The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl.” And there’s a reason it’s still a debate, an unsolved mystery that won’t die. Though a lot of people are sure they know just how guilty Leni Riefenstahl was, there has always been more insinuation to The Riefenstahl Question than there is direct evidence.
That’s what makes “Riefenstahl,” a documentary by the German filmmaker Andres Veiel that premiered today at the Venice Film Festival, such a valuable and arresting piece of work. It’s a portrait that’s really a meditation on Riefenstahl — her life, her art, the question of her guilt. And one of the things it does is to remind you of what a singularly provocative and insidious and mysterious figure she was.
She started off as a movie star, looking like a pixie Garbo as she acted out a Teutonic ideal of athletic-spiritual striving in Arnold Fanck’s “mountain films” (where she was photographed actually scaling mountains). She then scaled the heights of filmmaking power to become, at least up until that point, the most commanding female movie director the world had known, channeling the marching-band-on-fascist-acid roiling masses of “Triumph of the Will” through her tidal aesthetic of feminine surge.
Forty years later, when you see her erupt in fury on a talk show, dismissing the accusations against her as if they were libelous, she creates a zone of drama around her that’s like a lingering fire. We think: Does Riefenstahl believe what she’s saying? Could it be the truth? Or has she wiped away her past and totally convinced herself of a “truth” she’s compelled to tell? Or is she simply a devious great actress?
Veiel was given access to the archives of the Riefenstahl estate, and this allows him to showcase a great deal of material that has never been seen in public before: photographs, diaries, tape recordings of Riefenstahl’s phone conversations. It also allows him to examine how she wanted to be thought of, based on how she organized things. Here are images of Reifenstahl in the company of Hitler, the two smiling and clasping hands. Here are letters she wrote to the Führer, and a record of her relationship with Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda who wooed her and tried, in his apartment, to sexually assault her. Here are phone recordings that capture her close friendship with Albert Speer, the legendary Nazi architect.
For all that, “Riefenstahl” remains a film of suggestions, implications, and — on occasion — bits of evidence that could be called eye-opening. The point-of-view that would damn Riefenstahl tends to say, “Oh, come on! She was an associate of Hitler. Her films were an homage to Nazi ideals. She was around for all of it. How can you not connect the dots?”
Yet it was never that simple. “Triumph of the Will,” her most notorious film, was a visually hypnotic record of the 1934 Nazi Party Congress held in Nuremberg and attended by more than 700,000 Nazi supporters. As a film, it embraces the ideological metaphysics of totalitarian rapture (the fetishism of beauty, the idealization of the mob). Yet it offers no apologia to Riefenstahl to ask: In 1934, how many people, even within the higher echelons of Germany, knew what Hitler was going to do? (The Wannsee Conference, in which the details of the Final Solution were nailed down, was held in 1942.)
Riefenstahl knew Hitler well, and how to cozy up to him. She was an avid political schmoozer who understood how to play footsie with power. Hitler bankrolled her films, so in her case he was almost like a studio head. She knew how to flatter and cajole him. What did the two speak about? We have no real idea. What did she “know”? That’s an even harder-to-pin-down question. Faced with the sketchy quality of the evidence, Sontag, in “Fascinating Fascism,” tried to locate Riefenstahl’s primal sin in the films themselves. She acknowledged their wizardry but argued that they had the corrupt DNA of fascist art. Aesthetically, that may be true. But is that the same as saying that Riefenstahl had complicity in the Nazi crimes? What about the fact that the United States, without blinking an eye, hired former Nazis — and this was after the war, when we really did know what had happened — to help invent the U.S. space program? Does that make JFK guiltier than Leni Riefenstahl?
For decades, up until the moment she died, Riefenstahl maintained her innocence with a dogmatic absolutism. “Riefenstahl” interweaves extensive clips from three archival gold mines: an interview that Riefenstahl gave to the CBC in Canada in 1965; a talk-show appearance she made on German television in 1976; and “The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl.” Watching these clips, including outtakes in which she bites the heads off her interviewers in revealing ways, we sink into her trauma, her iron-thick pride, and the lawyerly cunning of her defense. On the German talk show, she says, “Back then I couldn’t foresee what was going to happen. Neither could millions of others.” (Among those millions, she includes Winston Churchill, who praised Hitler in 1935.)
So does “Riefenstahl,” after all this, contain a smoking Luger? It includes plenty of circumstantial evidence that Riefenstahl, at least in the ’30s, was an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazi regime. And there’s a telling moment that the film examines from two contrasting angles. In September 1939, as World War II began, the Reich Chancellery commissioned Riefenstahl to film the Wehrmacht’s campaign — the German invasion of Poland. This was her first experience of the reality of war, and once she was there she asked to be released from her position.
But…”Riefenstahl” later uses that same situation to prove that Riefenstahl witnessed, and was perhaps even tangentially involved in, Nazi atrocities. She was trying to set up a camera shot and asked that a group of Jews who’d been forced to dig a ditch be moved out of the way. They wound up being killed. The film uses this incident to suggest that Leni Riefenstahl was complicit in genocide, an argument that I would argue is of questionable validity.
More damning is the chronicle of her filming of “Lowlands,” a film of one of Hitler’s favorite operas that she directed less than one year later, using gypsy children from an internment camp. Those children wound up in Auschwitz, where they were murdered. But Riefenstahl then claims that she met up with them again. (In other words: She was a seamless liar.) She married Peter Jacob, a committed Nazi, in 1944, and spent the last year of the war with him. The last time she spoke to Hitler was in 1944.
“Riefenstahl” presents more evidence than we’ve seen up until now that Riefenstahl was embedded in the regime. Yet the evidence remains circumstantial. And what is perhaps most telling about the film is that in its indictment of Riefenstahl, it insists, as Susan Sontag did, in using her work as a transcendent expression of her guilt: her lionization of “perfect” beauty and godlike physical prowess in “Olympiad,” or the expeditions that she took to the Sudan in the ’60s to photograph the Nuba tribesmen (we see extensive footage of those journeys), who she saw as a kind of spiritual extension of the Teutonic ideal. The film makes the point that the aesthetics of totalitarianism, as rendered by Riefenstahl, have carried over to our own time. But is that a damnation of Riefenstahl, or of us? There may be reasons to condemn Leni Riefenstahl. But her outrageous and immortal potency as a filmmaker isn’t one of them.
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