“Admire” would not really be the word I would use to describe my feelings towards Fraulein Riefenstahl”, says Shosanna Dreyfus at one point in Inglourious Basterds, while discussing G.W. Pabst’s The White Hell of Pitz Palu, where Leni Riefenstahl, then an actress, played one of her most famous roles.
Mountain films, which were wildly popular in Germany in the 1920s, and which Riefenstahl initially became known for, constitute one of the most innocuous chapters in her career. As does her directorial debut, The Blue Light, a melodramatic mystery with fantastical elements. That was in 1932, and by the mid-decade, she would begin making propagandist documentary films sanctioned by the National Socialist Party.
“Visionary? Manipulator? Liar?” asks the original poster of Riefenstahl, a German documentary directed by Andres Veiel, aiming to decipher the mystery of one of the most provocative and notorious filmmakers in cinema history. Here’s the spoiler: the film doesn’t really answer these posed questions, or – depending on how to view the facts and opinions presented – gives an answer that often tends to be irritating for many, but also makes the movie as effective as it is: the director in question might have been all of the above, since they are not at all mutually exclusive.
There will be no “aha, gotcha!” moments or anything that could be considered as simple as that in Riefenstahl. In fact, the idea for the film was born out of a feeling its producer, Sandra Maischberger, once had while interviewing Leni Riefenstahl in 2002: A feeling that the truth is more complicated than what was being said, and that Riefenstahl was intentionally withholding information. In a way, that’s a narrative that ran throughout the German filmmaker’s whole path for many decades.
The director was tried after the war, but wasn’t sentenced to actual prison time. In the following years, though, up until she died in 2003, she was relentlessly asked about her supposedly close friendship with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, about concentration camps and the Holocaust.
Riefenstahl spent every interview denying that she was aware of the horrors and claiming that she wasn’t really that well acquainted with the Nazi leadership. In her book of memoirs, apart from a fascinating dive into her methods and approach to work, she also spent many pages fictionalizing the more dubious details of her biography.
This duality, once accurately described in the title of another famous documentary about the German director, The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, is at the heart of Veiel’s film. Riefenstahl’s favorite go-to defense was to claim that she wasn’t interested in ideological stuff; she was fascinated by images, the flickers of a feeling, the changes of light, and the rhythm of a human body. So, the authors take a measured look at their subject as a person and as an artist, trying to reconcile the fact that her Triumph of the Will and, especially. Olympia, which revolutionized the approach to sports events coverage, are still studied in film schools, with the idea that their author’s ties with the Nazis are undeniable.
Veiel and his co-authors double down on the latter, utilizing their access to Riefenstahl’s estate – i.e., private letters, notes, photos, rare audio bits – to reveal some really disturbing details about the director’s work, even beyond the commonly known facts. Never does their intonation become accusatory, though; this is an exploration.
It's a dig into a human’s complexity, made with a full realization on the authors’ part that an absolute clarity, something that might amount to being called the truth, can never really be achieved – even through the most meticulous study of archives.
The film is now playing in New York at Lincoln Center and Quad Cinema; it opens Friday, September 12 in Los Angeles at Laemmle Royal and Laemmle Town Center 5. Visit Kino Lorber's official site for more information.