Leni Riefenstahl: what are we to make of her? What did she know? Often described as ‘Hitler’s favourite filmmaker’, she always claimed that she knew nothing of any atrocities. She was a naive artist, not a collaborator in a murderous regime. This documentary wants to get to the truth. But even if you’ve already made your own mind up – I had! – it’s still a mesmerising portrait of the kind of person who cannot give up on the lies they’ve told themselves.
Riefenstahl died in 2003 at the age of 101. A striking, Garbo-esque beauty in her youth she looked like a haunted Fanny Craddock by the end. She left behind a huge archive amounting to 700 boxes of photos, footage, letters, writings, journal entries and recorded phone conversations, which director Andres Veiel has mined for this documentary. There are no talking heads or interjections. Instead, he uses the archive materials to recreate her life as dancer, actress, then director. Hitler called her the embodiment of German womanhood. They became friends and he asked her to direct documentaries glorifying the Nazi regime, including Triumph of the Will, filmed at the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg in 1934.
She did not produce a newsreel as expected. Instead, she came up with a sweeping cinematic epic with Hitler portrayed as a rock-star god. She was next given a huge budget to film the Olympics in Berlin. She employed many unusual camera angles and the result was an ecstatic ode to physical perfection. (You can see her aesthetic influence in almost every perfume ad today.) Neither film was art for art’s sake.
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