Riefenstahl (Preview)
Reviewed by Stuart Liebman

Produced by Sandra Maischberger; written and directed by Andres Veiel; cinematography by Toby Cornish; edited by Stephan Krumbiegel, Olaf Voigtländer, and Alfredo Castro; music by Freya Arde; sound design by Matthias Lempert; archive producers Monika Preischl and Mona El-Bira; Blu-ray, color, German and French dialogue with English subtitles, 115 min., 2024. A Kino Lorber release.

The veteran documentarian Andres Veiel, working with the journalist Sandra Maischberger and an excellent archival research team, is the latest filmmaker to attempt to penetrate the mastery, mystery, mind, and misery of Leni Riefenstahl. The broad outlines of her career and character, of course, have been widely known for years from extensive journalistic coverage, denazification hearings, and scholarly books. Although she never joined the Nazi Party, she was Hitler’s favorite filmmaker and attained extraordinary heights of European celebrity in the 1930s by making films financially supported by the government that were consistent with Nazi artistic values. After World War II, however, she suffered a precipitous descent into incarceration and, despite her eventual release, an Allied-imposed ban on her filmmaking. Controversies pursued her until she enjoyed a personal renaissance in the 1970s when some feminist groups seeking accomplished precursors revived attention to her cinematic achievements. Still, despite the publication of her memoirs in 1987, many biographical details remained sketchy and the myths she had spun about her life were still insufficiently explored. Another obstacle to completing the picture was Riefenstahl herself who continued to blur or block the disclosure of key facts, even filing dozens of defamation cases against commentators to prevent their exposure.

Faced with the opportunity of watching another cinematic profile of Riefenstahl, the first in three decades, readers of Cineaste might understandably ask what new facts could be unearthed that would provide novel perspectives on her work nearly a quarter-century after her death at 101 in 2003? The short answer to these reasonable questions is: a lot. They will find Riefenstahl rewarding.

Veiel is perhaps best known in the United States for his 2017 profile of the late German conceptual artist, Joseph Beuys. Thanks to Sandra Maischberger’s efforts, he and his colleagues are the first to have gained unprecedented access to Riefenstahl’s vast archive, now permanently housed at the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin, where Riefenstahl was born. From the archive’s vast holdings of rarely (if ever) seen documents, Veiel and his editing staff have fashioned a stylish collage film that provides fresh insights into her life and art, as well as her outsized ambitions, manifold contradictions, and the deceit, denial, and self-aggrandizement that animated them. The array of materials they have drawn on is extraordinarily varied, including footage or outtakes from films Riefenstahl directed or in which she starred; excerpts from many filmed TV and talk show interviews; hundreds of photographs—snapshots, formal portraits, and contact sheets—shot at all stages of her career, including pictures of her at work or hobnobbing with Nazi notables such as Hitler, Goebbels, and Speer; admiring letters and supportive messages preserved on her answering machine tapes from postwar Germans who, like Riefenstahl, resisted guilt for having served the Third Reich; home movies of her parents as well as impromptu footage of her 1960s forays into South Sudan to photograph the Nuba and Kau tribes for her still controversial, bestselling books about them. Veiel also painstakingly examined the original manuscripts of her bestselling Memoirs (1987) to demonstrate how she suppressed key facts about her own life, and he selected outtakes from Ray Müller’s The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993) to reveal how, like a tempestuous, obstreperous diva, she refused to allow him to include these revealing scenes in his pathbreaking account of her career.

No cinematic portrait of another filmmaker I have ever seen is better supported by such a wealth of visual and sonic documentation than Riefenstahl. There is much to absorb and process, yet the film is eminently watchable. Some may be disappointed that Veiel did not decide to use the material to mount a prosecutorial brief for a show trial about her past misdeeds during the Third Reich and the decades of cover-up that followed. I admit that I was initially hoping the film would deliver a final knockout blow to her reputation, one that would finally expose her disregard for the truth and the immorality of her political commitments to well-deserved shame. I also wanted Veiel to take down her artistic reputation several notches. She was an accomplished editor, but her own stylistic achievements clearly owed much to the innovative practices (extreme high- and low-angle shots, high-speed montage, wide-angle images of masses in motion) pioneered by other contemporary visual artists in the 1920s and early 1930s such as Dziga Vertov, Alexander Rodchenko, Elizaveta Svilova, and Moholy-Nagy, among others. Without their precedents, the most striking sequences of her films, especially in Olympia (1938), would have been unthinkable…

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Stuart Liebman, professor emeritus at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center, is a Cineaste Associate.

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Cineaste, Vol. LI, No. 2