Riefenstahl (15)
Directed by Andres Veiel
★★★★☆

LENI RIEFENSTAHL’s work, particularly her two documentaries of the Nazi era, Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938), is often used as the starting point for a discussion of whether great art can have appalling content; the relationship between form and content, essentially. The first presented a Nuremberg rally to the world; the second, the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

Undoubtedly a filmmaker of brilliance, Riefenstahl’s post-war life was dominated by defending herself against accusations that she did Josef Goebbels’ work for him, presenting a flattering portrait of the Third Reich. She attempted this rehabilitation via self-archivisation, both in written memoir and through the many recordings she made.

Andres Veiel’s new documentary ostensibly presents as objective a view of her long life (she lived to be 101) as is possible; there’s little voiceover or obvious directorial point of view; instead, episodes – often from earlier documentaries – of her life and work are cut together to form a picture of a complex woman desperate to present herself as simply responding to the times in which she worked.

Veiel gets across this duality with great skill, particularly in his use of a doubling effect for some of the Nazi footage, which is presented out of focus, portraying the shadow behind the film and behind Riefenstahl’s career. 

It is notable that this technique is only employed for that type of footage and not, for example, the scenes shown from the mountain films she made with Arnold Fanck which brought her stardom as an actress and, of course, to the attention of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi leadership.

There are some excruciating moments: her appearance on a 1970s talk show opposite a German worker of her generation who resisted the Nazis; the revelation that she used Roma extras on her film, Lowlands (released in 1954, but shot from 1940-44), who were then murdered in Auschwitz; and most horribly, her request to have Jews removed from the area in which she was filming a record of the invasion of Poland in 1939. They were then shot.

Alternatively placatory and outraged, Riefenstahl’s life personifies the oscillation between memory and forgetting that still drives Germany’s attitude to its past. We hear telephone calls from admirers arguing that they didn’t know what was happening in the camps. This film will allow another generation to hold her life and work in the balance; and, by implication, post-war Germany.

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