31/08/2024 - VENICE 2024: Andres Veiel creates a complex breakdown of German director Leni Riefenstahl’s life and examines how effective people are at trying to rewrite history

Standard 8 mm films, audio recordings, pictures and magazine cutouts in their thousands: this is the legacy of someone who has lived a full life. “My life was very hard but also very rich,” the person in question says in an interview snippet. But that person is German director Leni Riefenstahl, famously connected to the Third Reich. Just how much of a full life she had is something she’d rather make everyone forget. But in his documentary Riefenstahl [+see also:
interview: Andres Veiel
film profile], which has premiered out of competition at the 81st Venice Film Festival, Andres Veiel won’t let her.

Her 1932 work The Blue Light is the movie she wants to be her legacy. But what defined her even more are Triumph of the Will and Olympia. They showcase her fascist aesthetics, the displaying of young, strong, beautiful bodies, and the fetishisation of Nazi ceremonials, not to mention her close ties to Adolf Hitler himself. There is a modern discussion on how art can be separated from its problematic artist. In Riefenstahl’s case, there would be no art without political tendencies.

This connection, however, is what she denied repeatedly in the post-war period. Images of her proudly explaining how she slyly cut the images to the rhythm of the marching song, while young men carried the swastika, seem haunting. Her estate, which she so carefully curated to tell her narrative, may accentuate or omit certain things. But ironically, it means she gets called out even more.

Veiel relies heavily on moments such as her phone calls with Albert Speer on how to monetise the public’s interest in her. There are several unaired moments during interviews in which she blows up at her interlocutor for pointing out contradictory statements. There are meticulous collections of phone calls from people siding with her point of view. “I got my orders, and I did my duty.” It is an oft-heard justification by those involved in the regime.

Why keep footage in which she denies the November pogroms or states that the word “Nazi” was not in use in the early 1930s? These are key moments that stand on shaky ground because sometimes, Veiel lets his narrator interfere and course-correct. At other times, he lets Riefenstahl speak. While it is obvious that her denial and her lies have become her truth, the film is stronger whenever she gets “caught out” by investigative counter-montage.

Such as when she claims that Triumph of the Will was about peace, but in an excerpt, Rudolf Hess speaks about the “purity of the race”. Veiel points out her ties to the forced sterilisation of Olympia cameraman Willy Zielke, the obvious fact that she recruited Roma people from an internment camp as extras who were later killed, or that she likely experienced the shooting of Jews, who were hindering her from setting up an outdoor set.

What exactly Riefenstahl felt, knew or believed has been lost to time and her fantasies. But these fantasies, this urge to push a narrative so much that it becomes your bizarre truth: one would call it fake news today. And it still works extremely well. As a common denominator, this is what Veiel is trying to achieve: examining how effective people are, to this day, at trying to rewrite history.

Riefenstahl was produced by Germany’s Vincent Productions GmbH and is distributed internationally by Beta Cinema GmbH.