‘Riefenstahl’ Review: Doc Mines Nazi Chronicler’s Estate for Compelling but Familiar Insight

No matter how much we might want to purge the ideology reflected by and reinforced in Leni Riefenstahl’s films from our cultural lives, her aesthetic influence is impossible to escape.

Every Olympics, NBC’s innovations evolve from common visual goals: allowing the camera to track races more fluidly, slowing down the action to showcase bodies in motion, discovering angles that redefine our way of seeing events.

Everything stems from the grammar established by Riefenstahl in 1938’s Olympia, just as so much of what we view as the aesthetics of political power finds a template in her 1935 Triumph of the Will. But in acknowledging these connections, we’re constantly forced to wrestle with the same questions concerning what Riefenstahl knew or didn’t know about the regime and the messages she was putting on film, and the degree to which her art can be separated from the service she put it to. 

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It’s not a new reckoning. Riefenstahl’s commissioned work for Germany’s Nazi government and her friendships with various Nazi figures came when she was in her 30s and 40s. She lived to be 101, and although she occasionally dropped out of the public eye, she still did many interviews with an unwavering version of the autobiography she wanted to present. There has been a constant effort for decades on behalf of critics (and defenders) to expose Riefenstahl’s truth.

That is to say that it’s possible to have seen a lot of Leni Riefenstahl works, as well as footage of and documentaries about her at this point — making it hard to find anything “new” to say or understand, even 20 years after her death.

Andres Veiel’s Riefenstahl, debuting at the Venice Film Festival, reaches a well-trodden verdict, albeit based on evidence that is largely previously unseen. It’s in conversation with the version of herself that Riefenstahl chose to present in Ray Müller’s The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, which features in both clips and unreleased outtakes.

I got bogged down frequently in the familiarity and intentional messiness of the story that Veiel and producer Sandra Maischberger chose to tell, while at the same time wondering what sense a wholly unaware viewer would be able to make of this woman and the long shadow she still casts.

The mess is, as I said, partially the point. Veiel is working from some 700 boxes of film reels, pictures, memoir drafts, letters, audio recordings and more that comprised Riefenstahl’s estate after the death of her longtime partner Horst Kettner. As narrator Andrew Bird explains, some parts of the estate were carefully organized, while others were chaos.

So it’s a documentary in the purest of senses: an effort to impose a narrative around an assembly of documents. There are pieces that feel directly incriminating. Riefenstahl’s long-repeated positive stories about the Romani extras she pulled from an internment camp for her movie Lowlands are countered with evidence that most of those extras were subsequently sent (not by Riefenstahl personally) to Auschwitz and murdered. Veiel and his editors like to catch archival Riefenstahl in untruths like this, and then to showcase her seemingly feigned outrage in subsequent interviews. The insinuation is that once we recognize what her lying looks like, we’ll recognize it in other instances on other topics.

Of course, once we think we know what Riefenstahl looks like when she’s being dishonest, does the evidence somehow become more conclusive if you play those lies without audio or in ultra slow motion, so that her intended message is lost and only her suspicious body language remains? Veiel and company certainly think so, since it’s a technique they return to over and over again. Turnabout is fair play, given how Riefenstahl used comparable techniques to accentuate athleticism in Olympia. One might theorize that this film is arguing that Riefenstahl was to public obfuscation what Jesse Owens was to sprinting — a comparison that’s worth making only because of how much Riefenstahl’s chums would have hated it.

Some of the parsing of material from the estate feels meaningful, like when Veiel is able to show information that was part of various memoirs and removed. Some of it is unsettling, as with audio recordings of calls she received from supporters after a particularly difficult German TV interview, who offer praise that sounds disturbingly like the modern antisemitic undermining of the media. And sometimes you just sense Veiel trying to make Riefenstahl look silly (and human), like with a very Judy Blume-esque conversation about puberty between Leni and several childhood friends. 

Although Riefenstahl likes making elegant and artistic connections between disparate pieces of material — one repeated trick is editing between photos of Riefenstahl at different ages through matched cuts, with her piercing eyes in the center of the frame — it’s just as frequently prone to toss a letter or conversation onto the screen because it’s generally damning, regardless of context or chronology.

This is not a documentary that gives much credence to Riefenstahl as an artist, with only Olympia getting even a cursory formal exploration, though it may convince people who don’t know her work that they don’t want to bother with that credence anyway. I’m not sure that’s a broad enough conversation. But maybe I just have Riefenstahl fatigue.