‘Riefenstahl’ Review: A Damning Documentary Portrait

In a thematically load-bearing scene from Andres Veiel’s Riefenstahl, German filmmaker and Nazi propagandist Leni Riefensthal displays on her relationship with Joseph Goebbels. This archival interview was recorded at Riefensthal’s cozy Bavarian mountain cottage, the place she lived to the ripe outdated age of 101. Over images of the 2 laughing and eating collectively, and instantly following excerpts from Goebbels’s most virulently antisemitic speeches, Riefenstahl boasts of the Nazi propaganda chief’s mad want for her, each inventive and erotic, and of the “adventures” and “affairs” they’d collectively. She then, nearly as an afterthought, suggests ruefully that he sexually assaulted her on two events.

Veiel’s meditative, ominous documentary eschews modern speaking heads and minimizes didactic narration; it lets a fantastically restored assortment of images, audio, movie strips, paperwork, and video segments regarding Riefenstahl and her colleagues communicate largely for themselves. However the Goebbels section is emblematic of the movie’s guiding interrogations: who Riefenstahl was politically, personally, and as an artist.

Whereas a lot discourse on Riefenstahl has centered on the aesthetic worth of her work (most notably, Triumph of the Will has been canonized as one of many best propaganda movies ever made), Veiel is just passingly fascinated about her artwork, preferring to critically look at the girl herself. Specifically, his movie appears wanting to problem her postwar self-portrayal as a “pure artist” freed from any ideological dedication and as an harmless seduced by the Nazi regime.

To this finish, Veiel repeatedly juxtaposes public statements made by Riefenstahl—that she had no private relationship with the Nazi elites, little interest in their ideology and no data of their plans or actions—with damning proof on the contrary. There are images and accounts of her wining and eating with the Reich’s truest believers, and we see private paperwork, conversations with admirers, and on-camera outbursts that counsel that she believed herself (and Germany) to be a sufferer of defamatory Jewish and communist conspiracy.

Significantly chilling is proof that the manufacturing of her movie Tiefland, which was filmed between 1942 and 1945, was deeply embedded within the Holocaust: Roma kids have been extracted from a close-by internment camp to be used as extras (her scrapbooks reveal that she took a specific shine to 1 terrified-looking youngster whom she known as “My Little Gypsy”) and carted to Auschwitz the second she was finished with them. A crew of Jewish slave laborers have been allegedly massacred as a result of she complained they have been ugly. If there’s nonetheless anybody uncritically repeating Riefenstahl’s narrative of naïveté, they’ll discover it onerous to maintain by the top credit.

For all her clear lies and apparent narcissism, one will get the sense that Riefenstahl wasn’t completely dishonest in portraying herself as a romantic guided by the unconscious; this was, arguably, what attracted her to fascism, a backward-looking romantic ideology that valorizes fantasy and elevates intuition over cause. Veiel provides us the ethical certitude of her guilt, nevertheless it’s the psychological mechanisms that led her to Hitler that increase deeper questions in regards to the semiotic structure of fascism and the connection between aesthetics and morality.

One needs for extra forensic element about Riefenstahl’s inventive theories and approach, how and why she created the precise pictures that she did. Riefenstahl is stomach-churning and engrossing, nevertheless it performs extra as a well-known warning about German complicity than a difficult exploration of our doubtlessly conflicting admirations for magnificence and goodness.