Riefenstahl review - fascinating fascism? Portrait of the Nazis' favourite film-maker

There used to be an unwritten rule among BBC commissioners about how long an interval had to pass before greenlighting a new documentary on a familiar subject – Shakespeare, Ancient Egypt, Andy Warhol – they all came round again with a decent interlude between reassessments. But if the pitch involved Nazis, all bets were off.

And maybe in Germany itself, that’s been the case with film-maker Leni Riefenstahl who may have had more documentaries made about her than she made herself during her years as Hitler’s favourite director.

The latest, Riefenstahl comes with the promise of new revelations based on its makers (Andres Veiel and Sandra Maischberger) having unprecedented access to the director’s extensive private archive. Their new documentary certainly has the advantage of its subject having finally died at the age of 101 in 2003 and no longer being around to complain. Riefenstahl proudly boasted of taking her journalist-defamers to court some fifty times, winning quite a few of her libel cases. A mistress of self-mythologising, she liked to maintain that her great passion was creating art and beauty not propaganda. In the decades after the war (below in 1973) she claimed to have been ‘inexperienced politically’, to have never uttered an anti-Semitic word and to having no knowledge of the gas chambers when they were operating.

Riefenstahl was almost as talented a liar as she was a creator of extraordinary images. Her most successful films, Triumph of the Will and Olympia are symphonies of innovative cinematography. Aerial and underwater camerawork compete with Busby Berkeley parades of exalted physiques, all brought together within the alchemy of the editing suite. And as that rare thing, a woman director, she got her share of acclaim – interviewed in Cahier du Cinema in 1965, fêted by feminist cineastes, commissioned to photograph Mick Jagger and the Nuba people in the 1970s.Susan Sontag famously grappled with the director’s legend; claiming in her 1965 essay On Style that because of their intelligence, grace and sensuousness, her films transcended propaganda. She changed her mind ten years later in Fascinating Fascism when she excoriated the "avant-garde film establishment" for turning a blind eye to Riefenstahl's close relationship to Hitler and his inner circle. As a subject Riefenstahl has long inspired fascination; she first came to fame in The Blue Light, portraying an intrepid mountain-climbing maiden in a celebration of nature and mysticism. She went on to take credit for the film away from her Jewish collaborators Béla Balázs and Carl Mayer. While she continued to perform as an actress, her interest in directing grew. The new material uncovered here reveals that far from being an apolitical artist, it was she who first approached Hitler after being overwhelmed with admiration while watching him at a rally in 1932. By 1933 the Führer was commissioning her to film the Nazi party convention; Triumph of the Will and Olympia were to follow.

Previous biographers of Riefenstahl have uncovered her mistreatment of director/cameraman Willy Zielke, the originator of many of the breathtaking images those films contained, Riefenstahl reveals how she was complicit in Zielke being forcibly sterilised after a mental breakdown. Her appropriation of the Nuba people in the early '60s is explored in detail and shows that nothing changed post-war; she was still a manipulative exploiter of her subjects for her own ends. Pop some soap packets next to the cute Nuba children (thank you Persil sponsors), and make the adults fight each other with spears on camera, because that's what Riefenstahl thought her audience wanted from 'noble savages'.  

However there’s little new here about her exploitation of Roma and Sinti people, including children, in her 1944 film, Lowlands.  Handpicked from the Maxglan and Marzahn concentration camps, they were to be colourful extras in her Spanish romace. In the early ‘80s  Nina Gladitz, an indefatigable journalist-filmmaker tracked down the few gypsy survivors for her Riefenstahl documentary Time of Darkness and Silence. On camera they gave the lie to the myth that ‘Aunty Leni ‘ told after the war, that she had tenderly cared for them during filming and that they had all survived. Instead they described being kept under grim conditions by armed guards and her empty promises to save them from the gas chambers. Almost 100 of these Roma and Sinti extras would go straight from the movie’s location to the death camps. When Gladitz’s documentary went out on German TV, she was sued by Riefenstahl and the film was kept in a vault. A bootleg copy can currently be found on You Tube. While while the quality is poor, the testimonies of the gypsies who survived are incredibly moving, especially as the story of the extermination of the Sinta and Roma people features rarely in Holocaust documentaries.Riefenstahi doesn’t use clips from Gladitz’s documentary, or reference the lengthy book she later wrote about Riefenstahl, whose self-mythologising and lies obsessed the journalist for decades. But it does have some revealing outtakes from Ray Müller’s (authorised) 1993 documentary, The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl as well as fascinating extracts from various TV talk show interviews. These appearances reveal the monstrous ego of this indefatigable narcissist; but they  also reveal  how deeply the media was enthralled by her. There’s a recording of a chatty telephone call between Riefenstahl and Albert Speer (Hitler’s Minister for Armaments) comparing notes on how much the BBC and American broadcasters were willing to pay them for an interview. Also new are home movie clips and scraps of unpublished autobiographical writing. Riefenstahl describes a miserable childhood with an aggressive father she could never please; it’s not an excuse but maybe gives some explanation for her later choices. 

Will this be the final, definitive documentary about Riefenstahl? Veiel and Maischenberg spent the best part of five years going through 700 boxes of photos, tape recordings, newspaper cuttings, documents and films. The director had carefully collected it all together, doubtless dreaming that her work would be appreciated by future film scholars.This archival treasure trove is cleverly deployed throughout Riefenstahl with artful graphic enhancement, a well-tempered score, sensitive sound design and sparse commentary. With the populist right on the rise in Europe, are we being asked to draw parallels between the Nazi era and today’s antagonism towards migration and multi-culturalism? If so, who will be the new Riefenstahl to entrance the right with a vision of their future?

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