Review: "Riefenstahl" confronts a singular, disgraceful director
Wednesday, October 15, 2025 at 5:00PM by Nick Taylor
We will never escape the discourse of whether it is possible to separate an artwork from the artist who created it. Death of the author, authorial intent, auteur theory vs collaboration, wider social contexts in which a work exists, so on and so forth. I state this as a fact above all else. We do love interviews and essays where someone talks about how they funnelled their passions and lived experiences into something magnificent. Frankly, I find it annoying only insofar as it feels like we’re asked to do this when someone’s got something very shitty going on offscreen, but even at its best, conflate an artist with their entire past can be a simple shortcut to dogpiling an object rather than meaningfully engaging with it.
Which brings us to Leni Riefenstahl, a hideously controversial and influential director forever famous as the woman behind Nazi propaganda films Triumph of the Will and Olympia. She’s also the subject of Andres Veiel’s documentary Riefenstahl, which premiered to great acclaim at last year’s Venice Film Festival and is waiting for you to rent it right now . . . .
Riefenstahl eschews a clean cradle-to-tomb narrative in deconstructing its titular director's life and the art she created. Instead, it offers a frame story while hopping between different source materials and reference points, possibly reflecting the disjointed but highly rewarding process of combing through an archive. In 2016, roughly thirteen years after Leni Riefenstahl died from cancer, her heirs bequeathed an extensive catalogue of her writings and recordings to the Prussian Cultural History Foundation, totaling over 7,000 boxes of her personal belongings. Producer Sandra Maischberger, who’d interviewed Reifenstahl in 2002, volunteered to help inventory the donation in exchange for permission to use the material in a documentary. This catalogue is contextualized, clarified, and refuted throughout the film by decades of publications and testimonies besides Riefenstahl’s.
Veiel and Maischberger largely focus on her life after the Holocaust. They attempt to piece together the director’s innermost beliefs from the mountainous collection of diaries and tapes she left behind. At no point do talking heads or unseen narrators appear to smooth things over or connect the musculature of one part of Leni’s life to another. Instead, Riefenstahl relies on text, video archives, and the woman’s own recordings to build its portrait of an artist who spent the majority of her life fending off accusations of participating in a genocide. She even argues her art is roundly apolitical. One of the first things we hear her say in the documentary is that all art is apolitical, and assuming or imparting meaning is a wasteful effort. Dumbass.
The point Veiel returns to most often, which becomes something of a spine for Riefenstahl, is a German public broadcast interview conducted in 1976 on the talk show Je spät der Abend. Leni appeared as a featured guest, seated next to a German woman her age named Elfriede Kretshmer who suffered the horrors of the Holocaust firsthand. Boy does Leni's smile at all the attention vanish the second she learns who this woman is. The host and Elfriede hammer Riefenstahl repeatedly on her argument that there was no way she could have known what the Nazis were doing under her own nose. Her reaction is a scorching, self-pitying refusal of any wrongdoing, amidst decades of being badgered by whiny activists, asserting anyone would have acted exactly as she did. The fact that Elfriede never believed in Hitler is completely irrelevant. Perhaps the biggest drama of the broadcast is the host learning in real time that his audience is thoroughly on Leni’s side.
One might say the attempts to integrate the different periods of her life into the documentary are jarringly presented, yet there’s a persuasive argument for Veie’s choices. I don’t know if Riefenstahl’s editing schemes ever match the sinuous and disarming cutting of, say, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which weaves together multiple life stories from Nan Goldin into a legible, cohesive whole. But does it want to? The central questions of Leni’s own complicity (if not membership and active participation) in the Nazi party’s exterminations, the sheer power of her artistry, and how one could possibly try to reconcile this with the old bat who spent the rest of her life reflexively playing the victim, are only emphasized by the blatantly segmented presentation of Veiel’s material. There are countless fissures to this archival portrait, so much work done by the documentarian to make Leni a human rather than a mythologized controversy or rhetorical object.
Frankly, I wonder if these shifts in audience perception speak more to my own unfamiliarity with her life. I’d either never heard about the years Riefenstahl spent cohabitating with the various Nuba tribes in South Sudan or simply forgotten this highly bizarre fact. She published some highly acclaimed photography books on this topic, won a German photography prize, and inspired Susan Sontag’s famous essay “Fascinating Fascism” - which you can read here - on the ideological aesthetics of the far right. There are also the less outrageous but still compelling life experiences, like Leni’s late-in-life love with a man half her age, and her descriptions of the gendered violence she suffered throughout her filmmaking career. The wavering inconsistency in her diaries across decades regarding her relationship with Hitler or an assault perpetrated by Goebbels, painful memories in their own right, contextualize her fierce, defensive ignorance in a very different way.
And yet. And yet. During the Je spät der Abend appearance on which Riefenstahl so frequently pivots, Leni declares she would have happily filmed the 1936 Olympics for Churchill or Stalin if they’d asked her to. It’s a big claim to throw out there, and the film doesn’t so much dig into whether this is remotely true so much as whether it matters. Is creating the defining template for fascist aesthetics across all visual mediums the sort of oopsie we can accept because the director says she didn’t mean to, didn’t know she was doing it, and shouldn’t be blamed for anyways? But even if we’re supremely generous and take her statements of ignorance at face value, the film achieves a more salient, damning point about how her refusal to take even a sliver of accountability is endemic of a larger culture built to deny self-reflection, and to warp being held responsible for one’s actions into a vindictive witch hunt.
Riefenstahl closes with Leni’s phone calls from fans and supporters who praise her appearance on the talk show. Some are more explicitly pro-fascist than others, as you might have already guessed, but one caller’s echo of Leni’s paeans to idealized beauty rather than human disability and ugliness really clarifies the intersection of politics and art that defines her work. When ideas of beauty are upheld as markers of superiority while any physical deviance from this standard is used to define some people as lesser, exulting such beauty inevitably becomes a fascistic gesture in itself. Through Leni’s eyes, beauty is fascism, and the camera lens is as powerful a fellow traveler as she could have imagined. Abstracting people, using them as geometric shapes and monuments, is not inherently loathsome. Appreciating beauty is not evil. Even so, everything about Leni’s art, how she filmed people, and how she chose to recall and interpret these aesthetic choices, all show how she viewed her subjects as objects rather than human beings. That’s how you get fascist art, even if the art is "good", and it makes cutting through Leni’s denials and contortions so fucking easy. She quite literally died rather than reckon with this, and the least we can do is make that death count.
Riefenstahl is currently streaming on Apple TV and can be purchased via most major streaming platforms.
Reader Comments (31)
Art can be apolitical.. unless it is specifically being used as a political tool. There is no way this woman was stupid enough to not know what her films were being used for.
In 20 years, how many documentaries are we going to have to sit through featuring the current politicians saying they didn't know what was really going on? That is where we are headed.
This was great read,I will be watching this when i can,Jodie Foster was going to make a film about her years ago.
TomG your last comment is quite controversial,what are those politiciaans turrning a blind eye to,I hope you didn't mean to align the politics and leaders with those of Leni's time.
President Trump,like him or not, with help just stopped a war that has been raging for years.
Mr Ripley79 -- It's interesting you say that since, in this very film, there is a line drawn between late 20th century violence against immigrants in Germany and the happenings of Nazi Germany. Riefenstahl condemns the former but refuses a comparison to the latter, claiming it never happened or that she never saw it.
Given the actions of ICE under Trump's administration and the recent demands to curtail the free press covering the White House, to name just two examples, I don't find Tom's comments that controversial or out of step with the points this very documentary is making. History helps us understand the present.
TomG -- I would argue that no art can be apolitical because it always reflects the society that made it, the production and economic systems in place, and the values of the time. And that is always defined by politics. Especially when the pretension of apolitical expression usually means fitting into the status quo. That said, I understand what you mean and this disagreement stems from having different definitions of what "art is political" means.
Anyway, for me, all art is political, but not every piece actively engages with politics or is intended to be used or seen as an object of political rhetoric. The most absurd thing about Riefenstahl's works is that they were both, since, as you said, they were explicit political tools. Which only makes her excuses more nonsensical.
Nick -- Great piece. It inspired me to check out this documentary last night. Though I have researched Leni Riefenstahl before, even read a biography of her and studied Sontag's essay in college, it's jarring to see footage of her spinning these ridiculous lies and evading responsibility rather than read about it. Moreover, I had never seen the footage of her in Africa, only knowing the photographs. The way she treats the people she photographs is so revealing.
Didn't expect Mr Ripley79 being a Trumper would be on my 2025 bingo card, but here we are.
I have to guess there's a post about Diane Keaton in the works but man, I've been refreshing this site hoping to see it. What a terrible loss.
DK -- I've been watching my Diane Keaton blindspots in hopes of writing something, maybe a top ten recommendations and where to watch them. Recently fell in love with her work on LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR and MRS. SOFFEL. Especially taken by the latter since so few folks discuss it.
Mr Ripley79 - The Palestinian Nakba has been going on for 77 years, and the end is nowhere in sight.
Fuck you, sir
Juan I am not a Trumper,never have been,i'm a reasonable minded human being,who doesn't see one side as angels and the other as devils
Claudio My point was this,Leni's government at that time murdered in the most callous way innocent people from all backgrounds etc and from what I can see Trump as controversial as his policies and retric can be is murdering no-one,
Atttempting to deport criminals isn't the wrong thing to do,if it's happening to innocent people yes it's wrong but people was dodgy pasts or in a country illegally is wrong simple,don't you want your streets to be safe,I know I do.
The inflammatory language used by some is way way out of proportion to what is actually going on..
Pedro saying F*** You reveals someone unwilling to engage with what has been said,I know that war has been raging for years but the man along with others all over the world has brought about some sort of stability and still people can't say a well done to him or commend him on trying.
I call that bad journalism,Trump is doing something which is better than doing nothing.
If the press were more measured in their views and reporting then maybe he wouldn't want to curtail them.
Everything he says and does isn't wrong,some of it yes but not all.
Since day one he hasn't been given a fair shake of anything,no matter what he says or does good or bad the press are one sided in their reporting.
Mr Ripley79 - Trump is bringing war to Latin America as you write this comments. He is not interest in peace, just profit. The democrats as well, of course.
I have a book to recomend: The Triumph of Evil: The Reality of the USA
@MrRipley79 - Trump is absolutely getting people killed, are you kidding me. People are being priced out of everyday amenities because the tariffs and market uncertainty have raised the price of everything. Housing prices are literally the highest they’ve ever been. ICE is happily rounding up, assaulting, deporting, disappearing, and killing any brown person they find. He’s arraigned political enemies on threadbare charges. Money is moving out of the hands of the poorest Americans faster than ever before. Right now the Supreme Court - of which he appointment three of its current members - may be gutting the Voting Rights act and deplatforming millions of Black Americans. And he’s still bombing ships in unidentified waters and not doing a damn thing to meaningfully stop the ongoing Palestinian genocide. Stopping any alleged criminals is secondary to the racist, fascist structures he is enabling to make America manifestly worse.
If you don't know what you're talking about, it's best to either ask questions or just step away from the keyboard. Parading your ignorance under the guise of being "reasonable" is offensive.
You're all right and i'm wrong obviously,typical one sidedness as usual,there's just no talking to people about any good he has done,no point at all.engaging in a reasonable and spirited but measured discussison is pointless.
Trumps evil that's it,agree or be shouted down.
That's what people say when people have different views,you don't know what you are talking about or you're ignorant simply cos you disagree with them and their views.
Has no-one been watching the news of the ceasefire in Gaza.
I never said he is getting everything correct but on this 1 topic he has done good but no-one will say yes he has,I just don't get it.
Anyone who thinks that our fuckhead dictator stopped anything in regards to Gaza-Israel is a fucking imbecile. He didn't stop shit. Are we forgetting the fact that the reason all of this happened is because the IDF were not in the Gaza area when Hamas kidnapped those people? This was all a set-up from day one as this conflict will never end unless Netanyahu is either dead or ousted where he will be fucked in the ass by a bunch of people who he fucked over. I don't give a fuck whose side people on as this recent conflict was driven by deceit and hate. It does not change the fact that an entire group of people have nearly been wiped out in an act of genocide.
Besides, we're all going to die on July 4, 2026 and we fucking deserved it. Democracy. What a load of bullshit.
Would it have been better if Trump hadn't intervened then,is that what people are saying?
Mr Ripley79 -- With all due respect, have you not been watching the news? How Israel has been quick to violate the ceasefire, how it has already halved the humanitarian supplies it agreed to allow into Gaza as part of the agreement? Whatever good Trump may have done is insufficient and pales in comparison to the bad. You seem to want us only to congratulate him and consider what little positive change he might have produced makes up for all that's wrong, but that is not how any of this works.
I don't want to be cruel, but the way you talk reminds me of how some conservatives here in Portugal speak nostalgically about the fascist dictatorship that ruled over our country until the April 1974 revolution. How Salazar fixed the national debt, and we should celebrate him for that, no acknowledgment of the countless human rights violations or the misery his policies inflicted upon the most economically vulnerable. Just because someone in power accomplishes something perceived as positive does not give them carte blanche to commit atrocities, nor does it mean we should be less critical of their other governance choices.
So what do you want us to do? To pretend that this ceasefire agreement is as good as you seem to posit, despite evidence to the contrary? And after that, to forgive or not even think of what horrible things he and his allies have done?
What you seem to characterize as a reasonable position sounds awfully like naivete or apologia.
If anything, this documentary and the history of Leni Riefenstahl are a good reminder to hold those in power accountable and not turn a blind eye to their wrongs, which might seem insignificant at the start but can quickly turn into horror beyond belief if we allow them to accumulate even more unchecked resources, influence, and might. Riefenstahl often recalls her first meeting with Hitler and how, in 1932, there were no concentration camps or anything of the sort. That does not mean the signs weren't there or that his rhetoric wasn't already one founded in hatred, white supremacy, antisemitism, xenophobia. etc.
In some ways, this is a good discussion to have under the review of this film but I don't think you're coming to it in good faith or that your arguments are especially persuasive.
TimeOut,big hugs,let's keep it to the films,sorry for making it too political,genuinely friends with you all.
Let's agree to disagree people,opinions are like you know what everyone has one.
Back to Diane, they republished a Fresh Air interview she gave promoting Marvin’s Room—and she talks about how hard it was to play the emotional truth of that character, specifically saying the lines. They played some clips and oh my god I had forgotten just how bad that movie is, there’s a reason why actressexuals pretend it doesn’t exist.
"Let's agree to disagree"...easy for you to say.
No, you don't get to "agree to disagree" when lives are being list due to Trump's murderous and genocidal policies, Mr Ripley79.
What happened to this site? It would be nice to focus on the movies, but we’re still waiting on Oscar prediction updates since September 17? And it feels more and more that people are attacking each other albeit about movies, politics, opinions, whatever. Sad to see this site go downhill….
Tony L - Claudio Alves keeps giving amazing coverage of festivals and releases, and a Trump supporter felt empowered by a doc about a Nazi figure... and then got roasted.
Tony L – what do you mean by focus on the movies? Movies are political, you know. They spark political discussions.
Sorry, the post was by Nick Taylor, who also keeps giving amazing coverage of festivals and releases
Echoing Pedro Penna- I also want to shout out writers Claudio, Elisa, Eric, Eurocheese, Nick- I showed people at work his Regina Hall post and everyone has been laughing since- as well as all the other writers who keep the blog going. I’ve been following this site since I was in college and most of the other movie blogs have either been discontinued or shut down. We are all lucky and appreciative to still have this site to come back to.
TonyL I always try and support whoever posts about movies,I try and comment on everything,sometimes there's no reply and i'm the only 1 commenting.
I will never speak about politics again on here for fear of being labelled a Trumper,ridiculed,belittled and for fear of being reprimanded for having opposing views which is obviously not allowed or tolerated by most guests here,which is what we all are.
Even when you apologise and realise maybe someone misunderstood a point or for having hurt members feelings or said something they consider off colour or offensive you get snarky comments and no forgiveness.
.
@MrRipley79: Maybe instead of incessantly whining about how persecuted you're being by fellow commenters, you could spend that time responding back reasonably to their responses to your initial comment? Or not, that's fine.
Yeah,call it whining if you like,your advice is duly noted but I don't think name calling is really the way to go about it.
I made an error and was perhaps misunderstood,I owned it and apologised.
I am currently reading about the NoKings movement and educating myself.
@TomG - Thank you so much for your initial comment - I was *this* close to writing about ICE and the ongoing genocide in Palestine, but I backed off because I was feeling too angry and the article was getting incoherent for it. I definitely expect we're gonna get a lot of "who could've known?" bullshit from people who chose to do nothing, I just hope there's consequences for it. Also, bless you for complimenting my Regina Hall piece and for sharing it with your coworkers???? That's amazing.
@Almost everyone - Thanks for the nice words about this piece, and this site, and for promoting good-faith conversation about this film and the politics it's confronting.
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@ Nick Taylor- I am slowly turning my coworkers into cinephiles and this site is the gateway drug.
I have a coworker from the Philippines and when Nora Aunor passed away, I showed her the post. My coworker talked about the actress and how important she was- also gave me some Filipino films to try and seek out.
I learned about the National Film Registry from this site and last week, I told a coworker about it and she is submitting ballots now- I convinced her to include a Greta Garbo movie.
Lastly, I have a coworker named Brenda and every time I see her, I wave my arms in the air and shriek out "BRENDA!" Honestly, that scene might be my favorite from the Scary Movie franchise. However, Brenda did not know what I was talking about so instead of having her watch Scary Movie 2, I just showed her the post and played the clip. All my coworkers thought it was very funny, although one person didn't know who Calista Flockhart was and that opened another rabbit hole I sent them down.