Review: "Riefenstahl" confronts a singular, disgraceful director

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.

Comments

[TomG]

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.