Leni Riefenstahl, the umpteenth documentary about the German filmmaker, explores the reasons why such a brilliant artist chose to place her talent at the service of the Nazi regime.
Why dedicate yet another documentary to Leni Riefenstahl? This is not the first time the filmmaker has been analyzed on screen: the author of propaganda films for the Nazi regime has already been the subject of a report broadcast in 1982, a docu-portrait in 1993 (approved by herself) and an Arte documentary in 2020. Hasn't everything already been said about this ambiguous figure in German history, at the center of so many controversies during her very long life (she died in 2003 at the age of 101)?
In any case, Sandra Maischberger hadn't yet said it all. The journalist, who is the film's producer, is a talk-show icon in Germany, and interviewed Riefenstahl herself on the occasion of her 100th birthday in 2002. She later explained to Tagesspiegel to have felt that Riefenstahl had lied to her, and to have been unable to get her to say anything of substance.
It's posthumously that she's talking about it: the filmmaker's heirs have opened their archives to Maischberger and director Andres Veiel.
The mourning of the naive artist
The film definitively puts to rest the myth of a naive director, obsessed with art, who lent her talent to the Nazi regime without realizing its horrors, even though she was helping to build it, at least in its symbolic and stylistic projection. All her life, Riefenstahl herself was at pains to propagate the image of a passionate, unpoliticized artist, rejecting the label «propaganda film» and insisting that she had no knowledge of the crimes committed in Germany's name. She never ceased to assert this, in interview after interview, libel suit after libel suit.
Riefenstahl was indicted, then considered a mere «sympathizer», or «Mitläuferin», but not convicted at Nuremberg. Nevertheless, she spent her entire life defending herself against those who accused her of involvement. Indeed, it's hard to believe that she could have remained ignorant of the crimes of the German regime, having been married to an openly Nazi officer, and having been in close contact with Hitler and Goebbels, to the point of writing a letter of congratulations to the Führer after the fall of Paris and declaring herself «crushed» on hearing of his death. And what about the Sinti and Roma extras hired for her film Tiefland in 1940? Could she really be unaware that they had been taken to an internment camp, and that most of them had been gassed at Auschwitz?
From Nazi propaganda to his own
The document's originality lies above all in its aesthetics: the narrative is constructed from excerpts of Riefenstahl's films, snippets of her interviews throughout the post-war years, and photographs from her archives. The most chilling scenes are those in which portraits of Riefenstahl follow one another and merge into one another: Leni Riefenstahl, ghost of the past, emerges from nothingness and stares directly into the camera. Sepia photos of the woman who was a prima ballerina, a renowned actress, a genius director, then a photographer and finally an old lady with a hard look in her eyes. She breaks the fourth wall and projects herself in front of us like a mirror.
Leni Riefenstahl is also all those who remain silent in the face of barbarity. She examines how the German people overcame the crimes of the Third Reich.th Reich. Her epidermal, vehement and implacable denial is indicative of a defensive reflex reminiscent of Adolf Eichmann's famous «I was only obeying orders». In an interview, she herself says that she was just going with the flow, like 90% the Germans in the 1930s. The documentary also shows that she was supported by hundreds of anonymous people: all her life, she received letters and phone calls from people who felt she was the victim of a witch-hunt, sharing her point of view: like her, they were innocent, what could they do against the Nazi party?
And yet, like Eichmann, she can't get away with it. The film dismantles her argument point by point, painting a portrait of an aggressive woman who never expressed regret or empathy for the victims of the Holocaust.
Riefenstahl seems to have gone beyond her work as a filmmaker, which she was unable to carry out after the war because she was ostracized by the milieu, and continued her own work of propaganda. Just as she had skilfully orchestrated the Nazi aesthetic, blurring reality with the grandiloquence of her staging, she staged her own story.
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Andres Veiel
Leni Riefenstahl. Light and shadow
With Ulrich Noethen and Leni Riefenstahl
November 2024
115 minutes
French 
German 
English