Leni Riefenstahl returns to the Venice film festival, after a fashion, as the star of Andres Veiel’s extraordinary deep-dive documentary about the original cancelled artist. It was here, at Mussolini-era Venice in 1938, that Riefenstahl scooped the top prize for Olympia, her sublime, suspect paean to the Berlin Olympics. Her career hit the heights on the Lido, after which it plunged straight to hell. Veiel’s film shows how it happened, and how she tried and failed to salvage her reputation.
Riefenstahl does not come to praise or reclaim the late director, but nor does it mean to bury her. It acknowledges her as a trailblazer: a driven female artist in a male-dominated industry whose poetic eye and technical nous turned the medium on its head (literally so in the case of Olympia, with its slow-motion divers and discus throwers). But the film also demonstrates the ways in which her work is inextricably linked to nazism – fuelled by it, defined by it – that it can never be viewed in isolation, as something pure and untouched. In furiously protesting that it should, the director embarked on an endless, irresolvable argumentative loop.
Riefenstahl’s defence, for the record, was that she was an artist not a politician, a slave to beauty and therefore a little naive in allowing herself to be co-opted and commissioned by Hitler and Goebbels. Triumph of the Will, her 1935 salute to the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, wasn’t propaganda, she says, but a film “about peace and work”. The body fascism of Olympia, moreover, was colourblind, free from racial prejudice and could just as easily be applied to Jesse Owens as to the Fuhrer’s Aryan supermen. “Art is the opposite of politics,” she explains. And besides, “anyone would have done” what she did at the time. “Should I have been a resistance fighter?” she scoffs when confronting a critic on a 1970s chatshow.
Riefenstahl, then, claimed innocence and ignorance. The evidence suggests otherwise. Veiel’s film quotes from a gushing letter she wrote to Hitler while on tour with her work (“the film’s impact as German propaganda is greater than I could have imagined and your image, my Fuhrer, is always applauded”). It covers her marriage to Peter Jacob, a committed Nazi, and her lifelong “rapport” (her words) with the Reich minister Albert Speer. Riefenstahl also denied any knowledge of the death camps, but may have indirectly caused a massacre when she ordered Jewish workers to be removed so that she could shoot a street scene. And while she insisted that the Roma prisoners that she used as extras on her 1940 picture Lowlands were all later set free, the Roma community saw it differently. “I’m not saying Gypsies need to lie,” she says by way of reply. “But really, who’s more likely to commit perjury: me or the Gypsies?”
Veiel gained unprecedented access to Riefenstahl’s personal archive and combed through film footage, audio, photos and writing to join the dots between the material that she decided to preserve and that which she chose to leave out. He paints a textured, complex portrait that feels close to definitive; a slice of dark history that speaks (eloquently, implicitly) to present-day tensions. Riefenstahl leads us from the director’s miserable childhood through to her later work with the Nuba people of Sudan, a project she hoped would bring about her redemption. But the film is at its most grimly compelling when it puts her on stage, pinned down by her accusers and fielding questions with a mix of wary contempt and sudden explosions of incandescent rage.
Riefenstahl died aged 101 in 2003. In her later years she haunted the wings as a flayed, anguished ghost. Eyes glittering beneath a marcelled blond wig, she was like a Nazi-adjacent Norma Desmond, complaining that she was still big, it was only the world that had shrunk. “I’d always fought as if my life was at stake, until I’d got my own way,” she says at one point, and it seems that she did so right through to the end, clinging to her self-serving version of events and steadfastly refusing to admit any guilt. Behind a camera or in the editing room, the director prided herself on her ability to control the narrative. In Olympia she reversed the film to make the divers turn backwards, holding them in the air as if to defy the laws of gravity, performing gorgeous magic tricks in the service of Third Reich propaganda. In life, though, her story crash-landed with an ugly, back-breaking thud.
• Riefenstahl screened at the Venice film festival.
