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.
