“My life would’ve been nicer if I died at the peak of my career,” Leni Riefenstahl, the famed German director can be heard in “Riefenstahl,” which of course was a different kind of summit than most after directing state-sponsored documentaries “Olympia” and “Triumph of the Will” for Nazi Germany. She may be directly speaking to an erosion of resources or even her talent, a gift at projecting strength with bold displays of physicality, but she could just as easily be referencing the fact that she would spend the second half of her life explaining away what she had done, giving Hitler a different kind of weaponry around the world as her films which were formally groundbreaking were all too sadly inspirational in other ways.
Director Andres Veiel convincingly suggests that even after putting down the camera, Riefenstahl never stopped crafting images, applying all her skill in later life to shaping how the public would perceive her and maintain her legacy. Although the recent rise of the far-right in various parts of the world may make Veiel’s deep dive into the director’s voluminous archives feel especially relevant, what may be more unsettling to contemporary audiences is the notion of a long, quiet campaign to cleanse a reputation could be so effective, with Riefenstahl having plenty of time when she made it to the ripe old age of 101.
“Riefenstahl” hones in on an inflection point of a 1976 German talk show in which after years of eliding questions about her complicity in Nazi propaganda by journalists, Riefenstahl was confronted in a group conversation by other guests Elfriede Kretschmer and Knut Kiesewetter and her ambivalent answers sparked outrage. Veiel finds that Riefenstahl kept every letter sent to her in the ensuing firestorm, both hate mail and correspondence of those showing their support, and while she had always been careful about other interviews she gave over the years, she set about penning a memoir that she intended to be the preeminent record, conscious of what the public response could be.
Somewhat detached from a chronological structure, “Riefenstahl” can be slightly jarring structurally, elegantly tied together by the solemn narration of Ulrich Noethen and a nimble and eerie score from Freya Arde that is both precise and reverberant, but having an unusual issue at its core when Veiel seeks to show how much of an insider Riefenstahl was to Nazi activities after presenting her own version of events upfront, essentially doubling back again and again to expose the truth. The effect isn’t repetitive, but it does give the film a slightly scattershot quality as Veiel compares unpublished drafts of her memoir and phone calls looking for advice with previous public statements to expose how she polished her story over the years with no small amount of aid from others, some deferential likely to simply be polite.
Notably, Veiel gets his hands on outtakes from “The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl,” the last major documentary about the director in which Ray Müller could still interview her directly in 1993 and while clips of Riefenstahl nearly walking off the set over questions about Joseph Goebbels and refusing to compare then-present-day protests around immigration to the atmosphere in the 1930s are revealing of who she really was, it raises the more interesting question of how history is shaped even by those of admirable motives. Müller’s doc was widely admired upon its release for allowing people to make up their own minds about its controversial subject, but obviously choices had to be made. “Riefenstahl” may arrive at damning conclusions about how the filmmaker controlled her own narrative through omission, but resonates in a grander way when wondering what we’ll all turn a blind eye to. As is stated upfront in Noethen’s narration, “For something to be remembered, other things must be forgotten,” but at times the film can show what’s forgotten can eventually become the most memorable.
“Riefenstahl” will screen again at the Venice Film Festival on August 30th at 9 am at Astra 1.