‘Riefenstahl' Trailer: Disturbing Documentary Portrait of Hitler's Favorite Filmmaker Resonates in the Present Moment
Now, documentarian Andres Veiel has delivered a riveting cinematic portrait that looks deep into the meaning of Leni Riefenstahl, and how her work still uncomfortably echoes today. IndieWire exclusively debuts the trailer for 'Riefenstahl' below. The film will be released by Kino Lorber in New York on September 5 and in Los Angeles on September 12, with a national rollout to follow.
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Riefenstahl's 'Triumph of the Will' was a film school staple for much of the mid 20th century — it's how USC grad George Lucas came to pay homage to it with the mass gathering at the end of the original 'Star Wars.' And yet the 1935 film was based entirely around a stylized presentation of the previous year's Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, with 700,000 Nazis arranged in geometrically precise rows, all fanatically devoted as Adolf Hitler speaks at length. She treats the human form like architecture. Those overhead shots of the Nazis arrayed like a Mondrian painting.
Her follow-up, a film that has an enduring impact easier to justify, her portrait of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, 'Olympia,' introduced tropes and techniques that have stuck with sports broadcasting to this day.
Riefenstahl's reputation endured in part because she doggedly claimed she was just a fellow traveler of the Nazis, not a true believer. That she had never even read 'Mein Kampf.' That she was simply carried along by history like millions of fellow Germans.
But Veiel makes a compelling case in 'Riefenstahl' that the director was, in fact, a fanatical Nazi, and until the end of her long life in 2003. She died at the age of 101. He finds proof that she had read 'Mein Kampf' and that she still courted the interest and regard of other unrepentant Nazis after the war. He even suggests that Riefenstahl may have been aware of the Nazis' atrocities, something she always insisted she was completely unaware of: He details how she accompanied the Wehrmacht in their invasion of Poland and possibly witnessed a massacre.
The documentary also makes some compelling connections to the present moment. Riefenstahl was obsessed with surfaces, with beauty alone. Isn't her work similar to the Instagram ethos of pictographic attractiveness presented as an end unto itself without regard for context or deeper meaning? Perhaps a surface-level view of Riefenstahl's work is the only way to appreciate it. Unless a focus on surfaces alone is exactly what Fascism demands?
Watch the trailer for 'Riefenstahl,' an IndieWire exclusive, below.
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