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Irish Examiner
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Leni Riefenstahl: New film tackles the complicated history of the Nazi filmmaker
Leni Riefenstahl, director of the notorious Nazi propaganda films, Triumph of the Will and Olympia, and one of the most controversial women of the twentieth century, died in 2003. She was 101. In the mid 1960s, Horst Kettner became her assistant, and later her lover. He was 40 years younger than Riefenstahl. They remained a couple until her death. When Kettner died in 2016, their household in Bavaria was dissolved. Two years later, the filmmaker Andres Veiel got access to Riefenstahl's estate, over 700 boxes of previously unseen materials, including letters, diaries, private films, outtakes and drafts of her memoirs. It was the start of a magnificent obsession. Veiel pored over the haul with a team of archivists, gaining insight into a complex woman who weaved an elaborate web after the Second World War about her true role in the Nazi regime. Veiel, whose films and documentaries have won over 50 awards, also had a personal connection to Riefenstahl's war story. 'My grandfather was a general in the Russian war,' says Veiel. 'There is a question of legends and lies in my own family. I know how easily you can get seduced. How to question [a troubling past] is something I have to deal with myself. To look at Riefenstahl is a good lesson to deal with the question of fake news, of how [myths] are fabricated, what are the longings and necessities for them. 'The moral question is not the only issue for me because we know she lied. I found the more interesting question was to examine what was behind the lies. What were her motives? How did she shift her storytelling in different periods of time? She re-stages in a way her life story. That's why her estate is so useful.' A scene from Triumph of the Will, made by Leni Riefenstahl at the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg. Veiel's film paints a fascinating psychological profile of Riefenstahl. Her parents divorced. Her father was a brute, who wished she'd been born a boy. He beat her violently. She was left in a closet for hours on end as punishment. Early in her adulthood, she was raped by a tennis star. (In an interview, she claimed Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, twice tried to rape her; elsewhere she maintained they had a romantic relationship, but later rolled back on that assertion.) 'Riefenstahl was very ambitious,' says Veiel. 'She's like a prototype of fascism. In 1906-1907, while only a little girl, she was thrown into the water by her father and close to drowning. It was a pivotal moment. Her conclusion was not, 'I have a terrible, cruel father.' The conclusion was: 'I must become a good swimmer.' This is a very Prussian style of education. Prussia was encircled by bigger, stronger enemies like Austria, France and Russia. Prussian thinking was, 'We are a small country, but we have to fight, to defend. We have to be stronger than all these countries'.' Riefenstahl was first a dancer, but after suffering a knee injury she shifted her energies into acting and later directing films. Hitler commissioned her to shoot Triumph of the Will, a Nazi Party convention propaganda film, in 1934. It was well received, scooping awards in Venice and a gold medal during the 1938 World Exhibition in Paris. Olympia, her film about the Berlin Olympics in 1936, premièred in April 1938, a gift for Hitler on the day of his birthday. 'Riefenstahl was a brilliant editor,' says Veiel. 'When you think about the famous high-diving sequence in Olympia, they're like avatars. They're not really human beings. They seem to defy gravity. Somehow, they levitate and then they fall, encircling, making these loops. "She was also a good director – good at choosing the right director of photography, good at taking risks on inexperienced cameramen but knowing they were innovative. She was a very poor writer. Her screenplays were full of clichés. Leni Riefenstahl taking pictures in Munich during the 1972 Olympic games. (Picture: AFP/AFP via Getty Images) 'But something I try to get across in the film – you can't separate aesthetics from politics. In Olympia, for example, she celebrates beauty and strength, which in her films always meant contempt for others, for the weak and so-called sick people. "So, when people like Quentin Tarantino and George Lucas celebrate Leni Riefenstahl as the greatest filmmaker ever, I say, 'Sorry, that's naïve. How dare you separate ideology from aesthetics.' ' Perhaps the most interesting section of Veiel's film is the way it tackles Riefenstahl's shape-shifting, how she held onto her self-image as a non-political artist throughout her lifetime, publicly pretending she wasn't a Nazi sympathiser, covering up half-truths and lies. Privately, she had no sense of remorse or regret about her actions. In her private papers, she mourned her 'murdered ideas'. She remained convinced of Nazism's ideals until her death. The documentary concludes with dramatic evidence of her eye-witness knowledge of the Holocaust, although she was fêted in the most unlikely circles while alive. The Sunday Times newspaper commissioned her to do photography work, including a gig photographing Mick and Bianca Jagger. In 1976, she was invited as a guest of honour to the Montreal Olympics. Michael Jackson sent her a congratulatory note at the time of her hundredth birthday. 'My film is like a warning against a possible future,' says Veiel. 'That's why it's necessary to watch it. We all have the power to change things. It's not inevitable that things in the world will get worse and worse. It's up to us. "We have to defend democracy. We need strength to deal with the challenges it faces. We need to understand the reasons, the backgrounds to how fascism takes root. Leni Riefenstahl is a prototype, from which we must learn something.' Riefenstahl will be released in select Irish cinemas on Friday, May 9. See: Riefenstahl and Hitler Leni Riefenstahl first heard Adolf Hitler speak at a rally in Berlin in 1932. His words, his delivery left her in a state of arousal. Her body began to tremble. She got hot sweats. She felt like her whole being had been captured by a magnetic force. 'I'm not a psychoanalyst, although I studied psychology, but when you analyse Riefenstahl's reaction to first hearing Hitler speak at a rally, it's a physical reaction,' says Andres Veiel, director of Riefenstahl. 'She denies any responsibility – 'It just happened. I was overwhelmed. My body reacted to Hitler. It was not my brain. It was the body. What could I do? I could do nothing.' Leni Riefenstahl at work at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. (Photo by Keystone/) 'Hitler triggered something in her – the idea of an ideal state. The state doesn't command us. We command the state. It's the heroism of somebody who is like God and who gives relief. 'You just have to follow me.' It's a huge promise of salvation. It fits into her character perfectly. It's like some sort of symbiosis.' Afterwards, Riefenstahl wrote to Hitler, requesting a personal meeting. They met on the North Sea coast in May 1932. Hitler, who loved her film The Blue Light which had come out earlier that year, asked her to make films for his 'movement'. At this stage, he was a few months away from assuming power in Germany. It was the start of a propagandists' marriage made in hell.
ABC News
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Riefenstahl goes behind the scenes with the propaganda filmmaker for the Nazis
Democracy is Fast facts about Riefenstahl What: A mind-boggling insight into the rise of fascism through the false narratives of Hitler's filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl. Directed by: German writer/director Andres Veiel Starring: A whole host of truly terrible people, including Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Albert Speer and Leni Riefenstahl. When: Screening at the German Film Festival around the country this May Likely to make you feel: Like you're being gaslit, and that it's happening all over again This worrying creep towards fascism is front of mind when watching Riefenstahl, Andres Veiel's astonishing documentary drawn from the vast personal archives of infamous German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Screening this month in the German Film Festival, Riefenstahl traces how the director and star of The Blue Light caught the attention of an ascendant Adolf Hitler in 1932. Riefenstahl would go on to shoot two Nazi party propaganda films — 1933's Victory of the Faith and 1935's even more notorious Triumph of the Will — at their annual Nuremberg rally. She would later claim, filmed while watching back Will, enraptured, that its only message is "peace". A further commission to cover the Nazi-run 1936 Berlin Olympics resulted in 1938's two-part Olympia. Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will) was released in 1935 and shown at one of the notorious Nuremberg rallies. ( Photo by Universal) Describing herself as having been "captured as if by a magnetic force" by the Führer, she was also close with other Nazi leaders, including Joseph Goebbels and Albert Speer. Riefenstahl nevertheless maintained her supposed ignorance of their crimes throughout her 101-year lifetime. "When you listen to her interviews, it's like a sermon," Veiel says. "She'll say, 'I was just an artist. I wasn't interested in politics.'" Riefenstahl allows the filmmaker enough rope, posthumously, to condemn herself. "The interesting question for me was not that she's a liar, because this is obvious," Veiel says. "But when does she use what kind of lies?" Preaching to the unconverted Veiel, now 65, first saw Triumph of the Will when he was 18. "I was somehow disappointed, because it's boring," he laughs. "There are some mesmerising shots, but two-thirds of it is stupid marching people like robots. Even Goebbels thought it was too long." Veiel was intrigued to discover why it once held so much power. Supported by producer Sandra Maischberger — a famous German journalist who interviewed Riefenstahl but felt she had failed to crack her — Veiel and his team of researchers and editors were allowed unprecedented access to Riefenstahl's archive. "I was somehow disappointed, because it's boring," Riefenstahl director Andres Veiel says of Triumph of the Will. ( Supplied ) Donated to the state, with no surviving relatives, it amounts to 700 often unorganised boxes. "I had doubts if I wanted to deal with this woman for two or three years, but I felt it was important to understand the current form of fascism," Veiel says. Diligent work began to uncover Riefenstahl's shifting narrative. "She used to say she was an eyewitness [to atrocities in Poland]. Then she had the denazification trial [after the war] and says, 'I was far away. I just heard some shots.' She insists she never heard about the Holocaust until after the war." But then there is the shocking revelation contained in a Nazi functionary's letter, reporting on an incident from the set of her film Lowlands. Released in 1954 but shot in the early 40s during World War II, the dramatic feature has Riefenstahl as both director and starring as a dancer — her original career. It's revealed she hand-picked Sinti and Roma prisoners from Salzburg's Maxglan-Leopoldskron camp as extras. Most of those prisoners later perished in Auschwitz. Leni Riefenstahl on set in Berlin circa 1934-1935. ( Photo by: Universal) Bad influencer Understanding the nature of the beast is vital, Veiel suggests, in terrifying times, with the far-right literally on the march in Australia, Germany, the US and more. "The challenge for me was not just to stage a tribunal, but to understand why Riefenstahl became what she was: the prototype fascist that's very current," Veiel says. "You have scapegoating, the separation of 'us' and 'them' and how this separation led first to the humiliation of others," he says. "Then to exclude them, step by step, to dehumanise specific groups. And, in the very end, give permission to kill them." Ironically enough, Riefenstahl debuted at the Venice Film Festival, where her two propaganda films were also once feted. "What with [Italian Prime Minister Giorgia] Riefenstahl described herself as having been "captured as if by a magnetic force" by Hitler. ( Supplied ) Veiel says it's important to be vigilant of the media's role in massaging the messaging of would-be demagogues, in "supporting a longing for these so-called values in a very simplistic way, this celebration of strongness [sic] and the contempt of weakness". Long before social media, Riefenstahl understood how to harness her image. "She's a role model for fabrication or fake news," Veiel says. It's telling how, in archival interviews, Riefenstahl appears to freeze, then crumple when faced with the truth. She's also prone to flying into a fury. But how much of her narrative — massaged at length for her best-selling memoir, with advice from Speer, no less — did she believe? "You can see how, in the beginning, she's rehearsing the line," Veiel says. "Later, the lie becomes a new truth. First, she tries to sell it with charm, using all her tools as an actress, then she gets aggressive." No justice Revelation after revelation, Riefenstahl pulls back the curtain, ending with a devastating line from a taped personal conversation, leaving little room for doubt. But perhaps the most galling aspect of what is, from start to finish, a searing documentary is just how often Riefenstahl attempts to frame herself as the victim. Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003), seen here in 1999, denied she knew of the Holocaust until her dying breath. ( Photo by: John Martyn/ullstein bild via Getty Images ) Long claiming she spent four years in a prison camp after the war, the truth is much stranger. "American troops arrested her, and she was kept in a hotel for four weeks," Veiel says. "But within a week, she was allowed to go to the casino." The denazification trial cleared her, even going so far as to argue, incomprehensibly, that Triumph of the Will was not a propaganda film. "All the Nazi victims had to fight to get a very low compensation of 500 euros or something, while Leni and Speer were paid a lot to be interviewed," Veiel says. "And yet she considered herself as being pursued like a witch. It's really bitter." The runs throughout May. Loading YouTube content
Sydney Morning Herald
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Hitler's favourite filmmaker always denied she was a Nazi. Now we know the truth
'She was just stuck in the storytelling – 'I was just an artist', 'I was never interested in politics', 'I never had much to do with all these Nazi politicians',' Veiel said. The documentary also argues Riefenstahl was an eyewitness to Nazis murdering Jews in Poland in 1939 and Romany children who had worked as extras on her film Lowlands in 1941. While it might seem esoteric to debate the reputation of a long-dead filmmaker, Veiel said the visually striking aesthetics that Riefenstahl pioneered were being revived to support powerful leaders globally. He first noticed it watching a Moscow military parade in 2022. 'I thought, it's Triumph of the Will,' he said. 'It's the low-angle shot on Putin, it's the marching soldiers and you have the strength and the celebration of the courageous soldier fighting the so-called Nazis in Ukraine.' Veiel said he was troubled that concepts embodied in Olympia – the celebration of the beautiful, strong and victorious while disregarding anyone who falls short – were being spread by the resurgent far right. 'When you think of Hitler, he was not the tough, bright guy,' he said. 'So he projected heroism into the so-called German race.'
The Age
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Hitler's favourite filmmaker always denied she was a Nazi. Now we know the truth
'She was just stuck in the storytelling – 'I was just an artist', 'I was never interested in politics', 'I never had much to do with all these Nazi politicians',' Veiel said. The documentary also argues Riefenstahl was an eyewitness to Nazis murdering Jews in Poland in 1939 and Romany children who had worked as extras on her film Lowlands in 1941. While it might seem esoteric to debate the reputation of a long-dead filmmaker, Veiel said the visually striking aesthetics that Riefenstahl pioneered were being revived to support powerful leaders globally. He first noticed it watching a Moscow military parade in 2022. 'I thought, it's Triumph of the Will,' he said. 'It's the low-angle shot on Putin, it's the marching soldiers and you have the strength and the celebration of the courageous soldier fighting the so-called Nazis in Ukraine.' Veiel said he was troubled that concepts embodied in Olympia – the celebration of the beautiful, strong and victorious while disregarding anyone who falls short – were being spread by the resurgent far right. 'When you think of Hitler, he was not the tough, bright guy,' he said. 'So he projected heroism into the so-called German race.'
The Guardian
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
How did Hitler's film-maker hide her complicity from the world?
Leni Riefenstahl had several successes at the Venice film festival. In 1932, the festival's inaugural year, the German film-maker's mystical mountain drama The Blue Light made the official selection. In 1934, she picked up a gold medal for Triumph of the Will, her chronicle of the Nazi party congress in Nuremberg. In 1938, 10 weeks before Kristallnacht, she won best foreign film with Olympia, a two-part documentary of the summer Olympics in Berlin that was commissioned and financed by the Nazi government, overseen by the Reich ministry of propaganda and enlightenment, and released on Adolf Hitler's birthday. After the war, and until the day she died, aged 101, in 2003, Riefenstahl insisted that her films were only ever about award-winning art. Through the postwar decades, and over the course of four denazification proceedings, the film-maker presented herself as an apolitical aesthete. She had no interest in 'real-world issues'. She was motivated only by beauty, creative opportunity and the perfection of her craft. Although she never disavowed her personal fascination with Hitler, she vehemently denied complicity with the atrocities of the Nazi regime. Olympia and Triumph of the Will were in no way tendentious, she told Cahiers du Cinéma in 1965. They were 'history – pure history'. Last August, the film-maker made a return of sorts to Venice, but this time as the subject of Andres Veiel's Riefenstahl, a new documentary that reveals just how doctored history could be in her hands. Made with exclusive access to her private estate, the film explores how Riefenstahl's great talent for staging and image-making extended not only to a cinematic glorification of nazism, but also to a personal exculpation campaign so persuasive that Mick Jagger, Madonna and Quentin Tarantino all gladly endorsed Riefenstahl's art. Alongside his producer, the journalist Sandra Maischberger, Veiel was galvanised by the possibility that the material Riefenstahl left for posterity might disclose truths she had skilfully obscured in her lifetime. The first challenge was the sheer volume of her estate, which comprised more than 700 boxes, containing film reels, news clippings, letters, diaries, home videos, several drafts of Riefenstahl's memoirs, hundreds of hours of recorded phone conversations, and hundreds of thousands of photographs. Over six years, Veiel, Maischberger and a team of researchers combed through the material for anything that might contradict Riefenstahl's public story. For the first six months, there were no breakthroughs. The experience felt 'like a sermon', Veiel recalls. 'It was just interview after interview – always the same questions, always the same answers: 'I was just an artist, I was not interested in politics.' It was suffocating.' It appeared Riefenstahl, a consummate editor, had perfected her posthumous presentation. Then, slowly, fissures began to appear among the folders and files. There was a scribbled note in a calendar to 'Vote NPD', a reference to the postwar neo-Nazi party. Recordings of private telephone conversations conveyed shared nostalgia for the 'decency and virtue' of the Nazi years. There was a missing section of a 1934 interview Riefenstahl gave to the Daily Express which, when located in the newspaper's own archives, described the 'tremendous impression' made on her by Mein Kampf, the first page of which had made her 'a confirmed National Socialist'. There were also private letters that proffered previously unseen, and compromising, accounts of Riefenstahl's stint as a war correspondent in Poland and her witnessing of one of the earliest massacres of Jews, in Końskie in September 1939. While Riefenstahl first claimed she did not see the shooting, and later that she did but had been horrified, the estate letters hint at a more complicated story. Indeed, one letter, referring to an army report of the massacre, suggests that Riefenstahl's directorial instructions to remove the Jews from a market square where she was filming may even have been a catalyst for the shooting. Her request was relayed roughly by a member of the Nazi military as 'get rid of the Jews', the letter says. 'Prompted by this remark … some of the Polish Jews attempted to flee and the shots were fired.' 'In the beginning, I was the detective, looking for her guilt,' recalls Veiel of his discoveries. 'Later on I realised she does the job herself.' Making Riefenstahl, Veiel and Maischberger observed in parallel a renaissance of the film-maker's imagery and its attendant ideology. From Donald Trump's raised fist to the organised bodies of Moscow military parades, the mediascape was increasingly occupied by the choreography, motifs and perspectives that characterise Triumph of the Will. To those in the film community – and beyond – who defend Riefenstahl as a 'pure artist' or foreground the formal appreciation of her imagery, the documentary insists, as Maischberger puts it, that 'there is no innocence in the use of these aesthetics'. The film works with minimal commentary, but makes deft use of cuts to expose the inconsistencies in its subject's storytelling. Her claim, in a 1993 documentary, that Triumph of the Will has 'no other political goal or motive' beyond 'peace and work' and 'no mention of racial theory' is swiftly followed by her low-angle shots of the Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher thundering that 'a people that does not hold dear its racial purity will perish'. The more archival interviews with Riefenstahl the team reviewed, the more the film-maker also revealed her strategies of postwar rehabilitation. An actor before she was a director, she deployed all her 'tools as an artist', Veiel says, to deflect from her ideological affinity with nazism. Over the course of the documentary, we encounter the film-maker as beguiling and flirtatious – all secretive smiles and 'oh, do have another cup of coffee'. We see her furious and intimidating, abruptly shutting down interviews with a high-volume tirade. We see her insist on her own victimhood and on how 'terribly difficult' it is not to be believed. And in English-language interviews in particular, we see her play guileless ingenue. 'What does it mean, 'disappear'?' she asks one interviewer, when asked about her knowledge of deportations. Throughout Riefenstahl, Veiel makes frequent use of slow-motion and zoom to bring the viewer uneasily close to his subject's gaze, gestures and mouth. Early on in the film, he cuts between photos of her at different ages, her piercing eyes steadfast centre of the frame. The effect is one of powerful beauty ('as pretty as a swastika', as American columnist Walter Winchell memorably put it), and of even more potent image control. 'We show her ability to stage herself,' he says. 'Different means and methods, always knowing there is some sort of impact.' Did Veiel, a posthumous interviewer of sorts, feel manipulated by what Riefenstahl had left behind? 'There was this deep suspicion. I asked myself how do I go beyond the performance?' In particular, the director, who studied psychology, grappled with documentation of the film-maker's childhood. In memoir drafts found in the archive, Riefenstahl described a harsh upbringing, punctuated by 'terrible beating' and often being told it was a pity she was not born a boy. She recalled a formative episode as a five-year-old, when she was thrown into a lake and left to figure out how to swim. Since these anecdotes did not make it into the published version of her memoirs, Veiel is inclined to consider them uncomfortable truths – determinative traumas, even – that might contextualise Riefenstahl's relationship to nazism. 'It's this very brutal Prussian education,' Veiel says, a childhood imbued with ideas of 'toughness, strength, the contempt for weakness, the question of supremacy'. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion These leitmotifs would carry over to Riefenstahl's early acting career of the 1920s, in which she starred in several so-called mountain films, directed by Arnold Fanck. In these Alpine epics – The Holy Mountain and The White Hell of Pitz Palu are two of the best known – Riefenstahl was determined to do all her own stunts. Often the only woman on set, she scaled glaciers without safety ropes, ascended sheer rocks barefoot, was immersed in freezing water, and nearly suffocated under a staged avalanche. Veiel sees a through-line from these childhood experiences and early acting roles to Riefenstahl's work for the Third Reich. 'It was some sort of long-prepared affinity,' he says. 'It was not by chance that Hitler was asking her to make these films. She had this divided idea of mankind – celebrating the strong, condemning the so-called dirty, sick or frail. We considered her at a certain stage as a prototype of fascism.' In assessing the impact of education, history and policy on Riefenstahl's outlook, Veiel described a tightrope between understanding and exculpation: 'For me it was important that she is not just a nasty Nazi. She is a human being. That makes her even more dangerous, because she comes out of the middle of our society. I wanted to understand her, but not to exonerate her responsibility.' At times, Veiel seems to come close to a psychological study of his subject. 'This ideal of purity and beauty was, of course, to repress the violent part of her experience,' he says. He acknowledges, however, that this is conjecture, rather than conclusion, around the film-maker's formative years, and that the unpublished drafts of Riefenstahl's memoirs have no more claim to factuality than the different versions of her experience in Końskie, Poland. In this, the documentary is on more unstable ground, contending with the unreliability, as much as the revelations, of its source material. 'It is open. I'm not the one who can judge what is fabricated or not,' says Veiel. To counter the doubt, Veiel insisted on total fidelity to the archival material. 'If you make a film on someone who is manipulating their whole life, it was a total no-go for us to use AI,' he says. He also developed a visual style rooted in the materiality of the estate. Spliced between the archival footage and recordings are several shots of the archive's physical presence: the file dividers, the labelled cassettes, the glued-in pictures in albums. The means and matter of analogue record-taking lends Riefenstahl a solidity its slippery protagonist cannot. Ultimately, however, Riefenstahl impresses most in attesting to the seductiveness of evasion. Veiel hopes that the film will above all foster a deeper understanding of 'the structure and necessity of legends' and the breeding ground of untruths. Even when the gaps and inconsistencies in her storytelling seem flagrant, she still finds her advocates and supporters. 'It doesn't matter that she is obviously lying,' Veiel says. 'People want the lie. That's the crucial point.' Riefenstahl is in cinemas from 9 May.
