BERLIN – What is perhaps most striking about Leni Riefenstahl is that by now, more people may have seen films about her than have sat through her actual films. There have been no fewer than six documentaries to date, quite aside from the countless cameos in other documentaries and films about the Third Reich. She has been valorized and vilified in equal measure throughout her life. Andres Veiel’s Riefenstahl, which screened in Germany last year and is appearing in select U.S. cinemas this fall, clearly sets out to be the final word on Hitler’s personal filmmaker. In combining footage from an infamous film career as the girl genius of Nazi propaganda and her post-war media confrontations with it, Veiel has a distinct advantage over those who came before him: Leni Riefenstahl is dead.

Riefenstahl held a unique place on an exalted stage until her death in 2003, photographing Mick and Bianca Jagger for The Sunday Times as well as Siegfried and Roy in Las Vegas. She was hailed as a seminal aesthetic and technical influence by such luminaries as Andy Warhol, Quentin Tarantino and Madonna.

As the Nazis rose to power in the early 1930s, Riefenstahl was young, directing and starring in Alpine adventure films before she found her muse in Adolf Hitler. They worked closely on fashioning his image and that of the Nazi movement in a series of propaganda films about the mass party rallies and torchlight marches such as Triumph of the Will and a monumental spectacle Olympia, about the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Both films won top prizes at the Venice Film Festival in the 1930s. In 2024, Andres Veiel premiered his documentary about her there.

Leni Riefenstahl, although briefly kept under house arrest by French occupation forces and tried four times by denazification courts, was never formally convicted of complicity in the crimes of the Nazis. She was designated, like so many of her compatriots, as a “Mitläufer” or “a fellow traveler” rather than an integral figure of the regime. Budd Schulberg, the erstwhile screenwriter and Sports Illustrated journalist, serving as an OSS officer, was sent to arrest her in 1945, and found her to be morally defiant and willfully ignorant of the horrors of the Holocaust in equal measure, a stance she maintained her whole life.

Riefenstahl deftly undertakes the type of media autopsy usually reserved for the most fiendish of true crime cover-ups. What Veiel does best is grapple with her reputation in a morass of chaotic yet meticulously vetted materials she left behind: Hours of taped answering machine messages, boxes of correspondence with admirers and a trove of still images from film shoots and her life in Munich after the war; a rich and revealing archive away from the threat of libel suits, of which she said she won over 50 in her lifetime.

Veiel picks out a still image from the archive with which he intends to make the most damning case against her: a photograph of Riefenstahl, looking visibly shocked at events unfolding behind the camera. Veiel investigates the events surrounding the now-infamous photograph, ostensibly capturing the moment she witnessed Polish Jews being shot by German soldiers at Końskie, Poland in September 1939. Written accounts presented by Veiel show this to be a lethal, albeit unintended, response to her request to remove them from the shot she was framing for a film about the German invasion. However, for all the careful construction of this “smoking gun” in his film, it does not quite deliver.

Leni Riefenstahl during a CBC interview in 1965.

CBC

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CBC

As further proof that she was more directly complicit in the atrocities of the Nazi regime, Veiel also cites well-documented sources about the Sinti and Romani extras in Riefenstahl’s last feature film, Tiefland, who were later murdered at Auschwitz. Tiefland was shot during the war and finished and released in West Germany in 1954, sparking lengthy and damaging lawsuits about claims made about the production. In a recording, Reifenstahl darkly disputes accusations made in an earlier documentary film and subsequent libel case, and betrays herself in one fell swoop exclaiming that, “I’m not saying Gypsies need to lie, but really, who’s more likely to lie under oath: me or the Gypsies?”

But these are not things that will come as a surprise to viewers of the film already familiar with Riefenstahl. It is simply a given that she knew, indeed that Germans always knew, what was being done off-camera. Despite Veiel’s best efforts, any criminal evidence against Leni Riefenstahl remains tantalizingly circumstantial, even if the circumstances themselves were indisputably criminal.

Quixotically ranging her innocence and her indolence at a debased post-war West German cultural elite with its insistence on “politics” over “art,” Riefenstahl shrinks on screen to an obdurate core, protesting the purity of her genius to the end. The artist Leni Riefenstahl, so she would have it, is innocent of all charges because she was ignorant of all the political ugliness and saw only beauty. This beauty, that ideal of the racialized body exemplified in the Triumph of the Will, the massed ranks, the shining youthful faces pounding drums and the perfect bodies shot at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, was an aesthetic of fascism she alone conjured into being with her unique prowess as a director.

Correspondingly, Riefenstahl’s obsession with “beauty” in her post-war documentary photographic books about the Nuba people of Sudan is disturbingly skin-deep. Veiel charts her attempts to lift this Nazi spell and claim to be a mere servant of high aesthetic ideals, which ultimately exposes her fascism as hard-wired. As Susan Sontag concluded, in Riefenstahl’s depiction of the fetishized African body, she “seems only to have modified the ideas of her Nazi films.” Ultimately her images of perfect bodies speaks to an aesthetic tailored to ideology more than individuals.

What is quietly shocking is Riefenstahl’s image of herself. Candid footage of her petulance and mawkish self-pity reveal a woman who you feel simply does not want to admit that Nazism was that bad after all, yet balks at the mere mention of the word, taking offense at the very thing she secretly resents being cast as offensive. Her plaintive denials on screen are robbed of any credibility by an inescapable sense of overwhelming resentment.

As her charmed existence ends after the war, she seems to retreat into a reverie of performative naivety in the face of all the evidence against her. The world of Leni Riefenstahl after 1945 is fatally split. What emerges from her lifelong attempts at maintaining personal and public cohesion makes for grimly fascinating viewing, reflected in her public defamations in the media and the chilling private messages of support from her sympathizers.

Archives from Leni Riefenstahl’s estate.

Vincent Productions

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Vincent Productions

Where Veiel’s film locks itself into a loop of attempting to show just how much of a Nazi Leni Riefenstahl was, it falls short. However what is revealed beyond that is much more disturbing. What we glimpse in Riefenstahl is a snapshot of a German narrative about its past. Leni Riefenstahl, the defiant figure, ambushed by questions about her Nazism on a talk show, is perhaps the most revealing footage in the film. There is a vulgarity to the staged event which serves a more insidious story. One cannot help but feel that casting Leni Riefenstahl in a spectacle on live TV was about giving the viewing public respite from a terrible burden of national shame by finding someone to take the blame for it.

Scarred by this event, Riefenstahl refuses to go onstage for an interview on French TV, fearing another ambush. The show goes ahead without her, a close up of the microphone occupying her empty chair, is perhaps her most damning epitaph.