Maven's Nest
Reel Life: Flick Pix
(photo credit: Riefenstahl_Hitler_Bayerische Staatsbibliothek_Bildarchiv)
Probe of the enigma who was Hitler’s most defining propagandist warns of making a Faustian bargain
By Nora Lee Mandel
Riefenstahl
Written and Directed by Andres Veiel
Produced by Sandra Maischberger
115 mins. Not Rated.
Germany. In German with English subtitles
Released by Kino Lorber- opens September 5 in NYC, at Film at Lincoln Center and Quad Cinema; September 12 in LA, at Laemmle Theaters
With the internet now full of warning guides to authoritarianism comes the timely documentary Riefenstahl that probes the enigma who was Hitler’s most defining propagandist. She outlived him by almost 60 years and left an estate of 700 boxes that were donated to three Berlin museums in 2016 and are worth searching for answers.
Producer Sandra Maischberger got the first access, and director Andres Veiel fielded a team of archivists over years to digitize and sift the boxes that included: 1930s footage with cutouts from the editing on her iconic, ever-imitated Olympia (1938); private films of her late in life by her younger, second husband; 200,000 photographs from the 1920s on, particularly her later years documenting Sudan tribesmen for coffee table books; diaries, memoir drafts; telephone recordings; handwritten notes and letters; interview outtakes; and the defamation lawsuits filed by her 50 lawyers.
Her documentation of Adolph Hitler’s Nuremberg adoration rally in Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens) (1935) set the standard for all authoritarians’ parades since. But it led to the primary questions interminably aimed at her in writing, on TV talk shows, and previous documentaries (seen here in many repetitive clips): the depth of her involvement with Nazi leaders, what she knew about their atrocities, and her personal commitment to their ideology. The director presumed that like many artists and historically important figures concerned about their legacy, Leni Riefenstahl would have excised any evidence that contradicted her vehement claims of just being a filmmaker for hire, that she knew nothing at the time, and she was not a Nazi. But Veiel found intriguing clues to both her psychology and the facts of her life and work.
After uncovering her admissions of the cruelty of her father and youthful rape by an athlete she had admired, the first cinematic focus is on Riefenstahl as a beautiful actress in the 1920s, particularly her several “Alpine films” for Arnold Franck, where she danced and climbed mountains with World War I veterans. Veiel muses that she never stopped acting. Her genre films culminated with The Blue Light (Das blaue Licht) (1932) that she says “is the key to my life”, as she also took credit for co-directing and co-editing with Béla Balázs.
Hitler was a fan. She became a fan of his “magnetic” speeches. But she calls herself politically “inexperienced” and was just all about “art” when she was commissioned to film his rally. Evidently she was too busy with the camera and editing to hear the antisemitic highlights, as she denies any awareness. Instead, she points at how the camera moves, pans back and over “so two shots combine to create a circle and the resulting effect is very powerful” for “the best scene of the day.” “The Triumph” of the film, she claims, is its theme of peace.
The unmentioned virtually unlimited resources at her disposal could explain her effusive written comments to her patron Hitler. She justifies her filming of his rally: “All the ambassadors were there. Ninety percent of the people were enthralled with him. Churchill was. There were very few resistance fighters. Should I have joined those few?” Recalling she was blonde and blue-eyed, she’s seen hand to hand with Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, his Minister of Propaganda, who she says was always after her. (Marlene Dietrich, in contrast, fled those importunings.) These defensive responses on paid TV appearances over decades, where she insisted on controlling the lighting and camera movements, brought her many supportive letters and calls that she saved for her personal archive.
She brags about the 30 cameramen she used at the 1936 Olympics and insists she never altered a shot. Jesse Owens and teammates fascinated her because she had never seen Black athletes before, and she took a lot of footage of them: “I was electrified. They moved like big cats.” Criticism of her emphasis on perfect bodies seems petty and could be applied to any coverage that followed in the decades before Paralympics. The “behind the scenes” filming of “The Prologue” where a live nude athlete emerges from a classical statue is mordantly narrated about what happened to the cinematographer.
More serious is the evidence gleaned from her estate material that Riefenstahl early on must have been aware of specific incidents of executions of Jews and Roma adjacent to her filming projects. There’s a hint those may have contributed to her backing off from working as a war correspondent to return to sylvan stories. Late in life she seems to let down her dyed blonde curls with Albert Speer, former Minister of Armaments and War Production (i.e. slave labor employer), after his prison release and supporters who look forward to when Germany will return to “morality, decency, and virtue”, sounding like the rising AfD party today.
What comes through Riefenstahl most clearly is the warning of making a Faustian bargain if you live to be over a hundred.
9/4/2025
Nora Lee Mandel is a member of New York Film Critics Online. Her reviews are counted in the Rotten Tomatoes TomatoMeter:
Complete Index to Nora Lee Mandel's Movie Reviews
My reviews have appeared on: FF2 Media; Film-Forward; Lilith, FilmFestivalTraveler; and, Alliance of Women Film Journalists and for Jewish film festivals. Shorter versions of my older reviews are at IMDb's comments, where non-English-language films are listed by their native titles.
To the Mandel Maven's Nest Reel Life: Flick Pix
Copyright © 2025