A new documentary delves into controversial German film-maker Leni Riefenstahl’s private archive to uncover a director who spent a lifetime covering up her central role in the Nazi propaganda machine

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.

The Guardian is really going with light fare today.

    • Pete Hahnloser@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
      1·
      4 days ago

      Far be it for me to be an NSDAP apologist. However, the techniques she introduced to the world would go on to be both iconic and standard. Look, for example, at the camera-angle choices in Citizen Kane. That’s pure Riefenstahl. And not considered a terrible movie.

      We can hate a person while appreciating their artistic output. This has been the case since Ugg made wheel.

      This said, I don’t think she was a good person. But I’d honestly challenge you to find an effective artist who is also a good person. There are some actors, of course; I’m talking reporters and the production team.

      We are effective because we’ve seen some shit. And when you’ve seen some shit, sometimes you don’t make the ethical choice. I’d not go so far as to vlog for the Fourth Reich, but she likely saw it as patriotic.

      How many of your neighbours would do the same?

      • Five@slrpnk.net
        4·
        3 days ago

        From Folding Ideas’ “Triumph of the Will and the Cinematic Language of Propaganda”:

        ‘Triumph of the Will’ is not a triumph of film-making. I just want to lay that out before we even start. Chances are good that you’re familiar with ‘Triumph of the Will’ by reputation but have never actually watched it beyond referential clips, and a sizable portion of that reputation is in its value as an advancement of the art of filmmaking. This is propaganda.

        Like, that belief is in and of itself propaganda.

        Nazi sympathizers spent a lot of time between the film’s release in 1935 and the war promoting the idea of ‘Triumph of the Will’ as an advancement of filmmaking. It was an intentional message to promote Nazi state art as superior, to suggest that the Nazi mechanism can produce better more proficient art than the artist the Nazis were busy throwing in jail.

        It is however not a triumph of filmmaking; it is a triumph of budget. None of the ideas or techniques were new it is simply that no one had previously thrown enough money and resources at propaganda on this scale before. We’ll come back to this and develop it in more detail, but I want to be upfront with the fact that you should be highly suspicious of any messaging surrounding propaganda.

        • Pete Hahnloser@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
          2·
          3 days ago

          I would counter that if it wasn’t groundbreaking, regardless of why, how is this something we still talk about?