In ‘Riefenstahl,’ A German Director Takes Down Hitler’s Favorite Filmmaker, Who Still Appeals To Hollywood — Venice Film Festival
deadline.comCuriously, for a woman who directed a movie called Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl seemed to lose control over her own person when she first met Adolf Hitler. “I had hot sweats,” the German filmmaker said of seeing the future Führer speak at a rally in 1932. “I was somehow captured, as by a magnetic force.” Embedded in that description is a self-defense: She may as well have said, “I wasn’t to blame, I couldn’t help it, I was overwhelmed by Hitler’s presence, like millions of other Germans.” The new documentary Riefenstahl, premiering today at the Venice Film Festival, argues the German filmmaker carefully crafted a narrative absolving herself of responsibility for becoming Hitler’s favored cinematic propagandist. “In a way, it is a detective story, because she is lying,” director Andres Veiel tells Deadline. “She’s manipulating.” After Germany’s defeat in World War II, when it was no longer helpful to be identified with the Nazis, Riefenstahl consistently described herself as an apolitical artist who merely took, in her words, “assignments” from Hitler and his circle.
Like documenting the Nazi Party Congress of 1934 in Triumph of the Will or celebrating the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin – a spectacle meant to showcase Hitler as a world titan – in Olympia.
For his documentary, Veiel undertook a forensic examination of the filmmaker’s archives, which are maintained by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin.
He says Riefenstahl tried to scrub the archives of inconvenient materials that contradicted her public narrative, but nonetheless clues remained.
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