A new documentary, Riefenstahl, by Andres Veiel, about the controversial German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, once again raises questions about an artist’s conscience. Can a filmmaker make beautiful and powerful propaganda films about an evil Fascist regime and claim she did not know about atrocities being committed against citizens of her country — not just Jews but anyone who stood up to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis?
Riefenstahl lived to the age of 101 (she died in 2003), and left behind an extensive archive, undoubtedly edited and sanitised, of photographs, films, letters, newspaper clippings and audio recordings — 700 boxes that Veiel sifted through to make his film about the woman, who has been the subject of countless films, books (including her own memoir), research studies, print and TV interviews, but remains enigmatic.
Many filmmakers, writers and artists colluded with the Nazi regime — some because they believed in the despicable cause, some out of fear; but so many decades later, the fascination with Riefenstahl lingers. It could be because she was a woman (though she described herself as “100% woman, 100% man”), at a time when women were not offered positions of power, and also because she was an extraordinarily gifted filmmaker. The stunning images in just two of her many films — Triumph Of The Will and Olympia — would guarantee any filmmaker a place in movie history. Other propaganda filmmakers of the time, like Fritz Hippler — who made the dreadfully racist The Eternal Jew — have been forgotten.
She started off as a dancer and movie star — there are innumerable studio shots of her dripping Hollywood glamour in Veiel’s film — and in the then popular ‘mountain films’ by directors like Arnold Fanck’s, she was photographed climbing a steep rock face, and conveying that Teutonic ideal of beauty, athleticism and courage that she also replicated in her own films later. She went on to direct and star in her own mountain movie in 1932, The Blue Light, which reportedly became Hitler’s favourite. The films of this genre symbolically depicted the struggles of Germans to climb out of the devastation of WWI. They were looking for a hero to lead them out and Hitler grabbed that role.
Riefenstahl wrote to Hitler requesting a meeting, and impressed him enough to get commissioned to make films on the annual Nazi Party rallies in Nuremberg 1933 and 1934, Victory of Faith and Triumph of the Will. The latter was exceptional documentary filmmaking and did help to burnish Hitler’s image. It is said that images of the glory of the German army affected the morale of the countries Hitler later invaded, so much so that the Danes laid down arms. As Susan Sontag wrote in the famous essay, ‘Fascinating Fascism’, that opened up the scab Riefensthal was hoping to cover with her statements of innocence, “In Triumph of the Will, the document (the image) is no longer simply the record of reality; ‘reality’ has been constructed to serve the image.”
At the time, it must have been hellishly difficult for her to get the opportunity to make films;she must have had to confront and fight off powerful men close to Hitler, who must have resented her entry into his inner circle and then her rise to fame. According to her, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, wooed her and tried to sexually assault her. But then, she also had a close friendship with Albert Speer, the Nazi architect, who was jailed for his crimes, and she married a Nazi, Peter Jacob.
About Riefenstahl there have always been conflicting points of view. Film historian Anthony Slide wrote, “Leni Riefenstahl is an extraordinary filmmaker. Without question, the greatest woman director of all time (although virtually ignored in feminist film circles), she is also one of the great pictoralists of the cinema.”
When she made Olympia, which was unquestionably a great work of art celebrating the human body (one of her subjects collapsed from exhaustion after repeating a discus throw several times), she also used techniques like placing cameras on fast-moving dollies to follow the athletes on the track, or using underwater cameras in the swimming and diving competitions — these are still used in sports films, though cameras today are much lighter and sleeker than they were in her time.
Veiel’s film devotes some time to that dark chapter in Reifensthal’s career; while filming Lowlands, she used gypsy children from an internment camp. Those children ended up in Auschwitz, where they were killed. But Riefenstahl claimed that she met up with them again, so she was clearly lying. She was, according to Veiel’s documentary, not just aware of Nazi atrocities — she was complicit in them. While setting up a camera shot for a film, she asked that a group of Jews who’d been forced to dig a ditch be moved. They were callously killed. She said she did not know, which could only mean she was either unbelievably naive, or just as evil as the regime her films glorified. She also said in interviews that she was like the millions of people who could not foresee what was going to happen (the Holocaust). She said in an interview, “I cannot regret that I lived in that time. No anti-Semitic word has ever crossed my lips. I was never anti-Semitic. I did not join the party. So where then is my guilt? You tell me. I have thrown no atomic bombs. I have never betrayed anyone. What am I guilty of?”
She got out of the post WWII years with her reputation as a filmmaker intact, though her career ended. After being detained by Allied forces for four years, she was cleared on collusion charges. Years later, she, and her 40-year-younger companion Horst Kettner spent years in Sudan photographing Nobu tribesmen, in keeping with her obsession with the beauty of the human body. It was criticised for its “fascist aesthetics” but American writer and photographer Eudora Welty wrote, in The New York Times, “She uses the light purposefully: the full, blinding brightness to make us see the all‐absorbing blackness of the skin; the ray of light slanting down from the single hole, high in the wall, that is the doorway of the circular house, which tells us how secret and safe it has been made; the first dawn light streaking the face of a calf in the sleeping camp where the young men go to live, which suggests their world apart.”
Her collections of underwater photographs, Coral Gardens and Wonders Under Water, were published in the United States. On her 100th birthday, she released , after nearly half a century, Impressions Under Water, a documentary on marine life.
All through her life, Leni Riefensthal was admired and damned in equal measure. Today, we live in a world of influencers, of half-truths, sugar-coated lies and easily disseminated toxic propaganda. If Veiel’s Riefenstahl is important, it is to show how public opinion can be swayed by the power of the image or the word. And the greater the artiste, greater the risk that history will never forget or forgive. After spending years trying to whitewash her past, her obituary in The New York Times was headlined: ‘Leni Riefenstahl, Filmmaker and Nazi Propagandist, Dies at 101’.
Deepa Gahlot is a Mumbai-based columnist, critic and author
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