What a film about Nazi-era director Leni Riefenstahl tells us about the present

“For something to be remembered, other things must be forgotten.” The commentary in Riefenstahl pierces through the fog of adulation that shrouds its subject – one of cinema’s most celebrated and contested figures.

Andres Veiel’s documentary examines the divisive legacy of German director Leni Riefenstahl, whose Nazi-era productions are studied as much for their technical virtuosity as for their propaganda value. Yet, after the demise of the Nazi regime and its leader Adolf Hitler in 1945, Riefenstahl spent the rest of her life denying her role in burnishing the image of the genocidal party.

Andres Veiel turns up evidence that Riefenstahl was dissembling when she echoed the argument used by Nazi officers tried for their crimes after the end of World War II: “I was just following orders.” Like a detective re-investigating a cold case, Veiel digs through previously unseen material from Riefenstahl’s estate and rummages through archival interviews to bust the myths about Riefenstahl’s Nazi leanings once and for all.

Riefenstahl is being screened at the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival (October 18-23). Apart from a takedown of a complicated artist, the documentary is a cautionary about how mendacious and insidious propaganda can be.

Leni Riefenstahl died in 2003, at the age of 101. Among film scholars, concerns over her Nazi connections have been balanced with admiration for her brilliant command over the medium of cinema.

Her Triumph of the Will (1935), a documentary about the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg in 1934, is a textbook example of how cinema can be visually sumptuous as well as dangerously seductive. (In his book From Caligari to Hitler, German writer Siegfried Kracauer called the film “the triumph of a nihilistic will”.)

The ground-breaking techniques used in the documentary Olympia (1938), about the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, have been endlessly imitated. Riefenstahl made these films with Hitler’s full support and financial backing.

In her later years, Riefenstahl turned to photography, producing acclaimed books on the Nuba people of Sudan, as well as making films about her diving expeditions.

Veiel’s documentary opens with blurred images of Riefenstahl in her early career as an actor and director of fiction features. The rest of Veiel’s film systematically seeks to bring Riefenstahl’s complicity in sharp focus.

The evidence for Riefenstahl’s fascistic beliefs, despite her later denials, is present not only in her films, which glorify the Nazi ideal of the human body, Hitler’s charisma, and the party’s popularity among the Germans. By maintaining an impeccable personal archive of personal diaries, unpublished photos and recordings of phone calls, Riefenstahl implicates herself ever so often.

As part of her image clean-up, Riefenstahl commissioned German filmmaker Ray Muller to make a documentary on her life. The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993) tries to be an impartial account of a misunderstood genius. However, Veiel includes unused behind-the-scene footage of Riefenstahl throwing a fit when Muller asks her about her personal ties with Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

Veiel’s documentary includes several clips from Riefenstahl’s television appearances. I was naive, she says in one interview. In another interview, she disingenuously declares that art is the antithesis of politics and they don’t affect each other.

Rigorously researched and dextrously edited, Riefenstahl is fascinating throughout its 115-minute duration. The documentary is essential viewing for anybody who wants to understand the motivations of propaganda filmmakers.

However, the intense focus on Riefenstahl leaves gaps in the larger understanding about the history of pro-government cinema before and during Nazi rule. It would have helped to know whether Riefenstahl was following in a tradition of Nazi-worshipping directors who had already been using the techniques that she perfected.

An effort to squarely debunk Riefenstahl’s claim that she had no idea about the concentration camps is only halfway successful. Were Jewish people shot dead just for a film that Riefenstahl was making? The claim is sensational, but the evidence isn’t entirely convincing.

However, the damage has already been done. In a particularly revealing segment in a German chat show in 1976, Riefenstahl is seated next to a resistance activist, who accuses her of making “Pied Piper films” – works designed to lure the Germans away from scepticism about the Nazi project.

Riefenstahl looks angry and uncomfortable at being confronted in this manner. She sounds defensive when she says that she was merely commissioned to make the films, and that she could not have refused Hitler’s orders.

There is evidence elsewhere in the documentary that long after the war, Riefenstahl kept in touch with at least one of the Nazi luminaries, the architect Albert Speer, whom she consulted when writing her memoir.

From an archival footage-led post mortem, Veiel’s film enters the present when it reveals how, after the heated television appearance in 1976, Riefenstahl received a host of supportive letters. The missives not only praised her courage at standing up to hostility but also betrayed a yearning for the return of Nazi-style order.

In this moment, Riefenstahl becomes a living-breathing study fit for the current age roiled by the rewriting of history by hyper-nationalist regimes and the use of cinema to push majoritarian ideas.

“Memory is the only paradise from which we cannot be banished,” Riefenstahl wrote during the filming of an early fiction feature. Veiel’s documentary suggests that by believing her own puffery about her achievements, Riefenstahl provided the shovel with which to dig her artistic grave.