A White Supremacist Gaze – Riefenstahl Reviewed

Andres Veiel’s Riefenstahl reveals the actor and director was only too pleased to pour her not inconsiderable talents into the Nazi cause…

There are moments during Riefenstahl in which you wonder about the level of complicity and guilt of actor and director Helene ‘Leni’ Riefenstahl, despite her undeniable proximity to Hitler. After all, this was a German filmmaker who, merely by birth and circumstance, was unavoidably positioned – like it or not – to be co-opted by the Nazis into producing propaganda.

Arguably, you might think, she was no more guilty than the factory worker who, pre-war, had made cars, but was now turning out everything from bullets to aeroplane parts. Just another cog in the wheel of the fascist war machine.

Her role directing Triumph of the Will, 1935’s highly choreographed and stage-managed coverage of the Nazi party congress in Nuremberg, and Olympia (1938), a vision of athletic beauty that sought to capture the ideals of Athens, about the 1936 Berlin Games, is not in doubt. But how much choice could she have had in the matter? Was she not simply another of the many who would later claim to have been following orders? Indeed, post-war, she would be exonerated of anything more than her proximity to the regime.

When director Andre Veiel seems to belabour Leni Riefenstahl’s telling of a childhood anecdote – in which she refused to accept that she was in the wrong for stealing chocolate as a child, and subsequently suffering a beating at the hands of her father – you watch almost with a sense of ‘well, so what’. If anything, we’re hearing of a case of abuse, where the child in question wilfully, foolishly, sticks to her guns out of a not entirely misplaced sense of indignation.

But little by little, thanks to Veiel’s liberal and judicious use of her archive, a picture begins to coalesce, one showing that Riefanstahl was no naïve bystander. The childhood story about her insistence of being in the right, even when caught red-handed, it becomes clear, is merely symptomatic of a broader pattern of behaviour, of a sense of entitlement that would follow her into adulthood.

We come to see that she was an enthusiastic enabler, and happy promoter of Hitler and the Third Reich, only too pleased to pour her not inconsiderable talents into the cause. This realisation unfolds slowly but gains inexorable momentum. We learn how, documenting the invasion of Poland, she baulks at the reality only to play a role in the senseless deaths of the defeated. Later, she would press Roma children taken from an internment camp (all of whom would later be murdered at Auschwitz) into service as extras in her film Lowlands. We hear of her relationships during and after the war with prominent Nazis and Nazi-sympathisers (among them, Albert Speer, an architect who served as Hitler’s Minister of Armaments and War Production).

It hits emphatically home as we watch Riefenstahl years later, in Sudan, working on a photography series with the indigenous Nuba people as subject matter. There, she’s shown frolicking with kids, handing out treats. Later, we’re shown a similar scene – and her true face. With another group crowding around her, her exasperation and, ultimately, her White Supremacist gaze, is exposed as she throws yet more sweets, not with joy but in an effort to extricate herself from the situation. Back on home soil, at what looks like the press opening of an exhibition of the photographs, she is pictured hobnobbing with the likes of Andy Warhol.

Throughout, a picture emerges of two things. One: that Riefenstahl lied repeatedly and compulsively about her complicity and philosophical position aligned to what she refers to in a phone call as ‘German predestination’, and Nazism. By the latter stages of her life, you suspect that she’d parroted her line about ignorance at the true extent of wartime atrocities – undermined time and again by Veiel’s film – so frequently that she no longer knew exactly where the truth lay. Two: that, as a result, she had become – was perhaps always – obsessed with controlling public perceptions of herself and her legacy (keeping an army of lawyers on the payroll, she was litigious in the extreme).

In the last segment of the film, as she is seen preparing to be interviewed yet again (despite insisting that she hates to do this kind of thing), you become aware that you’re sickened by her. To the end, she is still playing director, stage-managing her image, asking the camera man to avoid focusing on her wrinkles.

For someone so obsessed with avoiding the truth of the matter, this film exposes her, finally, as a vain, self-interested, unrepentant racist.

Mike Pinnington  

Riefenstahl is in cinemas now