Leni Riefenstahl is one of the most famous female directors of the 20th century and also its most controversial. Her films Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, 1935) and Olympia (1936) have been shown in festivals and cinematheques across the world, celebrated for their bold filmmaking and avant-garde aesthetics. In 2005, Time Magazine listed Olympia among the “100 greatest films of all time”. Meanwhile these “masterworks” were propaganda films commissioned by Adolf Hitler himself. To this day, they epitomise the Third Reich’s cult of the staged body and a eugenicist celebration of the fit and the superior. Riefenstahl herself was a muse of the Nazi regime, who would till her death blame her “political naiveness” on the zeitgeist and a boundless devotion to her art – and only to art.
For this documentary, famous German journalist and TV host Sandra Maischberger teamed up with veteran filmmaker Andres Veiel to unravel the truths hidden in some 700 boxes of unreleased documents from the Riefenstahl estate. Using private films, photos, letters and recorded telephone calls, but also fragments of TV shows – where the ageing lady indefatigably persisted to deny her endorsement of the Nazi ideology, they offer a new, critical perspective on a gifted fabulist. Beyond the unveiling of riveting never-published archives, the film fascinates for the dialectical way Veiel dispossesses the filmmaker of her power – that of creating truths through images – in order to appropriate it for himself. Scrupulously dismantling every distortion and lie, he offers a counter-biography to the narrative Riefenstahl spent over 50 years edifying for herself (she died in 2003, at 101 years). The result is the fascinating portrait of an ambitious manipulator brought up the hard way and abused by her father, and a semiology of fascist aesthetics and language that has chilling echoes for today.
