Leni Riefenstahl’s contribution to the evolution of film form cannot be overstated. It follows us like an apparition: look no further than Spielberg’s The Fabelmans for a tip of the hat to her technological innovations. But just as her influence is wide-ranging, so too is it inextricably bound with her fascist proclivities — it is this very inclination toward the totalitarian that made her such a great filmmaker. Rich fodder for a documentary, one might say. Director Andres Veiel apparently thought otherwise, and, granted unprecedented access to her archives, took instead a strawman approach to her life and work.
Riefenstahl is not the first documentary about the eponymous Nazi sympathizer, and it deserves credit for bringing energy to the material. Veiel takes the clever archival collage approach popularized by Brett Morgen in his kaleidoscopic documentaries about Kurt Cobain and David Bowie, juxtaposing interviews of Riefenstahl with footage she shot from across her ghoulishly long life. It’s such a shame then that Veiel can’t capitalize on his structure and organize the material into something coherent or interesting. At the beginning of the movie, for example, Veiel superimposes still images of Riefenstahl over one another in sequence until she’s an old woman; there’s no real meaning attached to the procession. At another point, we get a digression into a recorded conversation between Riefenstahl and some of her old friends. Again, no indication it’s there for a particular reason — it simply pops up and then disappears. Riefenstahl is insufficient as history, and it rarely develops a thesis outside of asserting, vociferously, that Leni Riefenstahl was a Nazi and Nazis are bad, wagging its finger with the moral sophistication of a Social Studies student writing an overdue essay.
Make no mistake, Leni Riefenstahl was a villain, but that’s self-evident. All one needs to do is look her up on Wikipedia, and within 40 words, it’s made clear that she was a propaganda artist. Better yet, we can take a look at the films themselves: Triumph of the Will and Olympia are thorny, fascinating works, eternally ripe for analysis. With a little critical thinking of our own, we can watch her movies and see for ourselves the damage a great filmmaker can do when utilizing her talents for evil. Riefenstahl is infuriating because it refuses to properly hold the contradictions that make a movie about Riefenstahl worth watching in the first place: without explicating Riefenstahl’s development and breakthroughs as a filmmaker, it’s nothing more than another simple-minded movie about another awful Nazi.
When Riefenstahl does get the chance to discuss her technique (in unreleased footage culled from another, much better documentary about her, The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl), it’s cut in such a way to make her seem like a craven carnival barker playing with her little toys, and it flattens any possibility of a serious discussion about her ambiguous legacy. Veiel frequently zooms into footage from the interviews, enlarging her, problematizing her, making her look like a boogeyman. We’re left with nothing more than an interminable two-hour axe-grinding and a “gotcha” directed at a woman who’s been dead for over 20 years.
Only once, and then just barely, does Veiel settle his mishmash of images and audio recordings into a novel argument: while working as a war correspondent in Poland, Riefenstahl asked soldiers to clear a space so she could shoot some film, a scene which led to the deaths of 22 nearby Jews. It’s the first time the movie advances new information and leverages it against her; it’s also the only time Veiel complicates the notion of complicity. What’s the difference between a filmmaker whose decisions immediately led to the murder of nearly two dozen people and one whose efforts to glorify her nation indirectly contributed to the mass extermination of six million? Is there one? Aside from a brief moment suspended on a photograph of Riefenstahl sobbing as she looks on at what we can only assume are brutal executions, Veiel doesn’t give us the breathing room to ponder it.
Leni Riefenstahl was the ultimate hypocrite. She had a serpentine capacity for deflection, faux naïveté, and Janus-faced manipulation. But if you know Riefenstahl at all, you know this already. If you don’t, Riefenstahl won’t give you a reason to care. It is, ultimately, less a documentary and more a litigation of something that already saw the light of day decades ago. Handshakes with Hitler, adventures with Goebbels (her words), phone calls to Albert Speer — collating it all in one place is what Riefenstahl deserves, but we cannot as yet beam movies down into hell. It’s useless to those of us still on the mortal coil.
DIRECTOR: Andres Veiel; DISTRIBUTOR: Kino Lorber; IN THEATERS: September 5; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 55 min.
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