The German director and photographer Leni Riefenstahl died in 2003, at the age of 101, leaving behind a notoriety among the filmmakers and questions that are still debated today. Was she a committed disciple of Hitler, or a visionary but naive artist whose commitment to beauty and formal perfection came to crystallize the Nazi aesthetics – especially in her documentary on the Congress of the Nazi Party of 1934 Triumph of the will? Was she indeed a great director and – as David Thomson, the British critic, suggested – “undoubtedly the most talented woman of all time to make a film”?
These questions are discussed again in DIFENSTAHLA new documentary by the German director Andres Veiel, who said that his mission by revisiting the subject was “to show that it is not only a life story, but a warning for the future”.
The new dimension that Veiel's film brings to its subject is access to the mass of equipment – images, photographs, writing, recordings – which was part of the succession of Leni Riefenstahl. Riefenstahl Producer Sandra Maischberger had, as a television journalist, interviewed the filmmaker for her 100th anniversary and left frustrated. “I started unanswered to my questions. I finally learned that her husband was dead (in 2016), and there was this house full of everything, which was to be packed in 700 boxes. I thought: maybe there are answers. “
One thing that emerges from the documentary is that the term “triumph of the will” could well be applied to Riefenstahl itself, its career an implacable self-invention process. Born in Berlin in 1902, she made her name as a dancer, before deciding that she wanted to appear in the flourishing then Mountain film Kind of mountain dramas. Without an actor experience, she told the director Arnold Fanck to give him the main role in The holy mountain (1926). It was in the same spirit that, later, she would directly approach a Hitler admiring each time she needed her support.
Riefenstahl learned the climbing in the mountains of zero and has become a popular star in the epics of Fanck, turned in abruptly difficult conditions. She picked up most of the cinema and was carried out in Blue light (1932), a mystical mountain epic that impressed Hitler. This led her to be ordered to make documentaries on three gatherings of Nazi party, the most notorious and the grandest Triumph of the will (1935). Given its entirety, the film is very repetitive, but its most imposing and frightening moments summarize the excess of the third spectacle of the Reich, and are undeniably impressive in their formal invention. A clip in DIFENSTAHL shows the director in 1993, relaxing the shots of TriumphClearly delighted with his own director of director.
Olympia (1938), towards the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, enjoyed an extravagant budget that allowed Riefenstahl to employ an army of cameramans and develop innovative techniques. It contains legendary dynamic sequences, both in factual content – flout the Nazi racial doctrine, Riefenstahl stressed the achievements of the great black American athlete Jesse Owens – and in her more whimsical moments. Among them are the intensely erotic evocation of ancient Greece, and the delicious montages of the springboard divers apparently transcend the laws of gravity.
Veiel's film re -examines disturbing incidents in Riefenstahl's career. During her brief passage as a war journalist in Poland in 1939, she would have witnessed the execution of 22 Jews – which she may have indirectly caused by the request for their distance, which led to their shooting. She also used Roma and Siti extras, including children, while making her fiction film Plain – Prisoners of the internment camps, most of which would be killed in Auschwitz (Riefenstahl later insisted that they were all alive).
After the war, she described herself as a victim, apparently injured especially since it had ended her career. She would never direct again, although she is officially absolved by the German courts of “political cleaning” post-war period to be Nazis (she was never in fact a member of the National Socialist Party).
She also insisted on her innocence several times; DIFENSTAHL The watch to answer difficult questions with an indigenous petulance. She claimed to know nothing about the Nazi concentration camps to the war, and even suggested that Triumph of the willBecause all his Fulminants of Hitler, Rudolf Hess and others concerned only “work and peace”.
In a 1976 German television program, we see Riefenstahl withstand the suggestion she could have refused to work for the Nazis. “At the time, the whole world was fascinated by Hitler,” she protests. She was certainly; In an interview, she declares that when she saw her for the first time speak during a Berlin gathering, “my whole body was shaking … I was somehow captured, as by a magnetic force”.
But the predominant magnetic force in the life of Riefenstahl seems to have been her own personality: she emerges as a surprisingly narcissistic, concerned about her career and her reputation. Upset that OlympiaThe release was postponed due to the annexation of Austria by Germany, she spoke to Hitler and managed to show it on her birthday.
Despite all that, DIFENSTAHL Reminds us that in the 1970s, she reappeared as not only an acceptable but fashionable – partly figure following her photograph documenting prolonged stays among Sudan's Nuba tribes. His new credibility, wrote Susan Sontag in his 1975 article “Fascinating Fascism”, was part of the vogue of this decade to see Nazi aesthetics as essentially pop art. In 1974, Riefenstahl was commanded by the Sunday Times to photograph Mick and Bianca Jagger and was invited alongside Gloria Swanson and Francis Ford Coppola to the Tenluride Film Festival; The following year, Andy Warhol spoke to him for his interview magazine.
Affirmations have been made for the formidably autonomous Riefenstahl as a feminist pioneer. “Here is a woman who has made her career, she was created herself,” explains Maischberger. “It was something that I would like to have admired as a woman. But looking at her deeply, there was nothing left to admire. Her lack of empathy does not really make her a model.”
She underlines the fixation of Riefenstahl with her own image. The director had turned a lot, notably by her husband, the director of Horst Kettner photography; We see her in her last years at home and skiant, as well as to cut a disturbing silhouette among the Nuba. “I would call her one of the first Instagram girls,” observes Maischberger. “She was still turning, focusing on the only person in the middle of the whole universe.”
Riefenstahl's images have left a lasting heritage – both in real demonstrations of sports prowess and political power, and in their screen representations, especially in science fiction. “While we editions,” said butchberger, “people called us and asked us:” Did you see Dune: second part? It looks like Triumph of the willThe way the masses of soldiers are organized. “”
For criticisms like Santag, Riefenstahl's concern with regard to beauty and physical strength was consistent with a traceable fascist ideology to his photos of Nuba wrestlers, and as far as his mountain films, which for Sontag already concern “The Vertigo Before Power”.
All this can be theoretical, but DIFENSTAHL Offers more concrete indications of the beliefs of his subject. After being asked about this 1976 television program, many German viewers contacted Riefenstahl to express their support and indignation in the face of his “ill -treatment”. His most revealing exchange with a fan of elderly people is left for the very end of the film; It seems that for all his refusals, Riefenstahl spoke of the Nazi speech, at least in private. But, above all, she created the photos; Even today, these images and their meanings remain intensely, weakening.
'Riefenstahl' is in British cinemas of May 9
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