Review of Riefenstahl (2024)
Seen in 2026.
The career of filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, emphasizing her work on Triumph of the Will (1935), the two-part Olympia (1938), and her popularity among surviving Nazis in the post-war period. A 1949 tribunal classified Riefenstahl herself as a Nazi sympathizer, for which the only sanction was to make her ineligible for public office.
This documentary is produced with an appropriate sense of gravity, but without the disarming simplicity of Shoah (1985). It makes minimal use of an authoritative “voice of god” tying the evidence together, which becomes a problem when it tries to point out how Riefenstahl lies.
For example, the film includes the accusation that in 1939 Końskie, Poland, Riefenstahl accepted the aid of Jewish forced labourers for a film about the invasion. Directing, she carelessly asked for the labourers to be removed from the shot she was composing: “Aber die Juden müssen da weg”. Supposedly, this led to the public execution of fleeing labourers in her presence. She asked to resign and then denied all knowledge of such events. This story is told with still images of a copy of Revue magazine, another old photograpph, and excerpts of type-written text from “a letter, dated 1952, written by an adjutant to Riefenstahl’s now-divorced husband, Peter Jacob”. The images from Revue seem to show both the labourers and the face of Riefenstahl in obvious distress, surrounded by German soldiers.
In the film, the Końskie episode is followed by one of several excerpts from a 1976 interview on the talk show Je später der Abend, where Riefenstahl admits fault in seeing “only the positive sides” of the Third Reich, claims to have been shocked by post-war revelations, and receives a round of applause for saying so. The Końskie episode is meant to undercut her applause line, but despite the slow pace of the film, the episode is not substantiated. The audience never learns who took the pictures of her face in distress, or when, or where, or why. The documentary refers to the shooting as a massacre, but does not actually lay out the chain of evidence for her knowledge of it.
The vagueness of that episode plays right into the hands of denialists like Riefenstahl. That is ironic, because part of the accusation against Riefenstahl is that her fatal stage direction in Końskie was too vague. Later, the voice of god does refute Riefenstahl’s lies more directly, as it should, in an episode on the long-running Tiefland project that would ultimately see release in 1954. Supposedly, Riefenstahl claimed that all the Sinti and Roma whom she worked with on Tiefland in 1940 had survived the war, when in fact these extras had been procured from an internment camp and were murdered in Auschwitz before the war ended. This is more solid, but even here, the details are vague. There is no reference to when or where she claimed to have met the extras after the war.
The vibes of this portrait are those of a bumbling Nazi collaborator: Dishonest, selfish, and querolous. She seems to have bought into Hitler’s facile notion of physical fitness as a sign of value, instead of buying into any notion of a more general human value or dignity, but what she truly believed, the film does not show.