There was a outstanding documentary about Leni Riefenstahl earlier than. The Great, Horrible Lifetime of Leni Riefenstahl (1993) was commissioned by Riefenstahl herself and he or she participated in it absolutely.
In ridiculously fine condition on the age of 90, she revisited the important thing places of her life – the mountains, the place she starred in her early romantic dramas; Nuremberg, the place the Nazi rallies have been held and he or she made Triumph of the Will (1935); the stadium in Berlin the place she made Olympia (1938) – and gave extended, combative interviews. Many times, she insisted that artwork had nothing to do with politics: “I simply noticed and tried to movie it effectively,” she mentioned. So far as she was involved, she claimed, Hitler’s speeches would possibly simply as effectively have been about bushes or fish as politics.
The documentary’s director, Ray Müller, who took on the duty after many had shied away from it, adopted a leisurely strategy, indulgently masking her entire profession, from her first look as a dancer within the early Twenties, to her photographic work within the Sixties and Seventies among the many Nuba folks of Sudan. This excellent, horrible life finally clocked in at just a little greater than three hours lengthy: Müller, whereas fulfilling his task, had taken care to present Riefenstahl sufficient rope to hold herself. You can’t mistake what she was actually like. The documentary deservedly received an Emmy.
Riefenstahl died in 2003, however her accomplice and collaborator, Horst Kettner, whom she had been with since she was 60 and he 20, lived till 2016. Her archive, together with some 700 bins of tapes, movie footage, images and paperwork, was then bequeathed to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Basis in Berlin. The German TV presenter Sandra Maischberger, who had carried out the final main interview with Riefenstahl in 2002 and are available away realising she had been deceived, made a deal to have the archive sorted and catalogued in change for the rights to make use of it for this new documentary. As producer, she recruited Andres Veiel, greatest recognized for his 2017 movie about Joseph Beuys, as director. The intention, clearly, was to convict Riefenstahl of energetic collaboration with Nazi crimes ultimately.
Riefenstahl, the consequence, consists solely of archival materials. The strategy sounds stultifying, however it is a riveting watch, a masterclass in easy methods to animate such materials by means of ingenious remedy. Montage and cross-cutting are at all times efficient in documentaries, however Riefenstahl goes a lot additional. The outdated media – slides, cassette tapes, crumpled prints of images and movie inventory – are reworked. The stills are by no means nonetheless, the digital camera shifting throughout them, panning in or out. The footage of Riefenstahl, on display screen or in tv interview, is altered by close-ups, sluggish movement, silencing: alienation results that make us observe her, not simply pay attention. The image high quality all through is astonishing. There’s a terrific minimalist rating by Freya Arde, pulsing and rattling, which has the impact of retaining us within the current, distancing us from what we’re seeing.
The topic just isn’t a lot Riefenstahl’s profession itself however her unrepentant administration of her repute till the tip of her life. “For one thing to be remembered, different issues have to be forgotten,” we’re ominously advised on the outset, as if full disclosure is on the way in which. But it needs to be mentioned that this archive, likely beforehand edited by Riefenstahl, the management freak’s management freak, yields little compelling new proof for such a posthumous conviction. There’s a suggestion that, throughout her very temporary time as a struggle correspondent in Poland, she ordered some Jews to be faraway from the scene, and that this set path was taken actually they usually have been shot. Nevertheless it stays rumour.
She was post-truth earlier than the idea had been invented. She at all times insisted that she, like many different Germans, knew nothing in any respect of Hitler’s crimes till the very finish of the struggle, however, implausible as that could be, nothing right here conclusively proves in any other case. The movie ends with a tape of a telephone name from a supporter telling her, codedly, that in a single or two generations, Germany will return to “morality, decency and advantage”. “Sure, the German persons are pre-destined for that,” she agrees.
The film-makers clearly intend this movie as a warning from historical past, within the context of the rise of the AfD. It types a vital coda to the 1993 movie. Probably the most telling critique of Riefenstahl’s profession, nonetheless, stays Susan Sontag’s 1974 takedown of her work for the New York Evaluation. For it’s Riefenstahl’s movies themselves that greatest embody and most reveal her brutal religion within the victory of the sturdy and exquisite.
“Riefenstahl” is in cinemas now
[See also: David Attenborough at 99: “Life will almost certainly find a way”]