Riefenstahl Photo: © Bayerische Staatsbibliothek/Bildarchiv; Inset photo below: © CBC Riefenstahl, Apple TV, Sky Store and other platforms
Andres Veiel's portrait of Leni Riefenstahl, whose career will forever be linked to Adolf Hitler's Nazis, is a fascinating psychological dig into her mindset, featuring a wealth of interviews. A lesson in the nature of "selective memory", Riefenstahl's obsession with keeping up appearances, both physical and in terms of spinning her work, is absorbing and repulsive in equal measure. The film covers her start in the business through the Third Reich period and on into her late career work, which suggests her unpleasant beliefs didn't dim with age. While some questions remain unanswered, not least around her relationship with the much younger Horst Kettner, this is an engrossing watch. Veiel told us: "We had a lot of insight, and, of course, I knew from the beginning she was a manipulator."
The Piano,...
Andres Veiel's portrait of Leni Riefenstahl, whose career will forever be linked to Adolf Hitler's Nazis, is a fascinating psychological dig into her mindset, featuring a wealth of interviews. A lesson in the nature of "selective memory", Riefenstahl's obsession with keeping up appearances, both physical and in terms of spinning her work, is absorbing and repulsive in equal measure. The film covers her start in the business through the Third Reich period and on into her late career work, which suggests her unpleasant beliefs didn't dim with age. While some questions remain unanswered, not least around her relationship with the much younger Horst Kettner, this is an engrossing watch. Veiel told us: "We had a lot of insight, and, of course, I knew from the beginning she was a manipulator."
The Piano,...
- 6/16/2025
- by Amber Wilkinson
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
No matter how much we might want to purge the ideology reflected by and reinforced in Leni Riefenstahl’s films from our cultural lives, her aesthetic influence is impossible to escape.
Every Olympics, NBC’s innovations evolve from common visual goals: allowing the camera to track races more fluidly, slowing down the action to showcase bodies in motion, discovering angles that redefine our way of seeing events.
Everything stems from the grammar established by Riefenstahl in 1938’s Olympia, just as so much of what we view as the aesthetics of political power finds a template in her 1935 Triumph of the Will. But in acknowledging these connections, we’re constantly forced to wrestle with the same questions concerning what Riefenstahl knew or didn’t know about the regime and the messages she was putting on film, and the degree to which her art can be separated from the service she put it to.
Every Olympics, NBC’s innovations evolve from common visual goals: allowing the camera to track races more fluidly, slowing down the action to showcase bodies in motion, discovering angles that redefine our way of seeing events.
Everything stems from the grammar established by Riefenstahl in 1938’s Olympia, just as so much of what we view as the aesthetics of political power finds a template in her 1935 Triumph of the Will. But in acknowledging these connections, we’re constantly forced to wrestle with the same questions concerning what Riefenstahl knew or didn’t know about the regime and the messages she was putting on film, and the degree to which her art can be separated from the service she put it to.
- 8/29/2024
- by Daniel Fienberg
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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