02/09/2024 - VENICE 2024: The German director discusses Leni Riefenstahl’s efforts to rewrite her own history while digging herself an even deeper grave

(© Giorgio Zucchiatti/La Biennale di Venezia/Foto ASAC)

Leni Riefenstahl’s career is as impressive as it is problematic, owing to her closeness to the Third Reich and her fascist visual aesthetics. It’s a notion she would like to make people forget. In his documentary Riefenstahl [+see also:
film review
interview: Andres Veiel
film profile], screening out of competition at Venice, German director Andres Veiel traces and discloses her efforts to rewrite her own history, and our memories of it, while digging herself an even deeper grave.

Cineuropa: Leni Riefenstahl's legacy was made public eight years ago. As is always the case with an estate like this, you want to create a certain image of yourself. What was your approach to dissecting this huge amount of material?
Andres Veiel: Since it was an analogue estate that underwent digitisation, starting in 2018, I was continuously presented with bits and pieces. There were 50,000 photos as well as unaired film and audio. At one point, I knew I had to make this film. On the one hand, I wanted to get closer to this difficult, extremely ambivalent character, but at the same time, I also wanted to examine the present – to show that it is not just a finished life story, but a warning for the future.

One narrative strand is how these Mitläufer, these sympathisers, were shipped from one talk show to the next. People were expecting ideological fireworks as a result of these constant confrontations.
It was always clear to me that the aesthetic and artistic achievement could not be separated from the ideological one. In the USA, Riefenstahl has been celebrated by Quentin Tarantino or Francis Ford Coppola as the greatest female artist of the 20th century. What jumped out at me from the get-go was this permanent, strict denial of the connection between aesthetics and politics. The estate gives us many opportunities to restore this connection. But it was also important for me not just to drag her into court and say, “Look, this is the perpetrator.” It was about making it clear that there are forms of making an impression. We take a closer look at them.

In some scenes, your narrator intervenes, saying it wasn't like that and clarifying things. In other sequences, only she speaks, and the viewer is expected to draw his or her own conclusions.
That's always the question: how obvious is it? Some contradictions we point out immediately, like when she says that the message in Triumph of the Will is peace, peace, peace, and there was nothing racist about it. We then cut to a speech that appeals to the “purity of the race”. At other moments, it is obvious that she was perhaps much more deeply involved than she admits. How great must the guilt be for her to lie like that?

It's a current debate that you can't separate the artist from the artwork. How would you categorise Leni Riefenstahl historically?
The clues can be found in her estate. I didn’t feel challenged enough, because she obviously made mistakes or didn't remove certain elements that weighed heavily on her. I asked myself, why is she under-challenging me in the under-complexity of her argument, and over-challenging me at the same time? Is the estate itself a trap? Was she simply “too stupid” to see how much it would incriminate her? Or is this just the presumption of people who put out fake news, who propagate these lies with such conviction that they have long since become their truth? For me, the film is a negative prophecy that if we are not vigilant and don't intervene, this world will head down a dark path again.