‘Riefenstahl’ Team On How German Filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl Used Guile, Charm, Lawsuits To Scrub Her Past Of Nazi Stain – For The Love Of Docs

“Hitler’s favorite filmmaker.”

That’s not how Leni Riefenstahl wanted to be remembered. No, she preferred a more self-serving myth – that she was “only an artist,” perhaps a bit naïve, who took on filmic “assignments” from the Third Reich not out of support for Nazi ideology but because, well, they told her to. Riefenstahl clung to this script so diligently in the decades after World War II that she convinced many to adopt a narrative that cast her too, as a victim of the regime.

The Oscar-contending documentary Riefenstahl, directed by Andres Veiel and produced by Sandra Maischberger, demolishes that carefully crafted narrative by digging into archives around the world – and most importantly, Riefenstahl’s own papers, manuscripts, recordings and much more.

“We had three archive researchers, 700 boxes, so it was really quite huge,” Veiel explained as he and Maischberger participated in a discussion after a screening of Riefenstahl as part of Deadline’s For the Love of Docs event series. “Something like 200,000 photos, a lot of diaries, personal notes, drafts of memoirs, private films.”

“We managed to be the first ones to open the boxes,” Maischberger added. “So, for the first time, it would be possible to connect all the pieces that were already in public about Leni Riefenstahl with her own archive and maybe get the whole picture.”

The film takes an almost forensic approach to showing how Riefenstahl used a conveniently selective memory to emphasize her absorption into image making over “true believer” attachment to Nazism. For instance, at one point she excitedly narrates a scene from Triumph of the Will, her astonishing propaganda film that documented the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg and idolized Hitler as a heroic leader. Riefenstahl waxes ecstatic about camera shots while pretending as if her film had nothing to do with promoting Nazi thinking. In an archive interview, she makes the incredible claim that Triumph of the Will contains nothing pertaining to racial purity laws then in ascendance in Germany that would prove a key step on the road to genocide.

“She’s just lying. She says it had nothing to do with racial laws, there’s no racism in Triumph of the Will,” Veiel said with some astonishment. “And of course, we [show] this little scene [from Triumph of the Will] when… the publisher of the antisemitic magazine in the ‘30s in the Third Reich [says], ‘People who don’t hold dear [their] racial purity will perish.’ And so we show she is lying.”

Maischberger, the producer, is one of Germany’s best known television journalists. In fact, she was one of the last to interview Riefenstahl before the filmmaker’s passing in 2003 at the age of 101.

“Riefenstahl was around a hundred years old. She had just finished editing her last film,” Maischberger recalled. “She invited me over [to her home] to do the interview. I was curious because she is who she is, and I had this question — a talented, gifted person like her, a woman who made her way, in a feminist way, she was very emancipated. How could she get that wrong? Why did she follow Hitler? Why did she work for him? And so I came out of the interview without any answers at all.”

Like many other journalists, Maischberger was stonewalled by the director when it came to questions she didn’t want to answer. Others fell hook, line and sinker for whatever Leni dispensed (like her exaggerations of supposed long-term incarceration by the Allies after they defeated Nazi Germany).

“She even turned around her really worst critics too in the end, like she put a spell on them,” Maischberger said. “I don’t know how she did that. And the other side on it is, of course, if anybody would come too close to the truth, she would sue them. [While] she still was alive, she had a lot of things going to court, suing people.”

“She intimidated people by her aggression,” Veiel noted. “She could also cry and telling the victim’s story. ‘I’m the victim, nobody else, only me.’ And she could be very charming. So, she used different means and methods of a good actress, and she knew how to achieve her goals, and that’s why she was really successful.”

Veiel says his objective wasn’t simply to investigate Riefenstahl’s true sympathies – how she was repulsed by weakness and glorified the able-bodied in her work; the way she maintained close contact with Nazi officials and sympathizers after the war, including Third Reich architect and munitions chief Albert Speer – but how her works remains with us today, a moment in which authoritarians find that they too might consider Riefenstahl their favorite filmmaker.

“During the editing process [of Riefenstahl] we watched a parade in Moscow. And the visual style, it was so close to Triumph of the Will, like the low-angle shot on Putin, encircling him, the wide-angle shot on the masses, the elevator shot, like in Triumph of the Will,” Veiel observed. “For Sandra and me, it was something like a discovery, a renaissance of her aesthetics. And of course, regarding the ideology, believing in… a strong hand organizing everything, the question of supremacy, ‘we are better than because of our nation, because of our origin,’ and scapegoating others. And so at many layers and levels, we found out many elements are so close, are so current, are topicalities… The renaissance of the [Riefenstahl] aesthetics and the ideologies on many, many, many countries, not only Germany as we know, it showed us why it’s the right film for today.”

Listen to the full interview above.

For the Love of Docs continues next Tuesday with a screening of Third Act, directed by Tadashi Nakamura. To RSVP for that, click here.