Source : the age
Debate about how German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl should be regarded has raged even after her death more than two decades ago at the age of 101. Now a new film has reignited it.
Was the director of the masterful Triumph of the Will, which chronicled the Nazi Party’s 1934 rally in Nuremberg, and Olympia, which documented the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, a dedicated Hitler propagandist?
Adolf Hitler with filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl at a Nazi rally in Nuremberg in 1934.Credit: Pictures From History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Or was she, as she claimed for decades after World War II, just an artist hired by the Nazis to make films and knew nothing about the killing of Jews in concentration camps as it occurred? After going through 700 boxes of material from her estate to make the new documentary Riefenstahl, German filmmaker Andres Veiel has no doubt.
“She was a Nazi, totally,” he said after arriving from Berlin for the German Film Festival.
“When you watch Triumph of the Will, only someone who was deeply convinced of the ideology – celebrating the strongness, celebrating the superiority, celebrating the victorious – could have made [that] film.”
The 700 boxes – donated to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in 2018 after her partner’s death – included private films, a diary, photos, recordings of phone conversations and interviews, early drafts of her memoirs, and letters.
Veiel, who received death threats from the German far right when the film was released there, found a 1934 British newspaper report that quoted Riefenstahl saying she became “an enthusiastic National Socialist” after reading just the first page of Hitler’s Mein Kampf two years earlier.
The documentary contends she privately held those extreme views even in her last years, despite publicly protesting her innocence.
Director Leni Riefenstahl and cinematographer Sepp Allgeier shoot Triumph of the Will in Nuremberg during the 1934 Nazi Party Congress.Credit: Photo by Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)
“She was just stuck in the storytelling – ‘I was just an artist’, ‘I was never interested in politics’, ‘I never had much to do with all these Nazi politicians’,” Veiel said.
The documentary also argues Riefenstahl was an eyewitness to Nazis murdering Jews in Poland in 1939 and Romany children who had worked as extras on her film Lowlands in 1941.
While it might seem esoteric to debate the reputation of a long-dead filmmaker, Veiel said the visually striking aesthetics that Riefenstahl pioneered were being revived to support powerful leaders globally. He first noticed it watching a Moscow military parade in 2022.
German film director Andres Veiel, who is in Sydney for the German Film Festival.Credit: Wolter Peeters
“I thought, it’s Triumph of the Will,” he said. “It’s the low-angle shot on Putin, it’s the marching soldiers and you have the strength and the celebration of the courageous soldier fighting the so-called Nazis in Ukraine.”
Veiel said he was troubled that concepts embodied in Olympia – the celebration of the beautiful, strong and victorious while disregarding anyone who falls short – were being spread by the resurgent far right.
“When you think of Hitler, he was not the tough, bright guy,” he said. “So he projected heroism into the so-called German race.”
The German Film Festival starts in Sydney on May 1 and Melbourne on May 2. Andres Veiel will be speaking at Q&A sessions of Riefenstahl.
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