‘Riefenstahl’

Luis Buñuel​ worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York between 1939 and 1941. His job was to select documentary films to be sent to Latin America, but he also, more notoriously, edited Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) with a view to turning its effect on its head. Heroic grandeur would become petty parading. The odds of success must have seemed good. Buñuel was a great practitioner of Sergei Eisenstein’s doctrine that montage makes meaning, and his version had nine uninterrupted minutes of German soldiers marching in goose-step. But certain other cineastes begged to differ. Charlie Chaplin thought the German film was ridiculous enough already. And René Clair thought it was dangerous to screen the film in any form: its grandiose scenes would retain their power, he felt, whatever order they appeared in.

Could all three of them be right? Probably not, but the question maps out the relevant ground pretty well. And it is, in a way, the question posed by Andres Veiel’s new film Riefenstahl, which is based on material from Riefenstahl’s archive and begins by treating this legacy as a sort of visual prompt. We see unfurled reels of film running up and down the screen, finally lining up side by side to resemble a vertical carpet or a piece of wallpaper. There are pictures of cassettes, books, spreads of photos, scatterings of manuscripts. At one point a glamorous photo of the young Riefenstahl morphs into one of her when she is slightly older, followed by another in which she is older still, until we find we have seen a whole life in a set of faces. Riefenstahl died in 2003, at the age of 101. Horst Kettner, her partner of many years, died in 2016, and the shots we have been looking at are part of their joint estate, which was sold and made public after Kettner’s death.

The second part of Veiel’s film is a well-made but very straight biography. It doesn’t play the game we have just seen, involving our ‘now’ with the movie’s sequence of ‘thens’. Instead it traces Riefenstahl’s early career as a dancer and film star (particularly in Arnold Fanck’s ‘mountain films’); her transition to directing (Triumph of the Will as well as two films about the Berlin Olympics); her marriage to Peter Jacob; and finally the end of the war, which brought a temporary end to everything that had once given her life meaning. She had become friendly with Hitler and scheduled the premiere of one of her films to coincide with his birthday, and she had been keen on the values of National Socialism even before she met him. Mein Kampf did the trick, and she talks in the film of being ‘caught up in some kind of magnetism’. In the press notes for the film, Veiel mentions an interview with the Daily Express from 1934, mysteriously missing from Riefenstahl’s large collection of cuttings, where she says the first pages of that book converted her to the cause. In the 1960s, she began visiting Sudan, which became a sort of second home and the subject of some of her most amazing photography. She got interested in underwater swimming and made a film called Impressions under Water (2002), which was released just before she turned a hundred.

The biography also fails to touch on what Veiel, in an interview, identifies as his own main interest. ‘I wanted to understand the figure of Riefenstahl in her development,’ he says, ‘without exculpating her in the process. Wanting to understand a person is not the same as looking at them sympathetically.’ The second sentence is a little ambiguous or slightly off-kilter. We can try to understand someone, and even sympathise with them in some respects, without approving of what they are doing. This possibility is what the first part of the film, along with its displays of the legacy and visual citations of interviews that Riefenstahl gave later in life, is seeking to explore.

Riefenstahl’s account of herself, constructed after the war, is full of denial, as Veiel points out, but it also has a certain plausibility. In an interview from 1980, she says she knows nothing about politics and lives only for art. She is or was, she claims, not exactly naive but unexperienced (unerfahren). Real things (reale Dinge) are not her field. There is a wonderful instance of the possible truth of this unlikely claim in a film Ray Müller made about her in 1993. Riefenstahl sits at a table watching a sequence from Triumph of the Will. Lines of soldiers move first to the right, then to the left, and the camera follows their movements with an obsessive fidelity. The point is not what is on the screen but the expression on Riefenstahl’s face as she rewatches her film after so long. She is as delighted as a child who has just discovered you can catch a ball as well as throw it. This doesn’t mean she doesn’t know about politics, but it does surely mean that art has an urgent, exclusive attraction for her that it may not have for the rest of us, who like it but don’t live it.

Another interesting moment in the film is less forgiving in this respect, but powerful all the same, carrying a message that may not be as simple as it seems. On a television talk show in 1976, Riefenstahl had an argument with Elfriede Kretschmer, a woman around her age, whose position regarding the National Socialists was exactly the opposite of hers. Kretschmer couldn’t bear the inhumanity of their policies. Riefenstahl says 90 per cent of Germans supported those policies at the time, why should she be expected to join the tiny minority? This is a poor excuse for supporting the bad guys, but an excellent reminder of the historical situation.

At one point in the film, an interviewer asks Veiel if he can ‘approach a figure like Riefenstahl, the staunch propagandist of a regime of terror, with an ambivalent openness’. ‘I … had moments where I had to force myself not to simply turn away from her,’ he replies. ‘I overcame this state of reluctance, otherwise there would have been no reason to make the film. There is a life before guilt.’ He goes on to say:

But something crucial was missing: the development … In the biographical narrative, there is no reformation, if you will: no redemption of the main protagonist. Riefenstahl refuses the classic turning point in her life-story. She remains with her legends until the end of her life, she regrets nothing, doesn’t call anything into question. This meant that at a dramatic level, I was missing a third act.

The third act he devises – more unanswerable questions – is intriguing but doesn’t solve the problem. I wonder what the three directors mentioned at the beginning might think. Chaplin would probably say Veiel didn’t need a third act in the first place. Clair might say that if there isn’t one there just isn’t. But Buñuel would perhaps suggest something else. That person, the one who doesn’t regret, doesn’t question, doesn’t earn the cleaning up of life, is stuck with a myth she cannot believe in. She has nothing else, and we can feel sorry for her plight and admire her long endurance, even if we are nowhere near understanding her adoration of victory and supremacy and the absence of all complication.