7 May 2025

The complicity of Leni Riefenstahl

The late film-maker insisted she was only an observer of the Nazi regime. A new documentary suggests otherwise.

Leni Riefenstahl welcomes Adolf Hitler to her villa in Berlin, in 1937. Photo by Prod DB © Bayrische Staatsbibliothek – Vinc/Alamy

There has been a remarkable documentary about Leni Riefenstahl before. The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993) was commissioned by Riefenstahl herself and she participated in it fully.

In ridiculously good shape at the age of 90, she revisited the key locations of her life – the mountains, where she starred in her early romantic dramas; Nuremberg, where the Nazi rallies were held and she made Triumph of the Will (1935); the stadium in Berlin where she made Olympia (1938) – and gave prolonged, combative interviews. Again and again, she insisted that art had nothing to do with politics: “I just observed and tried to film it well,” she said. As far as she was concerned, she claimed, Hitler’s speeches might just as well have been about trees or fish as politics.

The documentary’s director, Ray Müller, who took on the task after many had shied away from it, adopted a leisurely approach, indulgently covering her whole career, from her first appearance as a dancer in the early Twenties, to her photographic work in the Sixties and Seventies among the Nuba people of Sudan. This wonderful, horrible life eventually clocked in at a little more than three hours long: Müller, while fulfilling his assignment, had taken care to give Riefenstahl enough rope to hang herself. You cannot mistake what she was really like. The documentary deservedly won an Emmy.

Riefenstahl died in 2003, but her partner and collaborator, Horst Kettner, whom she had been with since she was 60 and he 20, lived until 2016. Her archive, including some 700 boxes of tapes, film footage, photos and documents, was then bequeathed to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin. The German TV presenter Sandra Maischberger, who had conducted the last major interview with Riefenstahl in 2002 and come away realising she had been deceived, made a deal to have the archive sorted and catalogued in exchange for the rights to use it for this new documentary. As producer, she recruited Andres Veiel, best known for his 2017 film about Joseph Beuys, as director. The intention, clearly, was to convict Riefenstahl of active collaboration with Nazi crimes at last.

Riefenstahl, the result, consists entirely of archival material. The approach sounds stultifying, but this is a riveting watch, a masterclass in how to animate such material through inventive treatment. Montage and cross-cutting are always effective in documentaries, but Riefenstahl goes much further. The old media – slides, cassette tapes, crumpled prints of photos and film stock – are transformed. The stills are never still, the camera moving across them, panning in or out. The footage of Riefenstahl, on screen or in television interview, is altered by close-ups, slow motion, silencing: alienation effects that make us observe her, not just listen. The picture quality throughout is astonishing. There is a terrific minimalist score by Freya Arde, pulsing and rattling, which has the effect of keeping us in the present, distancing us from what we are seeing.

The subject is not so much Riefenstahl’s career itself but her unrepentant management of her reputation until the end of her life. “For something to be remembered, other things must be forgotten,” we are ominously told at the outset, as if full disclosure is on the way. Yet it has to be said that this archive, doubtless previously edited by Riefenstahl, the control freak’s control freak, yields little compelling new evidence for such a posthumous conviction. There’s a suggestion that, during her very brief time as a war correspondent in Poland, she ordered some Jews to be removed from the scene, and that this set direction was taken literally and they were shot. But it remains hearsay.

She was post-truth before the concept had been invented. She always insisted that she, like many other Germans, knew nothing at all of Hitler’s crimes until the very end of the war, but, implausible as that may be, nothing here conclusively proves otherwise. The film ends with a tape of a phone call from a supporter telling her, codedly, that in one or two generations, Germany will return to “morality, decency and virtue”. “Yes, the German people are pre-destined for that,” she agrees.

The film-makers clearly intend this film as a warning from history, in the context of the rise of the AfD. It forms an essential coda to the 1993 film. The most telling critique of Riefenstahl’s career, however, remains Susan Sontag’s 1974 takedown of her work for the New York Review. For it is Riefenstahl’s films themselves that best embody and most reveal her brutal faith in the victory of the strong and beautiful.

“Riefenstahl” is in cinemas now