“For some things to be remembered other things must be forgotten”, we’re told in voiceover at the beginning of Riefenstahl, Andres Veiel’s riveting archival dive into the life of the titular pioneering propagandist of the Third Reich. An actor, filmmaker, and ardent Nazi who dubiously insisted that her passion for art rendered her clueless to politics, Leni Riefenstahl once even insisted in a televised interview that if she’d been commissioned by Roosevelt or Stalin to craft Triumph of the Will she would have agreed to do so.
Which for a narcissistic sociopath forever focused on her own wellbeing above all else, is perhaps the one honest admission Hitler’s fave director makes in the entire film.
Comprised entirely of never-before-seen material from Riefenstahl’s estate, bequeathed to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin (where it ended up only after the 2016 death of her husband Horst Kettner – a man four decades her junior), the treasure trove includes everything from photographs and home movies to letters and private recordings.
In fact, the amount of “evidence” Riefenstahl amassed against herself (and her claims that she was unaware of the atrocities taking place in plain sight) and kept is rather astonishing.
Or maybe not.
“Memory is the only paradise from which we cannot be banished,” reads the writing under a photo unearthed from one of the 700 boxes Veiel and his team were granted access to. Though in Riefenstahl’s case, her memory seems to be entirely made up of convenient illusions.
But perhaps it was inevitable that Hitler’s cinematic henchwoman, a survivor of childhood trauma, created a narrative of herself that edited out all the darker aspects. Or turned lemons into lemonade. (Her father’s sadism built character!)
A brilliant editor, Riefenstahl was able to apply those impressive skills to her own life as well. She could cut herself out of pictures, out of the story – and yet traces always remained.
In Riefenstahl’s case, her memory seems to be entirely made up of convenient illusions
Like her “rapport” with the German architect Albert Speer, Hitler’s Minister of Armaments and War Production, who Riefenstahl admired for likewise pursuing his art at all costs. So when Speer’s prison-penned memoir becomes a huge success, it’s not all that shocking to hear a phone call from Riefenstahl to her longtime friend seeking advice regarding her own memoir – specifically about the amount of money she might make. As she acknowledges with a laugh later on, “I’ve always fought as if my life was at stake. Until I got my way.” Like Speer, Riefenstahl could only realize her megalomaniacal ambitions through the megalomaniac in power – a Faustian bargain both were all too happy to pursue.
And yet, as the archive clearly reveals, Riefenstahl was indeed an enthusiastic perpetrator of lethal propaganda as well as a victim of horrific abuse – physical abuse (and who knows what else) at the hands of her father as a girl; and also sexual abuse by the likes of Goebbels, and even by the first man she ever had a crush on, who ended up raping her.
She was simultaneously mentally ill and a run of the mill woman of her time, who’d likely been excising the disturbing parts of her life from her psyche early on just to survive.
So with this understanding we might view Riefenstahl’s willingness to sit for interviews (as long as she could control everything from lighting and camera angles to the tone of questioning) and appear on untold numbers of talk shows as her desperate attempt to preserve her version of history – not only to save her artistic reputation for the present and future, but her very sanity in the now.
The fictional tale the larger-than-life filmmaker had long told herself had by then become her sole reality. Breaking the fourth wall could only lead to existential breakdown.
Evil is certainly banal. And Riefenstahl shows us that it’s also just small and pathetic.