Leni Riefenstahl, who died in 2003 at the age of 101, remains forever Googled as “Hitler’s favorite filmmaker” for her boldly innovative documentaries. The Triumph of the Willabout the Nazi rally in Nuremberg in 1934, and Olympiaabout the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Acclaimed and infamous in equal measure—was she a pioneering genius, a Nazi propagandist, or perhaps both?—Riefenstahl remains a subject of fascination and debate over whether her talent can be separated from her political views.
The question of what exactly these views were, what Riefenstahl knew about Hitler and the Holocaust and when she knew it, is at the heart of this debate and the subject of countless books and documentaries. Spring steelThe new documentary by German filmmaker Andres Veiel (BRD Black Box).
The documentary is screening out of competition at the Venice Film Festival, the same festival where Leni Riefenstahl won a gold medal for The Triumph of the Will in 1935 and the supreme prize, the Coppa Mussolini, for the best film for Olympia in 1938. Beta Cinema handles worldwide sales on Spring steel.
To make the film, Veiel gained access to Riefenstahl’s personal archive, some 700 boxes of diaries, correspondence, private photographs, and recorded phone calls. Although the film treads familiar ground, it is an attempt to do what no Riefenstahl documentary has done before: to create a psychological portrait of the filmmaker and, through her, of what Veiel calls the “seductive nature of fascism,” both that of the 1930s and today’s updated versions.
“What we found in his archives seemed very current, very relevant to what’s happening today, whether it’s his vision of a form of heroic nationalism, his celebration of the beauty of what is superior, what is victorious, or his contempt for the weak and the sick,” Veiel says. “It gave us a deep insight into a prototype of fascism, a chance to understand something of the far-right movements that are rising today, not just in Germany, but across Europe, and also in the United States.”
Veiel considers the question of whether Riefenstahl was a real Nazi or merely an opportunist to be settled.
Leni Riefenstahl (right) during the filming of Olympia in 1936
Vincent-Productions
“She was not an opportunistic artist, she was very deeply involved in the (Nazi) ideology, not only in its aesthetics, in celebrating strength and heroism, and its contempt for the weak, the sick and the so-called foreigners, but in real anti-Semitic beliefs… We found an interview she gave in 1934 to the (British newspaper) The Daily Expresswhere she said she read (Hitler’s autobiography) My fight “Already in 1931. “After one page I became an enthusiastic National Socialist,” she said. Something she denied all her life.”
In her correspondence and recorded telephone conversations with friends and colleagues after the war, including Hitler’s architect Albert Speer (who was also Minister of Armaments during World War II), Riefenstahl shows no signs of remorse or change of heart. She only regrets that her style and the old ideology have fallen into disuse.
“In one of them, she actually says: ‘It will take one or two generations (to rehabilitate Nazism in Germany),'” Veiel explains. “And now, two generations later, we see the right being reborn.”
A large part of Spring steel focuses on the director’s life after World War II, when she was declared a Nazi sympathizer by the Allies (although she was never a member of the party) and struggled to find work as a director. Spring steel The documentarian clearly feels victimized by her story. In a key scene, Riefenstahl is seen on a German talk show in the 1970s, where she is confronted by a presenter and German contemporaries who question her claim that she knew nothing about the Holocaust. Riefenstahl does not shy away from this, protesting that she knew nothing about the concentration camps before the war.
“At one point she turns to the audience and — remember, she was originally an actress, (in pre-war German “mountain films” like Blue light)— and she has tears in her eyes. She’s the perfect victim,” says Sandra Maischberger, producer of Tire steel and a famous German TV presenter, who interviewed Reifenstahl on the occasion of her 100th birthday. “The reaction was huge. She received many letters and phone calls from viewers who supported her. When I saw that, it was a real shock to me. I lost faith in my fellow Germans. How could so many viewers at the time have fallen for it? It seemed like a diagnosis of post-war Germany in the 1960s and 1970s.”
“I received 500 letters from viewers and I read them all,” Veiel says. “All of these letters were tributes to Leni Riefenstahl. That talk show and the reaction of the viewers triggered a kind of renaissance for her, a renaissance in post-war Germany. Leni Riefenstahl, the artist, began to be celebrated.”
This celebration continued, almost until his death. Legendary New Yorker critic Pauline Kael, called The Triumph of the Will And Olympia “the two greatest films ever directed by a woman.” The first Telluride Film Festival, in 1974, honored Riefenstahl as a pioneering “feminist” filmmaker and a role model for women directors. At various times, Jodie Foster, Paul Verhoeven, Steven Soderbergh and Madonna were all interested in making her biopic. (Riefenstahl reportedly told Verhoeven that she didn’t think Foster was “pretty enough to play me” and suggested he cast Sharon Stone instead.)
Riefenstahl continued to defend his version of history, reinforcing his legend as a naive genius ignorant of the dark side of Nazism. Ray Müller’s 1993 documentary The Wonderful and Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl — was made with his approval and editorial control. It won the International Emmy for Best Arts Documentary. Veiel’s film includes several excerpts from The wonderful and horrible lifeincluding previously unseen footage of Müller’s interviews in which Riefenstahl, objecting to his line of questioning, refuses to continue and yells at him to stop filming.
Spring steel director Andrés Veiel
Arno_Declair
If anyone dared to challenge his version of events, Spring steel The artist was quick to sue. In 2002, a year before his death, Riefenstahl sued documentary filmmaker Nina Gladitz to prevent Gladitz’s documentary from being broadcast. Time of darkness and silenceThe television documentary included interviews with Roma and Sinti who worked as extras on The lowlandsa film adaptation of Hitler’s favorite opera that Riefenstahl began work on in 1940 (she would eventually complete it in 1954). Reifenstahl had selected the extras from a nearby concentration camp. She later claimed that they had all survived the war. In fact, nearly 100 of them were gassed at Auschwitz, a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of Roma murdered during the Holocaust.
When Gladitz’s documentary was shown in court, Riefenstahl interrupted the screening, shouting, “Lies! Lies!” Faced with the evidence, however, she withdrew her initial accusations. But because Gladitz could not prove one allegation, that Riefenstahl had personally promised to save the Sinti from the camps, and because Gladitz refused to remove this interview from the trial, Time of darkness and silencethe film was never released.
“Of course she knew about Auschwitz, she knew that the Roma extras had been killed, and she simply denied it,” Veiel says. “She denied it all her life with a strange mixture of repression, denial and lies.”
By drawing a psychological portrait of Germany’s most infamous propagandist, Veiel hopes Spring steel also provides insight into the enduring and frightening appeal of fascism.
“It’s a story that shows how easily you can be seduced,” he says, “because there are elements of it that are like a filmmaker’s dream: Imagine having an unlimited budget to make your film! I can imagine the appeal of that. I think of my father, who was a general during the war. He was close to (Nazi SS chief Heinrich) Himmler on the Russian front and had a lot of advantages. He was seduced. So it’s a very personal question that I have to wrestle with.”
