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Riefenstahl 2024 Torrent HC.x265
45/15
Can disgusting propaganda also be great art?
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Explores Leni Riefenstahl’s artistic legacy and her complex ties to the Nazi regime, juxtaposing her self-portrait with evidence of awareness of the regime’s atrocities. This is a question that always comes up when discussing the work of the German director Leni Riefenstahl. She is admired as one of the greatest German directors of all time (for example, Quentin Tarantino), but she is also despised for making the Third Reich glamorous. Riefenstahl herself always denied that she was a Nazi.
After her death in 2003, this self-created image was quickly destroyed
According to her, she was an artist who accidentally worked for Hitler. In interviews, she always insisted that she did not know about the regime’s atrocities. The striking contrast between her own statements and historical facts has already been the subject of a recent TV documentary Riefenstahl: The End of the Myth and is explored in more depth in the Riefenstahl documentary. Director Andres Weil painstakingly combed through her estate, looking for letters, newspaper clippings and official documents to match Riefenstahl’s word with reality.
This study shows even more vividly how manipulative Riefenstahl was
But at the same time, it is very interesting to watch how her huge ego and her fearless ambitions helped shape her place in the history of cinema. During a question and answer session during the film festival in Ghent, Weil said that at first he wanted to create an avatar of Riefenstahl in his film, an alternative Leni created from personal letters and fragments of diaries in her estate. But in the end, the material itself turned out to be so clear that it could speak for itself. There is no doubt that Riefenstahl had a deep sympathy and admiration for the Nazi movement.
The film contains a treasure trove of historical material
Weyel convincingly shows that her own worldview fully corresponded to the Nazi ideology. Very revealing footage of TV interviews, made when the cameras were working, and the interview was interrupted. Riefenstahl was repeatedly very angry when she was asked questions about her responsibility as an artist and her participation in the Nazi movement. But even more revealing are the recorded telephone conversations that Riefenstahl conducted with her numerous admirers.
Andres Weyel himself considers his film a lesson for today
Whenever her artistic integrity was questioned, she received letters of support and sympathetic phone calls. Many Germans agreed that in the 1930s it was very difficult to resist the Nazi movement, and that Hitler’s passive supporters were judged too harshly. Riefenstahl’s ability to reinvent her own image and reshape the past in her own interests is similar to the numerous fake news stories created by populists like Donald Trump.
