With a wealth of new archive footage, director Andres Veiel sheds light on The Riefenstahl Question. But there’s still as much innuendo as evidence.
Center for Communication and MEDIA CITY Present: Steven Bach about Leni Riefenstahl
By Owen Gleiberman
The notorious and virtuoso Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl made the two documentaries for which she became legendary, “Triumph of the Will” (1935) and “Olympiad” (1938), almost 90 years ago. She herself lived to be 101 (she died in 2003). The controversy surrounding her first film arose more than sixty years ago, and ignited in the mid-1970s when Susan Sontag published her influential and accusatory essay on Riefenstahl, “Fascinating Fascism.”
Since then, there has been a hot-button frenzy in what we might call the Riefenstahl Question. That elevated quality—like the question itself—refuses to die. The question is: Is it fair to call this Nazi filmmaker a Nazi collaborator? She made her films for Hitler, who was her personal friend, so there’s no doubt that on some level she made a deal with the devil. But what was the deal? What exactly did she know?
