Leni Riefenstahl's Documentary on Hitler's Favorite Filmmaker

Leni Riefenstahl, who died in 2003 at the age of 101, will forever be Googled as “Hitler's favorite filmmaker” for her daringly innovative documentaries The Triumph of the Willon 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.

What exactly these views were, what Riefenstahl knew about Hitler and the Holocaust, and when she knew it, is the key to this debate and the subject of countless books and documentaries. It is the question at the heart of Stainless steelthe new documentary by German director Andres Veiel (BRD Black Box).

The documentary is being screened 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 most important award, the Coppa Mussolini, for the best film for Olympia in 1938. Beta Cinema handles worldwide sales on Stainless steel.

Veiel was given access to Riefenstahl’s personal archives for the film, some 700 boxes of diaries, correspondence, private photos, and recorded phone calls. Although it covers some familiar ground, the film is an attempt to do what no Riefenstahl documentary has done before: provide a psychological portrait of the filmmaker and, through her, of what Veiel calls the “seductive nature of fascism,” both the 1930s variety and today’s updated versions.

“What we found in his archives seemed so timely, so relevant to what's happening right now, whether it's his vision of a form of heroic nationalism, his celebration of the beauty of the superior, the 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 about the rising right-wing movements we see now, not just in Germany, but across Europe and even in the United States.”

Veiel believes that the question of whether Riefenstahl was a true Nazi or simply an opportunist is now settled.

“She was not an opportunistic artist, she was very involved in the [Nazi] ideology, not only in its aesthetics, celebrating strength and heroism, and its contempt for the weak, the sick and the so-called foreigners, but in actual anti-Semitic beliefs… We found an interview he gave in 1934 with [British newspaper] The daily expresswhere he said to read [Hitler‘s autobiography] My fight as early as 1931. “After one page, I became an enthusiastic National Socialist,” she says. Something she denied all her life.”

In correspondence and recorded telephone calls with friends and colleagues after the war, including Hitler's architect, fellow “Nazi artist,” architect (and World War II armaments minister) Albert Speer, Riefenstahl shows no signs of remorse or change of heart. She regrets only that her style and old ideology have fallen out of favor.

“In one of these, he even says: 'It will take a generation or two [to rehabilitate Nazism in Germany]”, says Veiel. “And now two generations have passed and you see the right rising again.”

Most of Stainless steel focuses on the director's life after World War II, when the Allies declared her a Nazi sympathizer (although she was never a member of the party) and she struggled to find work as a director. Stainless steel shows that the documentary maker clearly felt victimized by her story. In one key scene, we see footage of Riefenstahl on a 1970s German talk show, where she is confronted by a host and German contemporaries who question her claim that she knew nothing about the Holocaust. Riefenstahl does not waver, protesting that she knew nothing about the concentration camps until after the war.

“At one point she turns to the audience and – remember, she was originally an actress, [in pre-war German “mountain movies” like The Blue Light]— and she has tears in her eyes. She's the perfect victim,” says Sandra Maischberger, a producer of Stainless steel and a well-known German TV presenter, who interviewed Reifenstahl on the occasion of her 100th birthday. “The response was immense. She received a lot of letters and phone calls from viewers who supported her. When I saw it, it was a real shock for me. I lost faith in my fellow Germans. How could so many viewers at that time fall for her lies? It seemed like a diagnosis of post-war Germany in the 1960s and 1970s.”

“There were 500 letters from viewers, and I read them all,” Veiel says. “They all celebrated Leni Riefenstahl. That talk show, and the response from viewers, triggered a kind of renaissance for her, a renaissance in postwar Germany. Leni Riefenstahl, the artist, began to be celebrated.”

That celebration continued, almost until his death. Legendary New Yorker the reviewer Pauline Kael, called The Triumph of the Will AND Olympia “the two greatest films ever directed by a woman.” The inaugural Telluride Film Festival, in 1974, honored Riefenstahl as a pioneering “feminist” filmmaker and a role model for women directors. At different 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 “beautiful enough to play me” and suggested he cast Sharon Stone instead.)

Throughout, Riefenstahl continued to defend her version of her story, reinforcing her legend as a naive genius unaware of the dark side of Nazism. Ray Müller's 1993 documentary The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl — was made with his approval and editorial control. It won the International Emmy for Best Documentary on the Arts. Veiel's film features several clips 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.

If anyone dared to question his version of events, Stainless steel performances, the artist was also quick to sue. In 2002, a year before she died, Riefenstahl took documentary maker Nina Gladitz to court to prevent the distribution of Gladitz's documentary Time of darkness and silenceThe television documentary featured interviews with Roma and Sinti who worked as extras Plainsa film adaptation of Hitler's favorite play that Riefenstahl began work on in 1940 (she would finish it in 1954). Reifenstahl personally hand-picked the extras from a nearby concentration camp. She would later claim that they were all war survivors. In fact, about 100 of them are known or believed to have been gassed at Auschwitz, a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of Roma murdered in the Holocaust.

When Gladitz's documentary was shown in court, Riefenstahl interrupted the screening, shouting “Lies! Lies!” When faced with the evidence, however, she withdrew her original claims. But because Gladitz failed to prove one charge, namely that Riefenstahl had personally promised to save the Sinti from the camps, and because Gladitz refused to cut that interview out of the Time of darkness and silencethe film never aired.

“Of course, she knew about Auschwitz, and she knew [the Romani extras] were killed, and she simply denied it,” Veiel says. “She denied it her whole life with a strange mix of repression, denial and lying.”

By drawing a psychological portrait of Germany's most infamous propagandist, Veiel hopes Stainless steel It also provides an insight into the enduring and terrifying allure of fascism.

“It's a story about how easy it is to be seduced,” he says, “because there are elements of his story that sound like a dream for any director: imagine having an unlimited budget to make your own film! I can imagine the allure. I have to think of my father, who was a general in the war. He was close to [Nazi SS leader Heinrich] Himmler on the Russian front and he had many advantages. He was seduced. So this is a very personal question that I have to deal with.”