Decades’ worth of legendary film critics cite the stylistic brilliance of Leni Riefenstahl. Pauline Kael described her two most infamous works, Triumph Of The Will and Olympia, as “the two greatest films ever directed by a woman.” Film scholar Mark Cousins compared her to Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock to celebrate her as “the most technically talented Western film maker of her era.” Charles Moore claimed that she was “perhaps the most talented female cinema director of the 20th century.” That Riefenstahl’s work was done in the service of propagandizing the Nazi regime is viewed as an unfortunate asterisk next to her creative genius. Art comes before politics, so claimed Riefenstahl herself, and to this day, too many people are determined to prove her right.
The ongoing culture wars have made this conflict inescapable. For the past decade or so, leading up to the first presidential election of Donald Trump, pop culture has been buried by furious discourse over anodyne features of modern entertainment. The ludicrous GamerGate and anti-Ghostbusters reboot campaigns inspired fury, helping to pave the way for the current ecosystem of far-right pseudo-trolling. This new era is not the propaganda of old, but the fingerprints of the Riefenstahl model of fascist aestheticism are everywhere, if you know where to look.
Riefenstahl, a new documentary from German director Andres Veiel, finds a timeless rot when investigating its subject. Veiel and producer Sandra Maischberger, who interviewed Riefenstahl in 2002, received access to over 7,000 disorganized boxes of material from the filmmaker’s estate. Within, they found a portrait of an artist in the throes of a lifelong delusion, a propagandist in denial whose biggest concern was her own legacy.
Riefenstahl long denied that she was a Nazi. In the decades following the end of World War II and the end of her filmmaking career, she gave numerous interviews in which she repeated the same grab-bag of defenses: She was only obeying orders, she didn’t think art was political, she never felt that Triumph Of The Will or Olympia were anything other than great pieces of cinema, courtesy of her genius. Riefenstahl includes several interviews where she responds to even the mildest queries about her well-documented interactions with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels with open contempt. In one debate from the 1970s, Riefenstahl repeatedly insists that everyone in Germany was pro-Hitler at the time, while one of her contemporaries reminds her that this wasn’t true.
As her own archives show, plenty of Germans took her side. Not all of them were admitted Nazis according to her categorization, just admirers of her propaganda who bought into the collective idea that the nation’s genocidal regime was none of their business. As the decades wore on and Riefenstahl found herself slowly embraced by various cultural institutions, she came to embody a post-war philosophy of denial. It’s a hell of a lot easier to claim you’re a victim than confront your own culpability.
The documentary smartly lets Riefenstahl do a lot of the talking, allowing this control freak who slavishly tried to paint herself as a misunderstood genius to tie herself in knots repeatedly when confronted with the truth, or even asked basic questions about her life. She hurriedly tries to push her version of history, all of which is decimated by the film’s swath of evidence to the contrary. It’s almost shocking just how much proof exists to refute the decades’ worth of lies told by the queen of propaganda, and it all comes from her own archives. Did she collect it all to ponder over it, or to rehearse her own version of reality? “For some things to be remembered,” the film’s narrator says. “Other things must be forgotten.”
If Riefenstahl really was “just obeying orders,” it’d still make her complicit in Nazism. But as the documentary shows, she wasn’t just obeying orders: She was neck-deep in fascism. Riefenstahl married a committed Nazi, wrote glowing letters to Hitler, and was friends and had a lifelong “rapport” (her words) with Reich minister Albert Speer. While filming her 1940 picture Lowlands, she used Roma prisoners from the Maxglan-Leopoldskron concentration camp as extras. She long claimed that these prisoners were freed after her film was finished. Really, many were murdered in the Holocaust. “I’m not saying Gypsies need to lie,” she said. “But really, who’s more likely to commit perjury: me or the Gypsies?” One could almost hear a masked ICE agent spitting out this line as he drags away another elderly immigrant. Using prisoners as an artistic backdrop has remained abhorrently familiar; just look to Kristi Noem and her photoshoots in El Salvador. The only difference is that Noem isn’t denying anything
And yet, Riefenstahl too shows its subject as unrepentant and proud. In the editing room, her eyes wide like her smile, she explains all the trickery she put into making the Nazis look like gods on Earth. And those tricks are still in use, embraced by history as something we can and should divorce from politics. Veiel lays that myth to rest, not just through its subject’s own words but through the context of her work. It is inextricably defined by Nazism, fueled by its ideals and pushing its murderous agenda. To not provide that context is both lazy criticism and active historical whitewashing. Then again, a lot of propaganda goes unchecked in the modern day because of an unwillingness to correct falsehoods for fear of being called biased. What is the continued artistic heraldry of Riefenstahl’s hatred if not an endless “both sides” argument?
Bolstering Riefenstahl as a “great female director” benefits the Nazis far more than it benefits cinema. It’s not unlike the ways that The Birth Of A Nation is heralded as technically groundbreaking at the expense of noting how it revived the KKK. The more that supposedly artful displays of racism and bigotry are spun as cultural landmarks, the easier we make it for those insidious agendas to go unchallenged. At least now, obvious conservative attempts to cash in on the culture war rely more on baiting outrage than innovating the form. Nobody goes to the Daily Wire‘s movies for the craft.
But even the flimsy theatrics of Nazism were more easily refuted than Riefenstahl cared to admit. Mockery of its bombastic pageantry in films like To Be Or Not To Be, The Producers, and the Donald Duck short Der Fuhrer’s Face showed how such grand might withered under a few jokes. Today, South Park repeats history by revealing the Truth Social-cracking efficiency of a small dick gag.
This weakness underscores the fact that modern far-right propaganda is still using the Riefenstahl playbook: attack, deny, brag, and gloat. Refuting this strain of propaganda is a Sisyphean prospect in a society defined by two prevailing mindsets: kayfabe (the pro wrestling term for maintaining the illusion of reality even when everyone involved knows it’s fake) and brainrot (the mental degradation caused by a deluge of online falsehoods). Where Riefenstahl prided herself on her supposed artistic genius, modern propaganda is often deliberately sloppy, embodying the trolling meme-heavy ethos of the modern internet. When these attacks are so shrouded by the defense of irony—the notion that all criticism can be dismissed by claiming “it’s just a joke”—the ability to disempower it grows ever harder. And when craft no longer matters, or in fact becomes counterproductive to the goal, the sheer deluge of propaganda can greatly outnumber that created by its fascist ancestors.
Leni Riefenstahl was a very successful propagandist of the Nazi regime, but she was a terrible propagandist for herself. Every interview revealed her to be unpleasant, self-centered, and panicky about the goose-stepping elephant in the room. When she wasn’t behind the camera, she couldn’t defy the truth. But she had allies. Plenty of historians and critics helped to bolster her reputation under the guise of apolitical appreciation. Not depicted in the documentary are the decades of apologists who elevated Riefenstahl to the status of great art. She returned to the Olympics in the ’70s, won awards, and photographed Mick Jagger. An entire cultural shift contributed to her most insidious and lasting legacy: The delusion that art has nothing to do with that which it depicts.
If Riefenstahl’s propaganda has left any kind of impression on the current era of spin, it’s a chilling one that gets to the heart of the current administration’s concern with ratings and audience appeal. “This is going to be great television,” Trump declared after an embarrassing meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Like Riefenstahl, Trump masks his hatred and bigotry with the veil of entertainment for the masses. Perhaps the unashamed ugliness of Trumpian propaganda is more honest, for lack of a better term, than the precise choreography of Triumph Of The Will, but the aims are the same: flashy displays of pure might in the name of a political power grab.
