GNOME CINEMA
THE adult life of Leni Riefenstahl was divided into two phases. The first was being Hitler’s favourite filmmaker. The second was denying she was Hitler’s favourite filmmaker – or knew much about the workings and goals of the Third Reich.
As she lived to 101 that was a lot of denying but, as the new documentary Riefenstahl shows, she stuck to the task with the kind of steely determination and unwavering conviction that had made her Hitler’s favourite filmmaker in the first place.
Her most famous works were Triumph of the Will, her record of the Nazis’ 1934 overblown village fete in Nuremberg, and Olympia about the 1936 Munich games. For Riefenstahl, producer Sandra Maischberger, director Andres Veiel and a team of researchers, spent six years looking through the 700 boxes of her personal archive. The effort seems to have stupefied them. The resulting film is an exhausted and aimless amble through her life and times. Their painstaking research uncovered conclusive evidence of her complicity, such as proof that she had read Mein Kampf in the early 1930s, but doesn’t bother to flag this up as anything new.