Betty Ginette
As the Third Reich hobbled to its demise and modern media stood at the precipice of a new age, Leni Riefenstahl emerged as a filmmaker whose ability was as undeniable as the questionable ethics of the purpose of her works.
She is the name behind spectacles like Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938), in which she crafted one of the most chilling marriages of form and ideology. The colossal procession of bodies, flawless choreography, the myth of the heroic mass, the myth of the “beautiful” nation.
In 2024, documentarian Andres Veiel seeks to lay bare her legacy in unprecedented detail. The filmmaker draws on access to more than 700 boxes of her personal estate, opening up a trove of letters, home movies, taped phone calls, and photo albums that expose the woman who turned her camera into a megaphone for ideology.
Opening the Archive
Veiel does not simply offer us another biography of Riefenstahl, but a forensic look into her myth making. The viewer is confronted with the image of Riefenstahl that the world was sold back then. Leni, it was asserted time and again, was a brilliant filmmaker, apolitical, above the fray, an artist who simply wanted to highlight her craft.
Even in the modern age, she was exalted all the way to her death in 2003, being given the honor of photographing Mick and Bianca Jagger for The Sunday Times as well as Siegfried and Roy in Vegas.
Well-known artists like Andy Warhol, Madonna, and Quentin Tarantino, all hailed her as a seminal influence in their aesthetics.
But the documentary uses archival evidence to re-examine these claims. The material has been largely unseen until now. This release enables us to observe how an extraordinarily talented woman also accepted, and arguably embraced, the aesthetics and values of the regime she was working for.
In her archives, we find scripts and memoir drafts as well as other pieces of evidence that Veiel uses to expose the processes that went into her lifelong self-construction.
Aesthetically Brilliant, Ideologically Ambiguous
Riefenstahl’s visual style was pioneering. She shot from low angles that made her subjects tower. She would overlap movement and mass formations that combined athleticism, architecture, and ideology in one seamless spectacle.
Veiel’s film asks the audience to reflect on something important: at what point does such aesthetic mastery stop being neutral?
Her claim that her films transcended politics becomes hard to accept when you watch them alongside correspondence in which she praises the ideals that she was serving. The documentary is remarkable in this way, leaving the camera pointed at the archives themselves.
The neatly labelled boxes, the dates, cassette reels, the margin notes in her scripts, and so much more. In doing so, it offers us a tangible metaphor for how she constructed her own legend and how that story is unraveling as time goes by.
Just as the digital gambling world increasingly relies on independent reviewers like Casino Guru to expose non-transparent practices, here the film opens up about 700 boxes of her private estate to show the layers of self-mythologizing it took to make her image of an innocent artist passable, at the very least, among some circles.
Denial, Self Mythologizing, and Turning The Lens
One of the most arresting dimensions is the way that the film turns the gaze back on her, the filmmaker. Riefenstahl built her career on controlling viewpoints, directing how we see bodies and masses, and now, she comes under the lens. As its subject, her myth of the ‘innocent artist’ disappears, replaced by a layered story that shows her ambition, manipulation, and refusal to accept responsibility.
The film goes so far as to suggest that Riefenstahl was more than a collaborator. She shaped, through camera and editing, the heroic image of the regime she served. Even if direct criminal responsibility remains hard to prove, her works had real power.
Riefenstahl was kept under house arrest by French occupation forces and went on trial four times for complicity in the Third Reich’s crimes. She was never formally convicted of these charges and was instead designated a ‘fellow traveler’ (Mitläufer) instead of a key player in the regime.
She was reportedly defiant and willfully ignorant of the horrors of the Holocaust, a stance that she did not give up her whole life.
For decades after the war, she denied complicity, portrayed herself as an isolated genius and not the agent of horrific spectacle that she was.
Why Does Veiel’s Film Matter Now?
We live in an era of image-making, spectacle, and political manipulation. These elements are ascendant now and live alongside a more divided world that seems to have a renewed appetite for despots, even amidst massive Gen-Z protests.
Riefenstahl’s story is not just another chapter in history. It is a deeply relevant and cautionary tale that seeks to remind us that propaganda did not die in 1945. It simply evolved to fit the new times.
Her techniques, like the tight framing, heroic massing, and iconic low angles, are still in the modern toolkits of media power.
The film forces us to ask: what happens when aesthetic brilliance is used for morally stained goals? What happens when the artist insists that she is neutral, but her work doesn’t reflect that assertion?
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