RIEFENSTAHL - Mark Reviews Movies

Riefenstahl, Kino Lorber

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 4, 2025

By the end of Andrews Veiel's documentary, it is wholly apparent that, following World War II, Leni Riefenstahl was dishonest about her connections to the Nazi hierarchy and her personal politics. Veiel's Riefenstahl is an expertly crafted dissection of the German filmmaker's constant contradictions, shallow defenses of herself, and apparent inability to simply condemn the Nazi Party, its leaders and supporters, and its ultimately murderous policies. A single statement from Riefenstahl plainly denouncing Nazism at any point during her post-war life could have saved her a lot of trouble. She took a different approach, and that speaks volumes.

What does it actually say, though? That's a question that remains at the end of this documentary and that, hopefully, will haunt those who have promoted Riefenstahl's Nazi-era works as "important" in some way. Too many critics, scholars, and educators have tried to frame works like Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will as so technically and stylistically noteworthy as to speak of it as if it exists separate from the material's politics.

That's the argument Riefenstahl herself tried to make for decades, and Veiel cuts through that, too. The politics are an intrinsic component of that piece of Nazi propaganda. It only existed to promote Nazism, Adolf Hitler as some kind of savior, and the idea that Germany could only survive by allowing that man and his party to do whatever they want. The fact that Riefenstahl put all of her ingenuity and craft into making it does not negate what the movie is saying. It makes the propaganda more potentially convincing and, hence, abhorrent.

The subject of Triumph of the Will is one of the first overt lies in which Veiel catches Riefenstahl, and the way the director does so also displays how subtle and thorough his tactics can be. He shows footage of Riefenstahl going through the Nuremberg rally scene from her infamous propaganda movie. She explains each shot in detail, anticipating certain ones before they even appear on the screen in front of her.

Riefenstahl knows the piece—inside and out, backwards and forwards, each composition and every bit of editing trickery. Of course, she does. She filmed it and edited it by hand, and as a side note of another blatant contradiction in her personal narrative, it's very possible or probably likely she was involved in the staging of the rally in the first place. Later on, Riefenstahl would say that her filming of the rally at Nuremberg was completely by chance. She didn't know—what will become a common refrain from her—what would be happening. If that's the case, what are those photographs of her standing next to Hitler and his cronies as they plan the event?

The more significantly dishonest statement goes back to the content of the propaganda itself. In one of several TV interviews she gave, Riefenstahl claims that her documentary contains not a single reference to the Nazi's racial politics. For someone who can so intricately dissect and explain her own movie, Riefenstahl seems to have conveniently forgotten the part in which a Nazi higher-up in her movie champions the idea of "racial purity." Veiel puts it right there for us to see and hear.

He has all of this footage, not to mention private letters and phone calls, because of access the filmmakers have obtained of Riefenstahl's own archive. She organized everything, right down to miscellaneous items having their own separate category—much in the way an inventory separates her communications with Nazis from "those with other beliefs," specifying "communists" and "Jews" among those "others." The little details really matter here, although the more conspicuous ones are generally damning.

There are substantial accusations made by this film. The most considerable ones of all are that Riefenstahl may have exploited Roma people, who were in a concentration camp when she needed them for a project and would eventually be murdered in one of the Nazi death camps, and gave some production instructions that resulted in the murders of a group of Jewish men, whose presence did not fit the scene she wanted to shoot. Riefenstahl did counter the first accusation, claiming that she had spoken to some of those background performers after the war. There are, however, records of all of their deaths, before any such meeting could have occurred.

If Riefenstahl—who died at the age of 101 in 2003—were still alive, she almost certainly would have disputed the second accusation, too, and probably have sued the filmmakers for defamation, as she so often did during the course of her life. She might have won, as she also did often, such as legal case, as well, although it'd be difficult to imagine a judge or a jury accepting the veracity of any statement Riefenstahl might make if this documentary were presented as evidence in that hypothetical trial.

The film shows her to be contradictory, dishonest, and, if all of the deceit is intentional, a clear-cut example of a pathological liar. On those TV appearances (for which she received monetary compensation, by the way), she generally maintains an air of calm, even as she's confronted by a woman around her age who knew what the Nazis were doing when they were doing it and openly questions how Riefenstahl can claim she didn't know. In some unused footage from a 1993 documentary about her, she becomes quite irate at even the suggestion of the Nazis crimes. Like all narcissists, she lashes out in preemptive defense.

The best possible interpretation of Riefenstahl's actions during the war and her behavior after it is that she was just a narcissist, who saw the Nazis as a way to earn the respect, admiration, and influence she craved and didn't want to admit that later. A worse version is that she knew exactly what the Nazis were doing and wanted to legally protect herself.

The worst is that she knew and believed in the Nazis deeds, while her later deceptions were simply covering that. That she remained close friends with Albert Speer, who was convicted of crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials, and can be heard agreeing with her fans' hope for a return of certain ideas in Germany aren't exactly exonerating.

Riefenstahl doesn't make a solid claim in any of those directions. It doesn't need to. Any of those options is awful enough.

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