Riefenstahl (Blu-ray Review)
Director
Andres VeielRelease Date(s)
2024 (November 18, 2025)Studio(s)
Vincent Productions (Kino Lorber)- Film/Program Grade: B
- Video Grade: B+
- Audio Grade: B+
- Extras Grade: D-
Review
In the annals of the endless debates over how to separate the art from the artist (or whether or not they even should be separated in the first place), Leni Riefenstahl’s name has always loomed large. She’s unquestionably one of the greatest documentary filmmakers who has ever lived, and yet she made her documentaries on behalf of a no less unquestionably reprehensible ideology. Triumph of the Will, Olympia Part One: Festival of the Nations, and Olympia Part Two: Beauty of the Festival are extraordinary works of art, but they openly glorify Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Weltanschauung—and worse, they were produced on the genocidal dictator’s behalf, with his full participation. It’s impossible to appreciate these works of art divorced from that ideology, even when examining them from a purely technical perspective.
The unresolved tension that exists between artists and the works that they create is always an interesting conflict to ponder. Yet it wasn’t particularly interesting to filmmaker Andres Veiel, and he had a different goal in mind for his 2024 documentary Riefenstahl: to prove that she was complicit in the crimes committed by the Nazi regime. Riefenstahl studiously maintained that she was unaware of Nazi atrocities while they were happening during the war, right up until the day she died at age 101. She was tried repeatedly by post-war courts but never convicted, although she was branded as a Mitläufer, a “fellow traveler” who may not have committed any actual crimes but was still sympathetic to the cause. Riefenstahl spent the next six decades cultivating her own image in order to overcome that designation. Veiel’s intention with Riefenstahl was to tear down her self-portrait in favor of not just portraying her as a Mitläufer, but rather as a monster.
Yet despite poring over voluminous archival photographs, films, tape recordings, and other records, Veiel never quite succeeds at proving that Riefenstahl was anything other than a complex individual who doesn’t fit into any simple boxes (either positive or negative). Riefenstahl makes a great deal out of the well-known photograph that supposedly shows her reacting with horror at German soldiers shooting Jews at Końskie, Poland, where she was making a documentary about the Polish front in 1939. Veiel cross-references that photograph with a 1952 letter written by a former German officer who said that she had asked for the Jews to be removed, and that resulted in them being shot while trying to escape. The problem is that while she was obviously lying when she denied any knowledge of Nazi atrocities, none of this proves that she actively condoned them (and the horrified look on her face seems to prove otherwise). Her use of Roma and Sinti prisoners during the production of Tiefland in 1940 and 1942 is far more damning, but it still falls short of the definitive proof of complicity that Veiel was after. He found plenty of smoke, but not the actual smoking gun.
Veiel seems to have understood that fact, because rather than presenting his evidence against her objectively and dispassionately, he chose to use every trick in the book in order to make her appear monstrous. From the editing to the intentionally macabre score by Freya Arde, everything in Riefenstahl is carefully calculated to present the director in a negative light. And to be fair, Riefenstahl’s equally curated self-image was in need of deconstruction, but as a result of the techniques that Veiel uses, Riefenstahl feels more like agitprop than a true documentary. And once again, Riefenstahl’s own documentaries were pure agitprop, so Veiel may have felt like this was a case of sauce for the goose. Yet if that’s true, he was out of his league in using techniques like these against a true master of film form. What the film gods get away with, the cows can’t.
Yet despite these deficiencies, the one area where Riefenstahl works the best is in terms of deconstructing her self-image, not via the ham-handed stylistic approach that Veiel uses, but rather by simply presenting her doing her best to maintain her own illusion. All throughout the film, we’re shown example after example of her trying to control her image, and reacting angrily to anyone or anything that contradicts it. If she really had nothing to hide, then there shouldn’t have been any reason to spend so much time and effort looking like she was hiding something. That’s almost as damning as any of the smoking guns that Veiel could have found.
And yet even that’s not quite so straightforward. The last scene of Riefenstahl shows footage from one of her final interviews, with her looking into a mirror first in order to see how she was going to appear on camera, and demanding changes in the lighting in order to improve that appearance. What sometimes appeared like a guilty conscience may also have been little more than simple vanity. Ultimately, that’s what drove Leni Riefenstahl more than anything else: not Nazi ideology per se, but rather her love of physical beauty and her quest to find the perfect visual representation of it. From the splendor of the landscapes in her early mountain climbing films to the architecture of Albert Speer, from the superiority of athletes’ bodies in Olympia to the Aryan ideal, it’s easy to see how her artist’s eye led her to seek sublime images of idealized forms, no matter where that journey may have taken her. Since she lacked appropriate boundaries, there really isn’t a way to separate this particular artist from her art. Veiel’s biggest mistake with Riefenstahl may have been to think that he could.
Riefenstahl combines archival footage and interviews (including some that was originally shot on standard-definition video) with new footage shot by cinematographer Toby Cornish (digitally captured, presumably, but there’s no information available about it). The film itself is at full frame 1.78:1, with 1.33:1 footage windowboxed within that same frame. As a mixed media presentation, the image quality varies depending on the source, with the SD video looking the worst of all. The new footage consists primarily of still photos, documents, film strips, and audio cassettes, with Cornish’s camera panning, tilting, and zooming over and into them. Those sections are sharp and crystal-clear. Multimedia compilations are never going to look like reference material, but everything here looks exactly like it should.
Audio is offered in English and German 5.1 and 2.0 DTS-HD Master Audio, with optional English SDH subtitles. Riefenstahl is driven by Freya Arde’s ominous score, which works well to create the foreboding ambience that Veiel was after, and it’s the driving force in both the 5.1 and 2.0 mixes, even more so than Leni Riefenstahl’s own damning words. The clarity of the dialogue varies according to the source, but it’s always comprehensible enough (and the German language dialogue has forced subtitles anyway).
Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray release of Riefenstahl includes just a single extra:
- Trailer (HD – 2:00)
Better than nothing, I suppose. Still, Andres Veiel’s intentions for Riefenstahl are crystal-clear, so there really isn’t any need for additional extras. It’s a far too simple a portrait of a complex individual, and while Veiel may not entirely succeed at his aims for the film, the wealth of archival materials that he includes makes Riefenstahl essential viewing for anyone with even a passing interest in one of the greatest documentary filmmakers of all time—one who just happened to make those documentaries on the behalf of one of the worst homicidal maniacs of all time. Art, like most things in life, ain’t easy.
- Stephen Bjork
(You can follow Stephen on social media at these links: Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky, and Letterboxd).