Somehow, the creator of this documentary has been able to lay his hands on the extensive personal archives of Helene Bertha Amalie (Leni) Riefenstahl (1902-2003). This archive is for a small part unstructured, but for a large part extremely structured. The archive itself shows how obsessive Riefenstahl tried to document her own life according to her own picture of herself so that she could tell that story the way that she thought it should be.
The archives contains many, many photos, largely unknown, but also material that did not make it into Riefenstahl’s films, personal recordings, diaries, notes, the draft of her autobiography, recordings of phonecalls (!), etc. Veiel also used other footage, such as interviews, diaries and biographies of people in Riefenstahl’s life, etc. You get a view at Riefenstahl from a broad perspective.
What is clear is that Riefenstahl has tried to influence the way that people see her her entire life. We see giving her directions to the camera man who shoots an interview, questions that are not to be asked, remarks that makes her explode, putting stress on details that matter to her story, the fact that she has over 50 lawsuits against media that published something that she did not like, etc. In this way the viewer gets a look into a remarkable woman, but I doubt Riefenstahl would have been entirely content with the result.
Most stress is (of course, I would almost way) laid on Riefenstahl’s dealing with Nazi Germany and her films “Triumph des Willens” (1935) and “Olympia” (1936). On the one hand Riefenstahl tells that she was “magnetised” by Hitler, but she keeps stressing that Hitler was just the person who assigned her to make the film and she made “Triumph des Willens” from an art-perspective, not an ideological one. Here and there Veiel also shows Riefenstahl ‘unfiltered’. It is somewhat daring that also later in life Riefenstahl did not really try to distance herself of her employer of the time. She was of the opinion that she had made the right choices for her career in the circumstances.
Besides this you will also get a look into Riefenstahl’s youth, her parents, early films, relationships with people like Albert Speer (1905-1981), her marriage with Peter Jacob and -fortunately- her Africa expeditions.
An interesting documentary with a bit too much stress on the WWII period.
