Riefenstahl proves that the best subjects for documentaries are monsters

By: Xan Brooks, film critic / The Independent Translation: Telegrafi.com

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Leni Riefenstahl often said when asked about her past. The German director was willing to talk about her groundbreaking cinematic techniques, her enduring credentials, and her later redemptive work with the Nuba people of Sudan. But there was one nagging subject she preferred to avoid: her role as Nazism’s chief propagandist. Riefenstahl survived the Third Reich for nearly 60 years, dying in 2003 at the age of 101. Six decades of avoidance, distortion, and denial. “I don’t want to talk about it,” became almost her usual refrain.

If you are excited by the sight of an animal caught in a trap or a criminal being chased to the end, then you will enjoy the documentary Re-establish [Riefenstahl], Andres Veiel's new production of the first artist to be canceled by the public. It is a comprehensive and perhaps definitive portrait, exploring Riefenstahl's personal archive, filling in the gaps and presenting his subject as she was - with the good and the bad. Veiel has no intention of making a personal attack. He acknowledges Riefenstahl's artistic instinct and technical mastery and shows how Olympia [Olympia] - her 1938 film for the Berlin Olympics - took cinematography by a huge leap forward. But it also breaks down the great director's defenses. Riefenstahl repeatedly insisted that she was simply an artist, not a politician, that her films were pure and peaceful, and that she had no particular interest in Nazism. The only thing she was guilty of was her complete and profound innocence.

The evidence, as expected, tells a different story. The story suggests that Riefenstahl was fascinated by Hitler and happy to work as the Reich’s official mythmaker. Moreover, although she claimed to be unaware of the Holocaust, investigators later discovered that she may have indirectly caused a massacre by ordering the removal of Jewish workers from a street scene she was filming. At one point in Veiel’s documentary, a television interviewer asked her if it was true that she went to the movies with Joseph Goebbels (about 10 times, according to Goebbels’s diary). Riefenstahl exploded in uncontrollable rage. She did not want to talk about it.

In the best sense of the word, Riefenstahl is a monstrous subject. She is devoid of empathy and carries a dark history with her. She is false and deceitful, constantly clashing with reality and exploding when faced with responsibility. All of this makes her a documentary filmmaker's dream. Every film is a collaboration between director and subject. The latter provides the raw material and establishes the basic storyline. But she also leaves gaps to fill and lies to unravel. They tell one story, while the director tells another - and this tension, this friction, is the recipe for good drama. It doesn't even matter that Riefenstahl is long dead and Veiel can no longer interview her. She has left compromising letters, false statements and an archive of chaotic television interviews for all of us to analyze.

All things considered, I prefer documentaries where the subject won't talk to those where they willingly do. I like it when I have to see uncomfortable truths confronted, or when the chatter is a distraction or a puzzle to be solved. Andrew Jarecki's famous true-crime investigation in the series the poor [The Jinx], ended with the prime suspect - alleged murderer Robert Durst - caught on camera, almost confessing to his crimes. But, in movies, as in life, smoking guns are rare. Truth is elusive; clashes are inevitable. Most good documentaries are a constant battle between two or more points of view.

It’s up to the director to decide how much of this collision to show. Filmmakers like Nick Broomfield and Louis Theroux open the hood and show the engine, casting themselves as the stars of the drama. Others keep a lower profile, preferring to let the ugly negotiations take place behind the scenes. Cartoonist Robert Crumb hated the idea of ​​being the subject of a documentary, but his close friend, Terry Zwigoff, begged and pleaded with him to let him (legend has it that Zwigoff said he would shoot himself if the film didn’t get made). The director then created a dark and twisted portrait – Hug [Crumb, 1994] - which portrayed the Crumb family as the most disordered in America, aside from the Manson family. When the cartoonist saw the finished film, he was horrified.

Oscar-winning director Errol Morris is known for his candid interviews with controversial US figures (Steve Bannon, Donald Rumsfeld, Holocaust denier Fred A. Leuchter). But his greatest achievement remains The thin blue line [The Thin Blue Line, 1988], a detailed investigation into the murder of a Dallas police officer. Morris's documentary gives us not just one insensitive subject, but many of them; a gallery of unstable crooks with false witnesses and outright liars, random incompetents and googly-eyed lunatics. The thin blue line expertly delved into this minefield of lies. He identified the real killer and freed an innocent man from death row. But the storm had barely subsided when the film's hero - Randall Adams, the wrongly convicted man - sued the director for exclusive rights to his story. Adams wanted to tell his own story and make a profit in the process. He didn't want to be the subject of someone else's masterpiece.

Towards the end of Veiel’s documentary, we see Riefenstahl preparing for her final television interview. She scans her face in the mirror, checks the camera angles, and prepares herself again to avoid and protect herself from trouble; to present herself and her work in the most favorable light. This is perhaps the only moment in the film when I felt a little sorry for her—perhaps because it is a larger, darker version of what we all do every day. We structure our lives as a story and cast ourselves as the hero, even when the facts say otherwise. Good documentaries tell strange stories about unusual subjects. But the great ones, in my opinion, highlight a universal human weakness. They show us that, in the end, everyone behaves more or less the same—whether successful or unsuccessful, Nazi sympathizer or not. We tell the truth as we see it and hope that no one will interrupt us. We like to talk about some things. About others, not so much. /Telegraph/