“Riefenstahl”, interview with director Andres Veiel

At the 81 Venice Film Festival, Fred Film Radio interviewed Andres Veiel, the director of “>Riefenstahl”, featured Out of Competition. A fascinating look into the private archive of Leni Riefenstahl, who rose to world fame with her Nazi propaganda film “Triumph of the Will”, but who always denied any close ties to the regime.

A detective story

When watching “Riefenstahl” you have the impression of watching a detective story. Did Andres Veiel feel like a detective called to solve a puzzle while working on the production of the documentary? “I think it’s the right approach for it because it gave hundreds of traces and you have to decide: ‘Okay, we follow up this trace’. And then we find another trace and then we find a proof or something. So it was like a puzzle and in the end we could create a very intimate close portrait of a fascist artist”.

Leni Riefenstahl: the director of her own life

To make “Riefenstahl”, Andres Veiel had to use a lot of material cataloged by the director herself. In doing so he realized that some passages of his life had been deliberately modified by Riefenstahl herself, becoming the director of her own life. “For us it was very important to understand more, not just accusing her of being a perpetrator – what she was, of course – but to understand how she became a Nazi fascist artist. And we have to go back to her youth. We could find a lot of testimonies, little notes telling about the violence of her father and violence of other men she experienced. Now, of course, this is not an excuse for her guilt, but we have to be precise, to understand her, but not to exonerate her or not to discharge her from the guilt. And this was a balance, like a title for her. We had to balance both sides. It’s very important to get a deeper insight of her character”.

Is Riefenstahl’s cinematic gaze dangerous today?

In a society where right-wing political movements have found new fertile ground and where failure is not allowed, is Leni Riefenstahl’s cinematic gaze dangerous today? “When you watch footage from military parades in Russia you can discover the aesthetics of Riefenstahl. A lot is present. And also the ideology by celebrating the strongness, the male heroism, and with the contempt of the weak. That’s the ideology of fascism. And when you think about fakeness, for example, Riefenstahl is the prototype of fakeness. And it’s so present. We have a lot of politicians that just repeat lies, and the longer they repeat the lies, they really are convinced it’s the truth. And many people believe it. When you look at Riefenstahl, you will understand how fakeness is produced, and why there’s a longing for fakeness. People need them. People need lies, and that’s horrifying”.

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