Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl’s four-hour 1938 documentary—a purported masterpiece on the Berlin Olympic Games—is impossible to get through in its entirety. You can’t do it, not without several thumb leans on “Fast-Forward” to skip the dull parts. Her work has that in common with porn. It shares lots of the same characteristics, actually: an obsession with slick, perfect athletic bodies; monotony; repetitive floggings; manipulated states of arousal.
The way to view Olympia is to sample it after watching the new documentary Riefenstahl, directed by Andres Veiel, a film that is genuinely impossible to turn off or away from. That work, which is now available for American audiences to stream, will be of interest to anyone concerned about the seductive creep of Nazism on a populace, especially given the tenor of modern right-wing movements in Europe and America. After World War II, Riefenstahl insisted that she was a “naive,” apolitical artist who had simply pursued her aesthetic obsession with “beauty” and knew nothing of the Nazi atrocities as they were happening. Veiel, an award-winning German filmmaker whose previous subjects include the left-wing terrorist group Baader-Meinhof and a Jewish-Palestinian collaborative-theater company, set out to resolve the questions of whether she was truly Nazi-neutral, and whether her aesthetic was really so innocent.
These questions are important, given Riefenstahl’s enduring influence; her work is still taught in cinema classes for her monumental camera shots. The film critic and historian Mark Cousins has called her “the most technically talented Western filmmaker” next to Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock. Her body ideals have also hung around for decades, disguised as harmless expressions of “art” and “sport.” Veiel’s conclusion: Riefenstahl was a fascist at heart whose aesthetic was inseparable from Hitler’s. She was “infected” by his ideas, Veiel told me, and “totally enthusiastic” about Nazism.
An arch-seducer, Riefenstahl knowingly slipped Hitler’s ideas into Germany’s stadiums and theaters through imagery: boy flag bearers with chests like Kevlar in the orgiastic pageant Triumph of the Will (1935); the sleek, statuesque forms of young athletes in Olympia—which contains a weird amount of nudity—suggesting German strength and virility. To audiences wearied by disorder, she offered images of perfect lines and perfect bodies. “There’s an attraction, and there’s also a choreography,” Veiel told me. “It’s the dream of an organizing hand.”
Toward the end of her long life, lengthened no doubt by the galvanic forces of malevolence and inexhaustible narcissism—she died in 2003, at 101—Riefenstahl was asked if she wished to apologize for her complicity with the Nazi Party. “I don’t know what I should apologize for,” Riefenstahl said. “I cannot apologize, for example, for having made the film Triumph of the Will. It won the top prize. All my films won the top prize.”
There you have her. Riefenstahl is largely based on material that Veiel and his producer, Sandra Maischberger, accessed from Riefenstahl’s estate, including 700 boxes of letters, photos, and recordings, explored in film for the first time. Riefenstahl portrays a physical and emotional bully who stage-managed everything she did—including reenactments of Olympic-medal performances in order to perfect her imagery—and lied about much of it. A piece of candid footage from her late-career work on the Nuba Tribe in Sudan shows her using a stick to swat her subjects around.
Riefenstahl’s insistence on perfection in her frames may even have provoked German soldiers to murder a work party of Polish Jews, according to material uncovered by Veiel. In 1939, Riefenstahl followed the Wehrmacht into Poland to film footage of its victories, and paused in the village of Końskie. A 1952 letter from a Nazi adjutant to Riefenstahl’s ex-husband, a Wehrmacht major, describes how Riefenstahl, in pursuit of a more beautiful shot of German soldiers, demanded that “the Jews” be “removed” from her frame. According to the letter, “It ended up sounding like, ‘Get rid of the Jews!’” Shots rang out, and 22 people were killed.
Given this context, the handsomeness in Riefenstahl’s films becomes almost suffocating to watch, because you have to consider the costs of achieving it. What stands out is not her innovative lens work but her appalling closeness to Hitler, who gave her carte blanche in everything she did. In both Triumph and Olympia, Riefenstahl’s cameras are right at his elbow, so intimate with him that you can count the hairs on the nape of his neck.
Triumph has been regarded as Riefenstahl’s most Nazi-ish film. But Olympia is actually the more menacing work, precisely because it’s considered more benign and laudable. After the war, she worked strenuously to position Olympia as evidence of her neutrality toward Nazism. In 1958 she claimed it was an independently commissioned sports film for the International Olympic Committee, made over the objections of Joseph Goebbels, who tried to obstruct her. This was an utter lie, as German bureaucratic records show. The film was wholly funded by Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda with an astronomical budget for the time, which he personally took to Hitler’s cabinet for approval. Her crew of 50 cameramen was supplemented by an order from the government that all of the weekly German news shows were to make their footage available to her.
Leni Riefenstahl and cinematographer Walter Frentz at work at the Summer Olympics in Berlin 1936. (Edward Roth / Alamy)
Again, the film has an intimacy: You can practically see up the shorts of the pole vaulters and high jumpers as they jackknife over the bars, because Riefenstahl was allowed to bury cameras in the pits. In one lingering shot, Riefenstahl dwells on the muscled haunch of the sprinter Jesse Owens at the starting line. According to Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich, Hitler was agitated by Owens’s four-gold-medal performance, and declared that Black athletes were jungle primitives who should be excluded from future competitions. Riefenstahl’s shots of Owens, his definition and tendons vividly etched in the film, are thus not admiring, but rather racialized. In a snippet from Veiel’s film, Riefenstahl explains her fascination with Owens’s thighs. “It was the first time I’d ever seen Black people, and I was electrified.” She added, “They were very well built and moved like big cats.”
Riefenstahl read Mein Kampf in 1932. As she says on a recording in the documentary, discussing one of Hitler’s speeches, “I was somehow captured, as if by a magnetic force.” Among the things she read was Hitler’s ranting claim that Germans were the racial inheritors of the classical Greeks and their athletic-beauty ideal, though this inheritance was imperiled by Jews, aliens, syphilitics, tuberculars, cripples, and imbeciles.
In Olympia, Riefenstahl translates these noxious ideas to film, almost verbatim. Its opening section is a staged contemplation of Grecian German bodies: a bronzed young man clad only in a loincloth throws javelins, celebrated by topless “temple dancers,” and a classical statue of a discus thrower resolves into the nude form of the German decathlete Erwin Huber. Later, in a bogus scene set in the Olympic Village, muscled athletes cavort in a lake, their buttocks shining in the sun, and repair to a steam bath together. The cinematographer who shot these scenes was named Willy Zielke, and Riefenstahl worked closely with him. He had a nervous breakdown after filming and was declared mentally ill, committed to an asylum, and forcibly sterilized under a Nazi law meant to stamp out weakness.
Riefenstahl picked her subject well with Olympia. The real beauty of sport lies in the continual struggle against imperfection, glaring weaknesses both inner and outer. But when triumph is overcelebrated and conflated with moral virtue, it easily tips over into fascism, designating some people as inherently inferior and others as more valuable. Olympia has this unbearable coldness—which makes it not one of the best documentaries ever, as Time magazine’s Richard Corliss called it in 2005, but one of the worst and most untruthful.
After the war, Riefenstahl’s career included invitations to film festivals and critical praise, a lovely lake home in Bavaria, and snarling attacks on anyone who questioned her lies. In a final scene of Riefenstahl, Veiel shows her prepping for a TV interview with a goblin’s smile that turns sour as she stages her own close-up, directing the cameraman to do something about the harsh overhead light while she stares into a hand mirror.
Riefenstahl saved recordings of phone calls with ex-Nazis and sympathizers who rang her up to offer support against the “swine” condemning her as her version of facts came into question. Veiel plays these, and they’re as indicting as anything else in the film. In one recording, a man gutterally congratulates her for portraying “the most beautiful human beings, and not the cripples!” Another tells her that in one or two generations, Germany will return to its old values of “morality, decency, and virtue.” Riefenstahl replies: “Yes. The German people are predestined for that.”
Knowing all of this, what should we do with Riefenstahl’s work? Bury it? On the contrary, Veiel told me: Watch it. Riefenstahl is a “warning,” he said, and “an instrument of diagnosis.” She was a virtuoso at persuading a needy, disordered population to accept the “organizing hand,” and that is surely something for modern audiences to beware of. She also demonstrated that fascism doesn’t take hold just through authoritarian state measures. It happens through sports and film, the flattening of national culture into a fetishistically rigid single aesthetic. “If we just put her in some sort of coffin and sink her at the deepest point of the Pacific or the Atlantic, it doesn’t make sense, because we don’t get rid of it,” Veiel said. “We have to deal with it, and we have to look.”
Watch Riefenstahl’s work. Watch it for its skin-deep enticement, its powerful visual devices, but also its concealed malignancy.
