Riefenstahl

Leni Riefenstahl is considered one of the most controversial women of the 20th century. Her iconographic imagery of ‘Triumph of the Will’ and ‘Olympia’ stands for perfectly staged body worship, for the celebration of the superior and victorious. At the same time, they also symbolise what these images do not tell: the contempt for the imperfect, the supposedly sick and weak, the superiority of some over others. The aesthetics of their images are more present than ever - and therefore also their message?
The film explores this question using documents from Riefenstahl's estate - private films and photos, recorded telephone conversations with close companions, personal letters. Image by image, facet by facet, the film uncovers fragments of her biography and places them in an expanded context of history and the present.
Riefenstahl's penchant for celebrating the beauty of well-toned bodies did not begin in the 1930s. As a ‘wishful son’, she is at the mercy of her father's brutal upbringing. In the 1920s, this ‘training’ continued on her film sets. She wants to keep up with her fellow actors - all men who glorify the First World War as a great time. And who are prepared to rally ‘in front of the Führer's flag’.


She uses the images from ‘Triumph of the Will’ to describe herself: Organised power and grandeur, demonstration of the controlled body, trimmed for victory. Her strict denial of recognising the interaction of her art with the terror of the regime after the war is more than just a defensive guilt: in personal documents, she mourns her ‘murdered ideals’.
She thus stands for many who, in letters and recorded telephone calls from her estate, dream of an organising hand that will finally clean up the ‘shitty state’. Then her work would also experience a renaissance, in one or two generations - what if they are right?

‘The hundred-year history of Leni Riefenstahl's life and impact is a key to understanding the mechanisms of manipulation that we are encountering again today.’ - Sandra Maischberger