Why Hollywood owes so much to Hitler’s favourite film-maker

Who is the most influential female film-maker of all time? Sofia Coppola? Agnès Varda? Greta Gerwig? Nope, guess again.

Some clues: her films were objects of fascination worldwide, and out-and-out blockbusters at home. They have been praised by mighty auteurs like Quentin Tarantino and Francis Ford Coppola, and when she visited Hollywood, she was given a VIP tour of Disney Animation Studios by no less a figure than Walt himself.

The 2010s superhero boom owes her an almighty debt – as does the Star Wars franchise, which contains many overt homages to her work. At the 2004 Oscars, she received a posthumous round of applause for her contributions to the cinematic arts. And she counted Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, Adolf Hitler and Madonna among her famous fans. Throughout her extraordinarily long-lasting 77-year career… erm, hang on a minute. Adolf who?

Yes, that one. Leni Riefenstahl – the woman known as Hitler’s favourite film-maker – was the director of two sweeping propaganda epics, 1935’s The Triumph of the Will and 1938’s Olympia, which remain among the most influential documentaries ever made.

Her work was instrumental in shaping the global image of Naziism as a formidably disciplined, even glamorous, and possibly unstoppable force: one national consciousness, marching to glory in lockstep. Moreover, it’s thanks to the Führer’s personal fandom and patronage that Riefenstahl still occupies the uniquely tricky position she holds in cinema today – so tricky, in fact, that it’s hard to fathom just how toxic it is.

A terrific new documentary released next month takes a stab. Directed by Germany’s Andres Veiel, it is the first film to be made with full access to Riefenstahl’s estate, and reveals an artist who spent the long second act of her life – she lived to 101 – scrambling to explain and excuse the first, with only limited (yet still in its own way startling) success.

One can reasonably question the depth and scope of Riefenstahl’s talent. She had no great flair for storytelling, and watching more than a few minutes of either Triumph of the Will or Olympia today requires a high tolerance for bottomless pomp. But the grim truth of it is that many of her images still daze and astound. In the diving sequences in Olympia, shot at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, it can be hard to fathom what the camera is even doing to achieve some of her shots, which show radiant, muscular forms tumbling through space like Matissean abstractions.

Every wham-bam team-up scene in Marvel and DC – the ensemble bits near the end that get the fanboys frothing – can trace its DNA back to Riefenstahl’s depictions of those glistening Olympian übermenschen. Just look at her starting-line shot of Jesse Owens, in which the gold-medal-winning American sprinter looks like he’s adopted The Mighty Thor’s landing pose.

American? Make that African-American. As a black athlete, Owens’s triumph was said by some to have greatly irked Hitler, who wanted the Berlin Olympiad to showcase Aryan ideals. And Riefenstahl herself would later repeatedly argue that Owens’ prominent, heroic role in the film was proof of her own disinterest in the broader Nazi cause.

Was she being honest? Over the course of Veiel’s grippingly thoughtful and rigorous film, a number of uncomfortable options emerge. A postwar tribunal found her simply to be a “fellow-traveller”, noting that she was never actually a member of the Nazi Party. As a result, she was forbidden from holding public office – but otherwise, the film says, this was an acquittal.

Yet how could it be possible that a woman who not only filmed hours of Hitler’s speeches but enjoyed a close relationship with the Nazi high command and bore witness to their soldiers’ conduct could tenably claim – as she often did – that she had spent the Thousand-Year Reich’s 12 years in the dark?

Veiel’s film unearths a 1952 letter about Riefenstahl’s time in occupied Poland 13 years previously, in which she was filming in a marketplace in Końskie and asked some Nazi officers to get rid of a group of imprisoned Jewish labourers who were spoiling her shot. Some of them overheard the order, panicked and tried to flee, and were summarily gunned down by German troops.

It also refers to two incidents during the making of her much-delayed operatic drama Tiefland, in which Riefenstahl visited holding camps near Salzburg and Babelsberg in 1940 and 1942, where she hand-picked more than 130 Romani prisoners to serve as (unpaid) extras in her film. She later claimed that all survived the war, though almost 100 are known to have been gassed at Auschwitz.

If accurate – and Riefenstahl vehemently claimed otherwise – these stories suggest at best wilful blindness; at worst, happy complicity. In the film she often splits the ethical difference, arguing that she made her films only because she was asked to, and would have equally sought to please Stalin if he’d been the one commissioning her work. (In a private letter to Hitler discovered by Veiel, she describes her films as “propaganda” – and with pride.)

Yet the truth is more complex and perhaps scarier still. Within Riefenstahl’s archive are reams of letters and recordings of telephone calls with members of the public, who would get in touch to congratulate her on her defensive and evasive talk show appearances. (Running through many was the additional suggestion that perhaps Hitler’s defeat wasn’t entirely a good thing.) In these private conversations, Riefenstahl’s public contrition is nowhere to be heard. Cinema, Naziism, war, the Holocaust: her sincerity shifts to meet the moment: it’s a reprehensible position, and one that suits the human conscience all too well.

But what of cinema’s conscience at large? After Olympia won the Mussolini Cup at the 1938 Venice Film Festival – beating Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – she travelled to America for a New York gala screening and a grand publicity tour, including meet-and-greets with Charlie Chaplin and Clark Gable. Unfortunately for her, Kristallnacht occurred five days into her trip, and her public defence of Hitler led to protests outside her hotel, as well as a unified cold shoulder from the industry, led by the predominantly Jewish studio chiefs. Well, not quite unified. Walt Disney still welcomed her to his new Burbank studio and showed her an army of animators hard at work on Fantasia.

Her plans to relocate to Hollywood scotched, she returned to Germany to begin shooting the middlingly received operatic drama Tiefland, the production for which ground on until 1954. (After its release, she would complete only one further film: a 45-minute scuba-diving documentary released in 2002.)

Yet the baleful magnificence of those two earlier propaganda works endured. They were drawn on by none other than George Lucas during the filming of Star Wars: the heroic prize-giving ceremony at the end of the 1977 original contains numerous shots influenced by The Triumph of the Will, with Princess Leia taking Der Führer’s place. At the 1974 audition of the Telluride Film Festival she was received as a guest of honour – and along with Francis Ford Coppola and the Sunset Boulevard star Gloria Swanson, received one of its inaugural grand prizes.

Her inclusion in the In Memoriam segment of the 2004 Academy Awards was a source of great controversy. But the creative world was far from united in its condemnation:

“Yes, Hitler was evil [but] ... she was a great film-maker, and as an artist myself, I think she deserved to be there”, said Elton John, while Jerry Bruckheimer, the influential producer behind Top Gun, Pearl Harbour and the Pirates of the Caribbean films, described her as “a genius…her movies were innovative and [are] still copied today”.

“Art is the opposite of politics,” she tweely insists in an early sequence in Veiel’s film, arguing her corner in yet another televised interview. But what follows makes the claim impossible to swallow. Rather, each one smilingly smooths the way for the other, and it’s up to the viewer to be on their guard.

Riefenstahl is in UK & Irish cinemas from Friday May 9