Billy from Film in Revolt chatted wth Andres Veiel (Director, Riefenstahl) on his visit to Australia for the German Film Festival.
Billy Newbery:
What got you interested in Riefenstahl as a subject?
Andres Veiel:
I got access to her estate. This was a gift. It was quite a huge amount of footage. There were 200,000 photos (a lot of which were duplicates). I got her diaries. I got the drafts of her memoirs. I got a lot of handwritten notes. I got taped phone calls, which are in the film. It took a long time to digitise all of this, to know what is in which box. Actually, till the very end of the three and a half years I worked on the film, we were still discovering stuff; it was an intensive journey. I started with just two initial questions, very simple questions. First, who is Lenny Riefenatahl? Doing a close-up beyond her own legends, lies and her storytelling. The second question was, what does it mean for today? What is the topicality of Lenie Riefenstahl regarding fake news, regarding reconstructions of narrative, even regarding her biography?
Were you the first one to go through and look at what was there?
Yeah. First of all, I had three great archive researchers, and I asked them once a week, ‘what did you find’? I got a very short 10-20 pages, some sort of preparation for the writing of her memoirs, a very personal report on her experiences of violence. She wrote down a lot of situations where she experienced this violence, and it’s not in the printed memoirs. The interesting question there is, why is she writing something that didn’t get printed, and how likely is it that these experiences of violence happened? In the end, I concluded that the experience of violence is like a thread that goes through her life. She experienced it with her father in a very extreme way, with her first lover, with Goebbels, as well as most likely her husband. She always searched in a way, trying to have control over [this trauma]. Then there was another question: is there a risk of exonerating her from her responsibility by giving [people] the chance to look at her as somebody who was traumatised? Does it justify anything? No, but then it becomes a tightrope between responsibility and, at the same time, wanting to understand Leni Riefenstahl.
That’s my favourite feature of the film, that you give her so humanity, you don’t just write her off as a kind of cardboard cutout villain. Why was this so immensely important to you to give us moments of personality and understanding of her behaviour?
I knew from the beginning, she was manipulating her estate, and she was manipulating, in a way, herself too. The interesting question was not the moral issue, of course, you can make the film into a tribunal and say “here’s she lying, she’s arrogant and she doesn’t feel any remorse regarding her responsibility”. The interesting question is, why and when she’s changing, shifting toward specific storytelling, and what is the reason for it? At what point did the truth and the fabrication of stories merge to make a new truth? These were the interesting questions.
Then why does she keep so much of the archive? Is she shifting and changing her story? Is it like to have some kind of ownership over the past?
It’s not only a question of ownership, it’s a question of being the master of interpretation. For example, by taping the phone calls she got [or by keeping the letters], it was just a symbol for redemption. [People would say] “Yes, you are one of the greatest artists. How dare someone doubt it?”. Getting so much support from thousands of people and keeping everything was proof to her that she could say, “The German people still love me. I’m the hero for them. I am a star to them”. She didn’t realise how much these phone calls were costing her to be stuck in the ideology. The very last quote we use from the phone calls, somebody calls her and says, it will take one or two generations, and then Germany will find its way back to the values of virtue, decency and order. She says, “Yes, the Germans are predestined to for all these values”. One or two generations, that’s right now, and we are experiencing the far-right party, the AFD, in Germany. It’s like a prophecy. It’s more than just an estate, it’s a warning about how easily people get seduced to follow a very simplistic ideology of supremacy of us and them. If we are better than them because of our origin, our nation, our birth, date of birth, place of birth, and it’s a very concerning situation.
In the film, you include a clip of her saying that she believed politics is the opposite of art. Do you believe there is any separation between the two?
No, it’s, of course, you can’t separate them, not at all. For me, it’s not only naive but even dangerous when colleagues of mine, Tarantino, for example, consider her to be one of the most important filmmakers ever. It’s a quote of Tarantino’s, and I think of Lucas, who in Star Wars, is quoting her aesthetics. She has a lot of people who admire her still today and who separate aesthetics from politics. Look at Olympia, there’s what I call the night side of aesthetics. There is the celebration of this heroism, of the strength, of the superiority of certain people who are “better than”. It’s the contempt for weakness, the contempt of the imperfect body, of being old, being sick, being whatever. If people don’t fit into the scheme of superiority, they get humiliated, they get excluded, and Nazi regime showed in the very end, they get killed. There’s value in the human being, in both weak and strong. You can’t just exclude people because of something like that. That’s a very current topic, and that was one of the reasons why I thought we had to do this film on Riefenstahl. She’s a “role model”; for that type of thinking, you can call a prototype of fascism.
The film is quite complicated, structurally. How did you come up with that structure? Not just going from fact to fact but exploring who she was side by with, exploring her history in a nonlinear fashion. Was that on the paper, or did it come about in the edit?
Well, we worked for 18 months on the edit, so it was not a straight structure. It’s always a long search. I’ll give you an example, the scene with the violence of the Father was tricky because if you put it after she is the catalyst of a massacre, it seems like we want to exonerate her guilt. That we want to show she’s also a victim of the violence of her father and other men. If we put it too early, it also has some sort of exoneration because then we start to look at her like she’s innocent. After all, she’s also a victim. It was a long search to find the right place for this sequence. In the early days, we wanted to cover her whole life, showing her as an old lady at the age of 100, with her many complicated health problems. All she wanted was to walk up a small hill, but it was impossible for her. You can pity her, I had some empathy for her because to become old is the greatest challenge of life. Then I asked Is this the message? No, this is not the right ending, not in the case of linear regressors. We had to give the feeling of getting suffocated through the presence of her ideas, the renaissance of these ideas, and the ideology. There’s no space to tell the story of her life from A to Z, from birth to death. This is something you have to find out during the process. You have to ask yourself again and again, what is the crucial message? Don’t just tell every part of the story just because you can; that’s a film of 300 minutes. It means you have to kill your darlings. Kill very emotional, strong scenes. There’s a lot of stuff that is not in the film, which is painful, but that’s what directing is about: saying goodbye.
Even though the finished film was able to cover so much of her life and had so many scenes, somehow the film has a lot of breathing space. Giving the viewer these quiet moments, usually only punctuated by wonderfully tactile sounds, to sit and reflect for a second. What was the sound design process like for this film to create these quiet moments?
It’s so important to me, the relationship between silence, sound, and music. It started with a long journey with the very excellent editors who created a lot of the cinematographic language. We had so much audio from the phone calls, from the conversation she taped with her friends and colleagues. We had to find what was right, what we could deal with the lack of footage. We originally tried to work with graphic novels like rotoscoping. Like Waltz with Bashir did, but it was not the right solution, to cover up these moments, which lacked footage. It felt like a comment, an ironic comment; it wasn’t reflective enough, and if you only illustrated parts of her storytelling with comics, suddenly you don’t take it too seriously. I felt she had to deconstruct her life.
Regarding the music, it becomes how much we use the music as a comment, or is the use of music something just simply helps to make the scene stronger. No, it must be something in between. In a scene like the shooting of Olympia, I always said there must be a little contradiction in it, it can go for big but not too strong, not entirely. It’s something you have to balance. It was a great work of the composer Freya Arde, who offered layouts from the very beginning, even before we had a rough cut, which was great. Then we have the competition between sound design and music in silence.
Most of the composers, I would say, 99% of them, want to showcase their abilities, and the sound designers want to do the same. They want to show you all they deliver in the mi,x and always ask for a reduction. Minimise everything. We have a short dialogue, reduce it because it needs some space for the voices. Here we have the interesting sound design, or music. I would often ask the sound designer to reduce it a little bit more or ask the musician to develop the music. Sometimes I tell the composer to use the sound design as a starting point and develop the music out of the sound design. It’s a very interesting journey.
My last question is, as you said earlier in this political time, it’s easy to fall into this kind of very black and white ideology because it’s simple. What do you think people can do, or can read, or how can they reflect enough to avoid these kinds of traps of power?
I think it’s one of the important lessons of how easily normal people get seduced by an ideology that is, in the end, responsible for the humiliation and eventual death of millions of people. These people are not evil by birth. It’s partly education, it’s partly historical events, and the economic situation all have an influence. We can be aware of how easily there can be a sudden shift. We have to know. We have to have insight. To be careful about how easily we can long for simple solutions, long for a scapegoat. It’s not just this or that leader, it’s us. Riefenstahl is not a monster, she is not an alien of evil. Alien. She comes from the middle of society, and there are many, many Riefenstahls among us.
I hope the film will be seen by a lot of young people, because it’s they who have to deal with a democracy that is threatened. They have to deal with a society that tends to be shameless. Ten or twenty years ago, people were convinced that to be better than this kind of supremacy, there was some sort of shame still present. Now, the shame is gone, and that’s the difference. People are proud of provoking others, proud of telling fake news that they know is fake news. I wish for a huge audience for the film, not just because I want people to watch it, but so people can debate. Some people will criticise, and that’s okay, but we need open debates.
Riefenstahl
German Film Festival