This article is taken from the May 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
“My life would have been easier if I’d died at the peak of my career,” Leni Riefenstahl is shown observing in Riefenstahl, a new documentary. As it was, the film director most closely associated with the Nazis would live until 2003, meaning that she spent close to 60 years defending actions taken over the course of a single decade.
And what a decade it must have seemed at the time. Adolf Hitler and Josef Goebbels saw in Riefenstahl both a physical and a creative ideal. She was asked to document the Nuremberg rallies of 1933 and 1934 and the Berlin Olympics of 1936. Her films expressed the Nazi view of themselves and the world. This was fully reciprocated: decades after her first meeting with the Führer, after his nature had been fully exposed, she spoke without any evident embarrassment of his “magnetic force”.
There is a possible interpretation of such language as refreshing honesty, an acknowledgement by the speaker that they had fallen under an evil spell. But Riefenstahl always argued she had no need to feel guilt: she had been present during the Nazi project but not involved; her films were documentaries, not propaganda.
In this way, it became clear, she spoke for many Germans who, 30 years after the war had ended, were tired of being told they should feel bad about what had happened in their country. After she made this case on a TV show, she was inundated with calls and letters urging her to keep up the fight.
But Riefenstahl’s willingness to say what others thought was only part of the reason she was, and remains, an object of fascination. The other factor was her undeniable artistic importance. Her often brilliant filmmaking, with its innovative camera and editing techniques, is a standing refutation of the comforting myth that great art only comes from the good guys.
Of course, she denied being a propagandist for the regime. She had simply worked with it. Filmmaking has always been an expensive business, and any director offered an unlimited budget will be tempted to compromise their ideals. Riefenstahl’s case was that, like so many of her countrymen, she simply went along with the flow.
When we see her asked about the places where that flow ended up, Riefenstahl clutches her hands as she tries to explain that she never knew about any of that stuff. Like so many other Germans after the war, she insisted that it had all been kept secret from her. The filmmakers, using her own archive, find evidence that suggests she might have been rather more complicit.
But even without those revelations, such claims deserve to be treated with a great “Oh yeah?” The film doesn’t make this point, but German cinema had a rich pool of talent in 1930. After 1933 that pool suddenly became a lot shallower, for some reason. Did Riefenstahl ever wonder why the Jews she’d worked with suddenly decided to move abroad? She would have us believe not.
In fact, as the film goes on, it becomes clear that Riefenstahl was fully engaged with the national project. We see her unalloyed delight in old age as she rewatches scenes from Triumph of the Will.
Any of us might take joy in work we had done at the peak of our powers, and yet there is not even a scintilla of unease here that all the marching and swastikas that she so stirringly captured were part of a terrible journey. Or indeed that even in 1934, the shape of that journey’s destination was already becoming clear.
She was moved, she said, by “the harmony between outer beauty and inner beauty”. There was certainly outer beauty on display at the Berlin games, and perhaps, if you like that kind of thing, at Nuremberg. But inner? Riefenstahl allows its subject to condemn herself.
Where the documentary fails is in explaining her importance as a filmmaker, the reason that she continues to matter today. Another biographical documentary of a difficult artist, Love, Charlie, does a better job on that score.
I’ll confess to never having heard of Charlie Trotter, a Chicago chef of legend. I may not be alone in that: this film was released in the US four years ago and is only getting a UK release now, possibly following the success of The Bear, a fictional tale of obsessive Chicago chefs. Trotter, we learn, was the father of them all, opening a restaurant in the city in 1987 that was quickly rated one of the best in the world.
This is an affectionate portrait of a brilliant, difficult man. “It was not easy,” his mother sighs, remembering him as a child. His first wife describes someone who was wonderful and uncontainable but also impossible to live with. “Some chefs have great marriages and others have great restaurants,” Trotter is supposed to have told a friend, “and I want to have a great restaurant.”
He achieved that and continued achieving it for a long time, but that idol failed, as idols must. The Michelin Guide began reviewing Chicago restaurants in 2010, the result, arguably, of Trotter’s work in the city. But it gave three stars to the restaurant of one of his protegés and only two to him. He died soon after, aged only 54, but still, as it turned out, having passed his peak.
