Seven hundred archival boxes filled, among other things, with letters, photographs, audio recordings, films and press clippings of the most famous filmmaker of the III.myReich: Leni Riefenstahl, director of Triumph of the will (1935), a propaganda film commissioned by Adolf Hitler, which chronicled the Nuremberg Nazi Party Congress, and stadium gods (1938), about the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games.
When she died in 2003, at the age of 101, she left the management of this estate to her partner and sole legatee, Horst Kettner, forty years her junior. These boxes contained the secrets and lies of the woman who, during her life, did not stop polishing her own legend: she did it in her Memoirs (Grasset, 1997), later in a documentary, Leni Riefenstahl, the power of images (1993), directed by Ray Müller, where he was in charge of maintaining the myth of a director who unconsciously served the Hitlerian State, without ever having adhered to its ideology.
These archives allow us to understand how this admired filmmaker – the famous English film historian Mark Cousins compares her to Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, and the American actress Jodie Foster thought about playing her on film in the 90s – tried to give of herself the image of an apolitical artist, of an aesthete who had the misfortune of living under the Nazi regime.
This version, surely already damaged by years and research, is definitively distorted in Andrés Veiel’s documentary, Leni Riefenstahl, lights and shadows (published November 27). The film serves as a “Rosetta stone” to decipher both the work and the personality of the filmmaker. It was not until December 2016, with the death of Horst Kettner, that this mountain of documents was finally accessible.
The filmmaker’s former partner tried not to divulge them. “Leni Riefenstahl had a strange relationship with him, points out Andrés Veiel. She claimed that he was not her lover, when he clearly was. He was also his secretary and cameraman. She also treated him as her “child” and could order him: “You need to eat salad and fresh fruit, I want a healthy child.” Furthermore, Kettner was linked to the German extreme right, which favored denialist theories. In Riefenstahl’s archives I found correspondence between him and the German Holocaust denier and neo-Nazi editor Ernst Zündel. »
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