Riefenstahl proves that the best documentary subjects are monsters

I don’t want to talk about it,” Leni Riefenstahl used to say when she was asked about her past. The German director was happy to discuss her pioneering cinematic techniques, her trailblazing credentials and her redemptive later work with the Nuba people of Sudan. But there was one pesky subject that she preferred to give a wide berth: her role as the ultimate Nazi propagandist. Riefenstahl would go on to survive the Third Reich by nearly 60 years, dying in 2003 at the age of 101. That’s six decades of deflection, distortion and avoidance. “I don’t want to talk about it” practically became the woman’s catchphrase.

If you thrill to the sight of animals being cornered and criminals run to ground, there is much to relish in Riefenstahl, Andres Veiel’s new documentary on the original cancelled artist. It’s an exhaustive and surely definitive portrait, combing Riefenstahl’s personal archive, filling in the blanks, and presenting its subject warts and all. Veiel isn’t remotely interested in hosting a hatchet job here. He acknowledges Riefenstahl’s intuitive artistry and technical prowess and shows how Olympia – her 1938 film on the Berlin Olympics – advanced the medium in leaps and bounds. But he also dismantles the great director’s defence. Time and again Riefenstahl would protest that she was an artist and not a politician, that her films were pure and peace-loving affairs and that she never had much interest in Nazism anyway. The one thing she was guilty of was her complete and utter innocence.

The evidence, no surprise, tells a rather different story. History records that Riefenstahl was dazzled by Hitler and overjoyed to work as the Reich’s official myth-maker. Moreover, although she claimed to have no knowledge of the Holocaust, investigators later found that she may have indirectly caused a massacre by ordering Jewish workers to be removed from a street scene she was filming. At one point in Veiel’s documentary, a TV interviewer asks whether it’s true that she used to visit the cinema with Joseph Goebbels (an estimated 10 times, according to Goebbels’ diary). Riefenstahl is incandescent and promptly explodes with rage. She doesn’t want to talk about it.

In the best possible way, Riefenstahl is a monstrous subject. She’s unsympathetic and drags dark history behind her. She’s a fake and a liar, constantly batting up against the hard glass of reality and prone to fly off the handle whenever she’s held to account. All of which is to say that she’s a documentary-maker’s dream. Every film is a collaboration between the director and their subject. The latter provides the raw meat and draws the basic story arc. But they also leave gaps to be filled and falsehoods to unpick. They’re telling one story and the director is telling another, and it is this tension – this friction – that’s a recipe for good drama. It almost doesn’t matter that Riefenstahl is long dead and can’t be questioned in person by Veiel. She’s left incriminating letters, false statements and a trove of car-crash TV interviews for us all to peruse.

On balance, I prefer documentaries in which the subject doesn’t want to talk than the ones in which they do. I like it when they have to be chivvied into facing inconvenient truths, or where their chatter is a distraction, or a puzzle to solve. Andrew Jarecki’s true-crime investigation The Jinx famously ended with its chief suspect – accused killer Robert Durst – caught on a hot mic and apparently confessing his crimes. But in films, as in life, smoking guns are a rarity. The truth is elusive; friction is a given. Most good documentaries are an ongoing squabble between two or more points of view.

It’s the director’s decision how much of this squabble they show. Filmmakers such as Nick Broomfield or Louis Theroux lift the bonnet and expose the engine, effectively casting themselves as co-stars in the drama. Others maintain a lower profile and like to keep the ugly negotiations backstage. The cartoonist Robert Crumb hated the idea of appearing in a documentary, but his good friend Terry Zwigoff begged and pleaded for his permission (legend has it that Zwigoff intimated that he might shoot himself if the film didn’t happen). The director then whipped up a gloriously dark and twisted picture – Crumb (1994) – which painted the Crumbs as the most dysfunctional American family this side of the Mansons. The cartoonist, on seeing the finished work, was horrified.

The Oscar-winning director Errol Morris is known for his down-the-barrel interrogations of controversial US figures (Steve Bannon, Donald Rumsfeld, Holocaust-denier Fred A Leuchter). But his finest achievement remains The Thin Blue Line (1988), a forensic examination of a policeman’s murder in Dallas. Morris’s documentary gives us not just one unsympathetic subject, but scores of them; an unstable rogues’ gallery of false witnesses and outright liars, casual incompetents and wall-eyed crazies. The Thin Blue Line brilliantly navigated this minefield of untruths. It identified the real killer and freed an innocent man from death row. But the dust had barely settled when the film’s hero – the wrongly convicted Randall Adams – promptly sued the director for the sole rights to his story. Adams wanted to tell it his way and earn some money on the side. He didn’t want to be the subject of someone else’s masterpiece.

Towards the end of Veiel’s documentary, we see Riefenstahl steeling herself for a final TV grilling. She studies her face in the mirror, checks the camera angles and prepares yet again to duck and block her way out of trouble; to present herself and her work in the most flattering light. This is about the only time in the film that I felt some sympathy for the woman, if only because it’s a grander, grimmer version of what we all do every day. We frame our lives as a story and cast ourselves as the hero, even when the evidence suggests otherwise. Good documentaries tell outlandish tales about unusual subjects. But the great ones, I think, spotlight a commonplace human frailty. They show us that everyone in the end behaves in much the same way, whether they’re successes or failures, Nazi sympathisers or not. We tell the truth as we see it and pray that our listeners won’t interrupt. We love to talk about certain subjects. Other ones, not so much.

‘Riefenstahl’ is in cinemas from 9 May