By Peter Keough

Two essential documentaries look at the legacies of Leni Riefenstahl and Elie Wiesel.

The National Center for Jewish Film’s Film Festival. March 16 through 31 at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, the Museum of Fine Arts, and Showcase Superlux Chestnut Hill.

Though the Third Reich shaped both, no artists could be more opposite in their origins, aesthetics, and morality than Leni Riefenstahl and Elie Wiesel. They are the subjects of two essential documentaries in this year’s National Center for Jewish Film’s Film Festival.

A scene from Andres Veiel’s documentary, Riefenstahl.

The former is examined in Andres Veiel’s slow-burning but devastating Riefenstahl (2024; screens March 16 at 11 a.m. followed by a virtual Q&A with the director), a collage of films, photos, interviews, and other artifacts from her estate. In 1934 Riefenstahl gleefully accepted an invitation from Adolf Hitler to make a film about his Nazi Party Congress that year in Nuremberg. She had already made a splash with the Nazis with her quasi-kitschy Alpine fairy tale The Blue Light (1932), which she directed and starred in (she was also credited for the screenplay because the actual writer, Bela Balázs, was Jewish).

Eager to please her führer, and recognizing a golden opportunity for career advancement in the Reich, she turned out the spectacular Triumph of the Will (1935). It enthralled audiences around the world with its geometrically precise masses of soldiers, workers, Hitlerjungen and ecstatic followers — not to mention Hitler’s apoplectic, not yet bellicose rhetoric. The images are rousing, seductive, repetitive, and hypnotic, conveying the notion that here indeed was a great man, perhaps even the solution to the woes of a world mired in economic chaos, political uncertainty, and moral confusion.

At the very least Riefenstahl’s film furthered the myth of the inevitability and righteousness of the Nazi cause, not just for Germans but for others around the world. But, in the numerous interviews included in Veiel’s film, Riefenstahl adamantly refuses any responsibility or any awareness of the evil done. In an interview from Ray Müller’s near-hagiographic 1993 documentary The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, she gazes rapturously at sequences from Triumph of the Will and explains how she designed and executed various shots. “Is there a message?” she asks. “‘Peace, peace!’ — that is the constant in the film. There’s no mention of other political goals or motives. There’s no mention of anti-Semitism, there’s no mention of racial theory. It’s just about work and peace.”

Similar objections arise about her next PR effort for the Reich, Olympia (1938), at the time the most expensive documentary ever made. If you overlook the many adoring asides to Hitler and company in the reviewing stand and the ubiquitous Nazi regalia, it could be seen as a rousing celebration of the beauty and athleticism of the participants — most notably the Black American champion Jesse Owens. But such a focus on physical beauty, some argue, might reflect and endorse the Nazi ideal of perfect Aryan bodies (Owens notwithstanding), the obsession behind the eugenics laws that resulted in the murder of as many as 300,000 people with disabilities, deemed unworthy of life.

A journalist in a 1976 West German talk show suggests as much when he calls Riefenstahl on this fetishization and asks if she would make a film about disabled persons and not just beautiful people. She dismisses the idea, saying that wasn’t her job. Yet ironically, as Veiel demonstrates, Riefenstahl’s job did result in someone being victimized by the Nazi eugenics policy. Willy Zielke, an avant-garde filmmaker responsible for creating Olympia’s ancient Greek-set prologue, suffered a nervous breakdown during the shooting. He was committed to an asylum and only released after being involuntarily sterilized — the fate of around 400,000 other victims suffering from mental disorders during the Nazi regime.

Nonetheless, Riefenstahl could claim that these two films never led directly to any Nazi crimes, and perhaps even that she might have been unaware that such abominations were occurring. But that was not the case with her work as a war correspondent during the invasion of Poland, when her set direction to remove some Jews from a location resulted in 22 of those unwanted extras being shot. A photograph of her look of horror when this happens is perhaps the most flattering image of her in the film. But when asked about this in a 1976 interview she screams, “It’s all lies! I never saw any atrocities.” To her credit, after witnessing this massacre she immediately quit her assignment and left the war zone. But she would never admit to what she saw and, however unwittingly, instigated.

She might also have participated on another occasion in Nazi transgressions. While making her final Nazi film Tiefland in 1940 (finally released in 1954), she “procured” (Veiel’s word) as extras some 50 Roma and Sinti prisoners, mostly women and children, from an internment camp. Many of them were subsequently sent to Auschwitz and murdered. Again, when confronted with these facts, she denies any knowledge of them, even claiming that she saw all of the victims after the war and that they were alive and well.

Riefenstahl ends with an outtake from a 1999 interview for Heinrich Breloer’s docudrama Speer and Hitler: The Devil’s Architect (2005). The nonagenarian filmmaker’s features are ravaged, her eyebrows are painted on, but her vanity is undaunted. She holds up a mirror inches from her face and directs the lighting. “Can’t you block the light coming from above?” she asks. It is the light coming from the sun.

A scene from Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire.

Like Riefenstahl, Elie Wiesel saw his life changed irrevocably by the Third Reich. As recounted in Oren Rudavsky’s searing and urgent Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire (2024; screens March 20 at 6:30 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner followed by a Q&A with the director), Wiesel grew up in idyllic surroundings in a traditional Jewish settlement in the town of Sighet, Hungary. In 1944, when Wiesel was 15, they started hearing rumors that the Nazis were going to round up all the Jews and deport them. Surely that could not be true, they thought. Weren’t they an essential part of the community, loved and respected by their non-Jewish neighbors? Reading from his masterpiece Night (published in English in 1960), Wiesel recalls how, still in disbelief, he helped to distribute water to those who were being transported. A few days later, he and his family would suffer the same fate, and watched as their non-Jewish neighbors sneered at them or looked away.

Taken to Auschwitz, the family was separated. His mother and younger sister (“in the red coat she just received for Passover”) and grandmother were soon murdered, and his older sisters disappeared (they would survive and be reunited with their brother). Wiesel remembers that the last thing his mother told him was that whatever happened he and his father must stick together. And so they did, as they both witnessed unthinkable atrocities, of living infants tossed into burning ditches, of a child hanged from a gallows and taking half an hour to die because his body was so light. “Behind me,” Wiesel recalls in voice-over, “I heard ‘Where is God now?’ And I heard a voice within me answer him, ‘He is hanging here on these gallows.’”

Despite the horrors, exhaustion, terror, and hunger, father and son remained together, up until a final death march to Buchenwald, where his father died. There is a photo of Wiesel at the liberation of that camp, one of many skeletal survivors crammed into a barracks, his face gaunt, his eyes haunted, unforgettable. Though Rudavsky eloquently includes archival footage and judiciously applies the now overused device of animated reenactments (here they are powerful and expressionistic, at times reminiscent of Francis Bacon paintings), it is that face, those eyes, that voice, and those words that make this such a stunning film.

For years after the war, Wiesel (he died in 2016 at 87) remained silent about his experiences, until he wrote Night. But after that he could not stop. He would write over 50 other books and become a teacher, including four decades on the faculty of Boston University, where he transformed countless lives. Unlike Riefenstahl, he recognized that he was a witness who must never let the world forget the truth.

That included speaking truth to the most powerful. One of the most poignant, and timely, of the events recounted in Rudavsky’s film is a confrontation between Wiesel and President Ronald Reagan in 1985. The occasion was Wiesel being honored with the Congressional Gold Medal of Achievement, the highest award that the US government gives to civilians. But Wiesel was disturbed by Reagan’s upcoming plans to couple a visit to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp with a wreath-laying at Bitburg military cemetery, which included the graves of 49 members of the SS.

“That place, Mr. President, is not your place,” Wiesel tells Reagan. “Your place is with the victims of the SS.” He added, “The issue here is not politics, but good and evil. And we must never confuse them.”

Reagan, perhaps the finest actor ever to serve as President, looks deeply moved. He visited the cemetery anyway.

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).