German Film Festival 2025 - Hildegard & Leni.

  The Sinner

Movie enthusiasm took a sudden upswing in the fifties. The London National Film Theatre occupied the South Bank site. The ”Version Originale” movement expanded from  Paris’ Le MacMahon, in a country where foreign films had traditionally been dubbed with the numbers cut out of musicals, meaning that there was a whole new audience of all the people who had only seen French versions. This new enthusiasm meant that subtitles copies briefly became the norm as other markets struggled to cash in. You could hear Louis de Funes’s voice!  Even in distant Australia, promoters woke up to the fact that there was an influx of people who wanted to experience the language of the old country and community businesses bought up abandoned suburban picture houses to show (usually untranslated)  foreign product.

Not to be left out, the two major circuits repurposed city fringe theatres to foreign speaking operations using the new wave of captioned copies and providing serious competition to the sleepy “Art” house industry. Brigitte Bardot would become a household name. There’s that scene in Newsfront where Old Cinesound hand Bill Hunter, looking at a foreign language venue, deplores losing what had been an outlet for their product -  to dirty movies.

However, before this German film production had resurrected and they had a hit,  Curt Maetzig’s 1946 Die Mörder sind unter uns/The Murderers Are Among Us (the original title of Fritz Lang’s M) starring a young beginner actress named Hildergard Knef. That one never made it to Australia but her scandalous (five seconds of nudity) Die suderein/ The Sinner hit Hoyts Paris, becoming the first German film I ever saw, even if it was dubbed - not the atrocity it sounds as the track was almost entirely voice over and played pretty much as well as the original, which half a century later made it to SBS.  Fraulein Knef also had the lead in Film ohne titel, produced by Helmut Käutner,  the first film made in the British Sector. It turned up here as a single, untranslated sixteen millimeter print. I had that one voice-overed for the Sydney Film Society, one of our successes.

Knef, re-birthed Neff for a short career after Anatol Litvak took her to Hollywood,  was big in my first contact with serious movies, so the documentary Ich will alles. Hildegard Knef / I Want It All about her life was a priority. I didn’t feel my expectations were met.

There are two major problems. Knef saw chanson as her strength and the film is largely made up of her husky voiced renditions of torchy songs taken from dupey TV Variety show kinerecordings, blown up in the wrong shape. Film clips (Murderers..., Decision Before Dawn and Fedora) are disturbingly brief, presumably to economise on royalty payments. Litvak and Käutner don’t rate a mention, though she does have a kind word for Julien Duvivier and Billy Wilder. English later husband actor manager David Cameron gets more attention. 

The film follows “The Gift Horse”, her best seller autobiography and flashes back to her teen aged exploit getting herself up in uniform to join her Tobis Executive  lover, conscripted to the front line in the final days of the WW2 - dramatic material but it does bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the old Henry King movie She Went to War. Neff coincidentally makes a brief, sexy, wasted appearance in King’s drear The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Ich will alles' comparison between her cosmetic surgery and the unmasking scene in Fedora is more telling.

I can understand her brushing her British films under the mat - including a Hammer piece with sea monsters but, in with the dross that wasted her talents, Hidgerdard Knef did notch up a Jenny in the Staudte Three Penny Opera, Marc Allegret’s Dedée Danvers, a nice role in Roy Baker’s Night Without Sleep, a TV Laura with Anton Walbrook and probably a quite a bit more in all those other inaccessible titles. I would have really enjoyed seeing her do “Silk Stockings” with Don Ameche on Broadway. She hung in there and went on displaying the talent that was attention grabbing in those first German rubble movies.

 As for  I Want It All, by and large I prefer Kai Wessel's 2009 fiction film Hilde with Heike Makatsch as Knef.

Veiel

When I saw that the German Film Festival had also come up with Andreas Veiel's new documentary about Leni Riefenstahl my first reaction was "Not again!" We've already got a couple by Ray Müller along with Annette Baumeister's  Eiskalte Leidenschaft - Leni Riefenstahl und Arnold Fanck zwischen Hitler und Hollywood but I felt duty-bound to investigate. 

White Hell

Leni was a great subject - glamorous young dancer, attracted to the silent mountaineering movies of Dr. Arnold Fank, by a metro poster for Berg des schicksals, she became their star in a succession of the most impressive German films of the nineteen twenties, a summit their cinema would never re-capture. Having the lead in Der wiesse holle von Piz Palu, where Fank was joined by Georg Willhelm Pabst, would alone give her prominence in film history but Leni was just starting. She directed her own mountain movie  Das blaue Licht - Eine Berglegende aus den Dolomiten and, with a change of government which you may have heard about, someone was needed to film the National Socialists' Nuremberg Rallies.  Leni got the gigs and her two-hour 1935 Triumph des Willens/ Triumph of the Will became one of the most expensive and ultimately most controversial non-fiction films of all time. 

Germany was up to host the 1936 Olympics and Leni, on a roll, got to film that one too. The new film finds her freshly accessible personal archive documenting the premiere as the high point of her life, where she clutched an armful of Roses expressed to her by Chancellor Adolf Hitler. She would later report back that first run audiences through Europe would cheer when he came up on screen.

However things were not going to be that simple. A stint as a WW2 war correspondent in Poland faced her with troops executing Jewish workers and she begged off to get back to her opera movie, where events caught up with her again as she used gypsies on their way to a death camp as extras. For the rest of her life, Leni Riefenstahl would be a celebrity fending off accusations of complicity in Nazi atrocities. Forget about Fank (who barely gets a mention here) Pabst, the Matterhorn, Piz Palu and the Dolomites. Forget about her technical innovations and massive organising skills. We want to know about Adolf Hitler. Leni Reifenstahl was paying the piper for the remainder of a remarkably long and conspicuous life, while litigating defamation cases or fighting off the allegations of TV hosts, whose invitations she was sufficiently unwary to accept. Her time-off to do imposing still photos in Africa and her underwater documentary were never going to compete with her status as the Fuhrer's favorite movie star.

I've never bought the notion of Leni as a great artist excused by her talent. That's the De Quincey was a drug addict ploy (does anyone still read Thomas De Quincey?) and it's being played out right now in the Gerard Depardieu trial. Veiel's  Reifenstahl isn't arguing that. It shows little sympathy for its subject, finding her at least guilty of naivety at a time when that was a capital offence. What it does show is how the judgment of history is formed. Leni Reifenstahl was doomed by being a glamorous celebrity who delighted in having herself filmed in the company of an infamous dictator, a man who compounded his offences by losing in the all-time most destructive military adventure. She was always going to be remembered in accounts like this as someone who danced bare assed in the Greek prologue of her Nazi games movie - even if they don't include that piece here, though we do see her, remarkably well preserved, directing the lighting of her own TV close up.

Veiel's 115 minutes provide space for support characters like Albert Speer outlasting his life sentence or Ernst The Devil's General Udet performing what looks like his famous airobatic, where he would do a flypast picking a handkerchief off the runway with a hook on his wing tip. There's a brief, informative sequence of Leni sitting at Arnold Fank's prototype editing table in a meticulously ordered cutting room - with lengths of inflammable Nitrate Film draped about her neck.

Personally I find the Rally and Olympics films monstrously tedious, though the footage can be impressive in other hands - William Hornbeck collaging sequences for Capra's The Nazis Strike, the downwards shot of the marching troops looped to a perspective-free title background for Project 20:The Twisted Cross and, in this film, where they break out her coverage of adoring women welcoming Hitler, or the slomo of the naked discus thrower backed briefly by the original score. I don't think that Leni Riefenstahl would be delighted to find that her achievement was in setting up the most impressive stock shot library of her time.

Despite my resistance, I came out of Andres Veiel's film feeling I had a better understanding of the Leni Riefenstahl phenomenon and the mechanism of entering history. I couldn't help comparing her Mountaineering Movie co-star Luis Trenker, here glimpsed only once unidentified in a wide shot. He was shafted twice. He missed out on Piz Palu when Pabst recruited lantern-jawed Gustav Diessl, his own regular leading man, and Trenker was turned down for the Olympics movie because he offended Joseph Goebbels. A Swiss National, Trenker went off to Italy and made adventure films for the rest of his career. He came out of WW2 without a stain on his character, though Leni would sue him because his autobiography said she made it with Hitler - something omitted from Veiel's movie, which also leaves out her more plausible pairing with decathlon champion and movie Tarzan Glenn Morris, when they shared their Olympics. 

Nobody under sixty now recognises Trenker's name. What happened to Ray Müller's proposed film about him?

Leni & Luis - The Holy Mountain.

Later Leni






Barrie Pattison - 2025