Parky At the Pictures (9/5/2025)

(Reviews of The Extraordinary Miss Flower; Riefenstahl; and The Last Musician of Auschwitz)

THE EXTRAORDINARY MISS FLOWER.

Having co-directed the stylised Nick Cave biodoc, 20,000 Days on Earth (2014), Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard have reunited for The Extraordinary Miss Flower. Inspired by the letters and telexes left following by writer Geraldine Flower her untimely death, this is an ambitious blend of commemorative celebration and performance piece that has been produced by Zoe Flower, who shared the documents left behind by her mother to her friend, the Icelandic musician Emilíana Torrini, who was sufficiently inspired to write an award-winning album that now forms the core of this uniquely innovative feature.

A narrator (Sophie Ellis-Bextor) mourns the decline of the art of letter writing, as it establishes `a personal, private, permanent connection with another human being', while also allowing us to retain a memento of `who we were and who we thought we'd be'. She also reveals that Geraldine Flower was an Australian who found herself in London in the 1960s. When she died in 2019, her daughter found a box of letters from various admirers in her flat. These caught the imagination of Emilíana Torrini, who gazes into the camera to explain how the correspondence prompted her to write a collection of songs for her first album in a decade.

Geraldine (Caroline Catz) sits at a table in a mocked-up café and recalls how she had allowed herself to fall under the spell of a magician in Ankara. He performs a card trick for her, urges her to consort with extraordinary people, and reads from a letter in which the writer insists, `I am in withdrawal from you like a Prague junkie.' Another missive, read in monochrome by Richard Ayoade, compares her to an Australian wine that has to be sipped before the glass can be drained.

This leads into the first song, `Miss Flower', in which the band members are introduced by on-screen labels: Liam Hutton, Ian Kellett, Simon Byrt, Lovísa Elísabet Sigrúnardóttir, and Mara Carlyle. A montage of archival footage ensues, as a female voice describes the kind of men who wrote to Geraldine and their motives for so doing. Suddenly, Geraldine is being interrogated in a bright light because two agents are convinced that the terminology used in a letter (read by Siggi Baldursson) feels related to spycraft.

The band plays `Black Water', which segues into the seductive, but admonitory `Waterhole', with its reminders about messing up. As before, the song cross-cuts between studio shots and dance routines that are recorded with conspicuous camera trickery. Torrini asks Geraldine if the man who sent the letter was a spy and she confides that another chap, named Reggie (Mark Monero), might also have been involved in espionage. He had mentioned marrying her so that she could stay in the UK when her visa expired. But he had not proposed and wrote about the regret he had felt as her plane had taken off.

This takes us into `Dreamers', which Torrini pauses halfway through so she can consult with Geraldine about whether she loved Reggie or not. She admits that she had several lovers on the go and smiles at the tricks he had played on her. An extract from a letter about a 70 year-old lover who is 28ft long leads into `Lady K', a song about a boat that is accompanied by a variation on the sailors' hornpipe. This is followed by an intermission, in which a serpentine dance is mesmerisingly performed by Viva Seifert to a melancholic piano and a bowed saw tune entitled `Dreaming Through the Floorboards'.

A TV presenter (Alice Lowe) appears to fill in some of Geraldine's background. Her Australian father and Irish mother had met in London during the Second World War and she had been born in 1947. One of three siblings, she had been raised in Newcastle and Sydney, where she had attended Abbotsleigh, a progressive school for young ladies whose principal, Betty Archdale, had written Geraldine a testimonial commending her brightness and her likelihood to be a worthwhile individual once she settled down.

Coming to London, Geraldine became the centre of a group of friends and their good times are celebrated in `Black Lion Lane', which sees Torrini bopping between two dancers behind cardboard cut-out buildings (reminscent of much 1970s children's TV animation). Lowe informs us that Geraldine got work as a secretary at the Daily Telegraph before the Daily Express agreed to pay some of her expenses for a reporting trip to the Middle East. But a letter to her brother in Oz (read by Angus Sampson) reveals that all was not particularly well and Geraldine pops up languidly to smoke a cigarette while explaining that she had been busted by the cops for carrying a tiny amount of hash after a man she had met at the all-night post office in Trafalgar Square had snitched on her after she had refused his advances.

Torrini produces a cassette that contains a song written for Geraldine by a Jamaican admirer named Harold and his rocksteady vocal is incorporated into `Let's Keep Dancing'. However, the action rewinds for Lowe to announce that Geraldine had to return to Australia, where she became entangled with Scott (Nick Cave), who not only wrote her letters, but also bombarded her with telexes. Torrini and Catz read alternate words from some of these to form a kind of electronica poem. But nothing can match the desperation in Scott's message explaining how he can ejaculated inside another woman while thinking of Geraldine.

Torrini turns this into `The Golden Thread', which she follows by a speech to Geraldine, in which she explains that she had wanted something she had written to give her a presence on the album. In a fever dream, she has seen Geraldine with Janis Joplin and Leonard Cohen and soon afterwards she found some verses written for Reggie, which inspired her to compose `Love Poem'.

With its psychedelic lava lamp visuals and a dance routine by choreographer Kate Coyne, this is the least distinctive of the songs, as the recurring refrain feels oppressive and the words aren't pliable enough to fit the dirge-like rhythm. Perhaps the pretentious reference to Joplin and Cohen breaks the spell the rest of the film exerts over the viewer - although the rewind sequence feels equally self-conscious.

Otherwise, Torrini's songtrack is beguiling and beautifully played by her band. The letters are read in an invitingly conversational manner that combines the familiarity of the language with the intimacy of the sentiments (which just occasionally spill over into unsettling infatuation). Nick Cave's delivery of Scott's emotionally wrought appeals for Geraldine to reciprocate his love is particularly effective, as is Catherine Catz's portrayal of Miss Flower, which brings to mind her self-directed performance in the excellent Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and the Legendary Tapes (2020).

Using projections and props to explore a range of staging strategies, Forsyth and Pollard ensure this is as visually enticing as it is musically. Clearly the plan with writer Stuart Evers was to leave Geraldine as enigmatic as possible, while also alluding to the socio-sexual attitudes of the time. Perhaps more of a hint about the timeline might have been helpful, especially as Scott appears to refer to The Karate Kid, which was released in 1984. But this remains a poignant filial tribute that conveys Geraldine's personality through her capacity to inspire devotion.

RIEFENSTAHL.

Eighteen film-makers refused the invitation to make The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993). Ultimately, Ray Müller accepted the commission and wound up producing a 188-minute profile that was much longer than the hour that Leni Riefenstahl had considered necessary to justify the decisions that she felt unfairly tarnished her reputation as a cinematic artist.

Now, two decades after her death at the age of 101, Andres Veiel has directed Riefenstahl, which draws on the contents of the 700 boxes of film, photographs, letters, audio recordings, and memoir drafts that were kept by her cinematographer partner, Horst Kettner, prior to his death in 2016. Subsequently, they were donated to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation by Riefenstahl's secretary and heir, Gisela Jahn, two years later. Disclosing information and ideas that the director had chosen to conceal, these artefacts offer Veiel and producer producer Sandra Maischberger the opportunity to reassess Riefenstahl's career and the claims to which she clung until 2003.

Opening with Leni Riefenstahl holding back her emotions when asked on the 1965 Leni Riefenstahl: In Her Own Words episode of the CBC show, Other Voices, if she regretted being so close to Adolf Hitler, the documentary moves on to an audio clip in which she denies having heard of the Nazis when she directed herself in The Blue Light (1932). However, she admits to Albrecht Knaus in a 1979 interview that she fell under Hitler's spell when she first heard him speak. She told a German TV show that she was too wrapped up in art to have time for politics and confided to 60 Minutes in 1979 that she wanted to be remembered for The Blue Light above everything else.

Narrator Andrew Bird explains over an arrangement of publicity photos of Riefenstahl that her archive had been divided into the carefully and the carelessly arranged - as though she wanted certain things to be found and others to be overlooked. This is followed by shots of Riefenstahl on location filming Triumph of the Will (1935) and a clip of her showing Müller how she used an elevator platform to get a shot at the Nuremberg Rally. On Other Voices, she insists she would have made films for Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Joseph Stalin if they had asked her and given her the right crew and working conditions.

She tells Müller that the theme of Triumph of the Will was peace and points to Rudolf Hess's rally speech as embodying Hitler's purpose in 1934. However, she is wrong in claiming that there was no mention of racial politics at Nuremberg, as Julius Streicher declares that `a people that does not protect its racial purity will perish'. Following a montage of photos of the director meeting the Führer, Riefenstahl is shown being backed into a corner on the 1976 chat show, Je später der Abend, by factory worker Elfriede Kretschmer, who can't understand how a woman could have produced such blatant propaganda. She also suggests that it was impossible for anyone in a big German city at the time to have not know what was going in the country.

As Kretschmer doesn't specify (in the clip) a date or what it was that city dwellers should have known, it's easy for Veiel to imply that she is calling out Riefenstahl over the Holocaust. There is plentiful evidence from the time to attest to the fact that people in Germany and beyond knew in the 1930s about the discrimination and persecution being endured by the Jewish population. Some might not have known, but the majority turned a blind eye or acquiesced in the bigotry. Veiel uses slow motion to convey the impression that Riefenstahl's body language is betraying her anger and anxiety, but he doesn't challenge her assertion about Winston Churchill admiring Hitler.

She was actually repeating this claim from a 1965 interview with Cahiers du Cinéma: `I showed what was happening then in front of our eyes, what everyone heard about. And the whole world was impressed by it...After the war Triumph of the Will brought me innumerable and severe difficulties. It was, certainly, a film commissioned by Hitler. But that was 1934, you must remember. And of course it was impossible for me, as a young woman, to foresee what was going to happen. In those days one believed in something beautiful. In reconstruction. In peace. The worst was still to come, but who knew that? Who talked about it? Where were the prophets? And how could I, of all people, have been one of them? How should I have known better than Winston Churchill, who even in 1935-36 was saying that he envied Germany its Führer? Could this be expected of me? Who could it be expected of? I owe to this film, after my arrest by the French, several years in camps and prisons. But you will notice, if you see the film today, that it doesn't contain a single reconstructed scene. Everything in it is real. And there is no tendentious commentary for the simple reason that the film has no commentary at all. It is history. A purely historical film.'

While it's true that Riefenstahl had stopped making films before the Wannsee Conference was called in 1942, she was active when the Nuremberg Race Laws were passed in September 1935 (albeit six months after the release of Triumph of the Will). But the 1976 tele-clip does not demonstrably prove that Riefenstahl was lying about her motives for making the documentary or the nature of her affiliation then or later to the National Socialist Party. Bird tells us that Riefenstahl catalogued the letters and calls she received after the show in 1976. We see and hear extracts from those supporting her cause, but nothing from those with opposing views (which she filed under `Communists, Jews, etc.'). When she interacts with callers, it's clear that she is pleased that others back up her comments on who knew what and when - but, even though it's difficult to assuage suspicions that Riefenstahl worked hard at covering her tracks when it came to her film-making activities, such reactions don't confirm that she was a card-carrying Nazi who condoned the Final Solution.

Over the years, there have often been traces of misogyny in the determination to discredit Riefenstahl. Contemporaries like Veit Harlan, Franz Seitz, and Hans Steinhoff have never been castigated to anything like the same degree. Here, Veiel highlights the age gap between Riefenstahl and Horst Kettner, as if this has anything to do with her methods and mindset in the 1930s. He includes her recollections of the times that Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels had tried to force himself on her. But because Veiel cuts in footage of him threatening to silence lying Jews (which does not come from a Riefenstahl film), any #MeToo implications are swept aside and Veiel includes instead unseen footage of Riefenstahl screaming at Müller for daring to contradict her version of events relating to her relationship with Goebbels and how often they encountered each other in a non-professional capacity.

Veile also snipes at the fact that she was installed in a comfortable home when she countered the press response to the publication of her autobiography in 1993. She tells Müller that she was too inexperienced to realise how she was being exploited by the Party. But she evidently revelled in the attention lavished upon her and knew full well that, as the only woman film-maker with such control over her work anywhere in the world, that her creative wings would have been severely clipped if she had sought exile in Hollywood, like so many of her male (and mostly Jewish) counterparts.

It takes a special kind of imperviousness to operate in such circumstances without being aware of the true nature of her sponsors and it's tough to imagine now that Riefenstahl was so blinkered in her pursuit of pure art that she failed to notice what was going on around her. But, in the first 25 minutes of his film, Veiel only has only presented circumstantial evidence against her.

He continues with the attack on her morality by having Bird detail her description of a rape by tennis player Otto Froitzheim. No date is given for this incident (they first met in 1921 and became engaged before Riefenstahl first appeared on screen as a dancer in Ways to Strength and Beauty, 1925) and Veiel uses various drafts of the manuscript to claim that she wrote about this assault in similar terms each time, while she proved less decisive in discussing other episodes, as though she was trying to get her story straight so she emerged in the best possible light.

A curious section follows in which footage of her father, Alfred, watching her rowing at boat provides the backdrop to Bird disclosing that he had told his daughter that she would have been better off as a boy. An anecdote follows about time he had dropped the young Leni into the water in a bid to improve her swimming technique. But this is left to hang without elucidation, as attention shifts to the conversations that Riefenstahl recorded with her publisher and some journalists during the writing of the book. In one conversation, she admits shoplifting a chocolate bar at around 12 and being beaten and locket in the bathroom by her father - yet she couldn't bring herself to admit that she was wrong.

And there we have it - a significant statement after so much obfuscation and conjecture. Why on earth didn't Veiel start with this? At a time when rocket scientists were being exonerated and installed in prestigious posts in the United States, Riefenstahl had been placed under house arrest. As she didn't have a Party card, she was not tried as a war criminal (despite later accusations that she had made `Pied Piper films') and was allowed to resume her career. However, without state backing, she struggled to raise budgets and the most notable woman in the Third Reich hierarchy was left feeling snubbed. The problem she faced while writing her memoir was to balance her own sense of importance with a reluctance to incriminate herself for wrongs she did not believe she had committed. That's why she kept rewriting her text. She had secrets to hide, but still wanted history to remember her more as a cinematic pioneer than as a cohort of psychopaths. The tweenager's stubbornness co-mingled with the older woman's fear of exposure and irrelevance to create a role that Riefenstahl had damned herself to play. Every now and then, the strain showed through.

Over dancing footage from Arnold Fanck's The Holy Mountain (1926), Riefenstahl examines the idea that mother Bertha pushed her to follow his showbiz ambitions because her own had been thwarted. In 1976, she met up with school friends, Alice and Hertha, and recorded their reminiscences about sock-stuffed bras and red-painted knickers. They agree she was ambitious and temperamental and joke about her need to be taken seriously.

As we see a scene from Fanck and G.W. Pabst's The White Hell of Pitz Palu (1929), Bird tells us that Riefenstahl demanded a lead despite not having acted before. But that was for The Holy Mountain not Fanck's Storm Over Mont Blanc (1930), which is the film under discussion. Bird tells us that she put herself at risk to get shots and was the only woman in an all-male unit of Great War veterans. Co-star Ernst Udet (who had trailed only Manfred von Richthofen in aerial kills) wrote in his 1933 memoir that Hitler had given his generation new hope. Veiel cuts to stills of Riefenstahl with the Führer, but he leaves it hanging whether Udet had introduced her to National Socialism (which made its electoral breakthrough in 1930) or whether he is trying to catch her in a lie about when she first became aware of Adolf Hitler.

The provenance or dating of the photographs are not given, but Veiel cuts into John Timpson's 1976 Tonight interview with Riefenstahl in which she refutes claims that she staged the images taken for Triumph of the Will and that only a convinced Nazi could have created them. She avers that critics rarely know the full truth and swears she only had a few days to prepare for the rally. In fact, it was her account of the 1933 rally, The Victory of Faith, that was sprung on her at the last moment. Albert Speer, who designed the setting for the 1934 rally, had pits dug for her 16 cameramen, while tracks were also laid to facilitate the movement of the cameras around the parade ground (and, as we have already seen, there was also an elevator built for her). So, Riefenstahl fibs without flinching - but Veiel makes no reference to how she could pass off a falsehood with such facility.

Instead, he shows footage of her working at an editing desk and having the temerity to manufacture meaning through montage (as if no one had ever done this before) by linking frames from Hitler's speech to close-ups of listening Hitler Youth in order to convey the impression of them being transfixed by his words. What she has done is use documentary footage to fashion an illusion - and, of course, no one has ever done something so underhand since!

While researching Albert Speer, journalist Ernest A. Ostro interviewed Riefenstahl in 1976. She claims that had a similar commitment to art. But Bird careers forward from the 1934 rally to 1942, when Speer took forced labour from the concentration camps as Reichsminister of Armaments and Munitions. He was jailed for 20 years at the Nuremberg War Trials and released in 1966. His memoir, Inside the Third Reich (1970), was a bestseller, despite being controversial, as it devoted little space to atrocities and skirted the issue of what Speer knew as part of the government. Rather than make a comparison with Riefenstahl's approach to her own tome, Veiel cuts to a phone call of her asking Speer for advice over her contract - which plants the seed that their actions were somehow comparable and that Riefenstahl should also have served time behind bars for her propaganda.

Tracking back, Veiel takes us to 1936, when Riefenstahl was entrusted with filming the Olympic Games in Berlin. We hear her describing how she planned how different events would be covered and how she encouraged competition between the cameramen. She's seen all over the arena supervising the crews. But no mention is made of the innovations that changed the way in which sport was presented on screen (and which still influence the broadcasting of the Games today). Instead, we hear of her fascination with Jesse Owens because she had never seen a Black man before. Veiel includes a passage from Olympia (1938), in which the crowd chants the American's name (much to the fury of the Führer). We see her defending herself on a German chat show for glorifying athletic bodies when she had no interest in making a film of those with physical disabilities. Once again, Veiel prefers to go for grandiloquent suggestion rather than nailing Riefenstahl in a lie. During the interview, she insists that everything in her Olympic film was authentic. But some parts of the opening ceremony and the diving were re-staged to ensure she got the exact image she was looking for. This is perfectionism. It may also be fetishism. But if it's simply Fascism, why was Riefenstahl invited to subsequent Olympiads and why has the BFI published a volume on the film in its Classics series?

Undeniably more troubling is her role in the mistreatment of Willy Zielke, the cinematographer who shot the javelin, discus, and torch footage for the opening section of Olympia. He had worked so hard that he suffered a mental breakdown and Riefenstahl did nothing to prevent him from being forcibly sterilised in 1937 under the law to prevent `mentally diseased offspring'. A quote from Mein Kampf about beauty bodies being good for the nation is read over Zielke's footage, although there is no record of Riefenstahl basing the prologue on this text. But this isn't an obstacle, as Veiel has found a letter that Riefenstahl wrote to Hitler to thank him for the flowers he had sent to Venice for her birthday (the premiere had been held on his birthday after it had been cancelled because of the Anschluss). She gushes about the film being great German propaganda and flatters him that crowds everywhere applaud his appearances on the screen. Concluding with the sycophantic revelation that she thinks of him daily, the missive reinforces the notion of the close personal relationship between the pair. But it doesn't prove they were of one mind politically. Riefenstahl doesn't mention the annexation of Austria. In many ways, it's a reminder to the Führer of her status and a way of buttering him up to prepare the ground for her next project.

After we get a glimpse of Riefenstahl skiing, we progress to September 1939 and the Polish town of Końskie. Riefenstahl comments that she wished she had died before her star started to descend, as nothing quite went right for her again. Commissioned to make a film about the Wehrmacht's campaign in Poland, she had been so appalled by the reality of conflict that she had asked to be relieved of her duties as a war correspondent. Instead, she began work on Eugen d'Albert and Rudolph Lothar's Tiefland, an adaptation of one of Hitler's favourite operas. In addition to writing and directing, Riefenstahl also took the leading role of Martha. She had actually been working on the scenario in 1934 and was annoyed when she was sent to replace Walter Ruttmann on what was to become Triumph of the Will. The shoot lasted four years from 1940, during which time she fell in love with SA officer and committed Nazi, Peter Jacob. They married in 1944 and spent the last year of the war together. She recalls being devastated when she heard of Hitler's death and concedes that her whole past had risen up before her.

On being interrogated after the war, Riefenstahl was deemed an unreliable witness. She confirms this by claiming on Other Voices that she had only heard of Dachau during the war - when she had procured 50 Sinti and Roma detainees from a camp (many of whom are children) to play extras in Tiefland. We see footage from the set and photos of a boy named Siegfried. She would claim to have met them all again after the war, but Bird confirms that many of them perished in Auschwitz. Veiel also shows her ending an interview in distress (feigned or otherwise), but he doesn't pinpoint the nature of the question that prompted the reaction. It might well have been about these children, but editing the footage creates doubt - which is what Billy Wilder was told when he came to Germany to make Death Mills (1945) in a series of long takes that could not be dismissed as fake because there were no edit points. This is a basic technique and the failure to adhere to it leaves Veiel open (justifiably or not) of shaping a truth that he has already established.

Text from Riefenstahl's tribunal verdict denotes her a `fellow traveller' and she is merely barred from holding public office. Bird claims the decision is tantamount to an acquittal before revealing that her past was to catch up with her again in 1951. Review magazine claimed she was one of the few women to witness atrocities at first hand and Ostro raised the matter in 1976, when he informed her that she had been in the officer of Generalmajor Langhaüser on 10 September 1939, when 22 Jews were executed. She objects vociferously, but the screen shows a damning image of a distressed Riefenstahl in uniform (although we're not told if she is actually witnessing the shooting or not). A letter from an adjutant to Jacob (who had divorced Riefenstahl) explains that she had asked for some Jews digging a ditch to be removed from a shot she was preparing. The soldier says it was a reasonable request for a film-maker to make. But it was passed on as, `Get rid of the Jews', and they were shot as a consequence. If this was the reason Riefenstahl fled the front, one can hardly blame her. But her fearful folly in refusing to provide a frank explanation is inexcusable and Veiel is wholly justified in condemning her.

When asked about her views on the Reich on Je später der Abend, Riefenstahl states that she found much to be positive about during the Third Reich. But, when she heard about the crimes in prison after the war, her world fell apart. She claims many West Germans feel the same way and there is warm applause from the audience when she says she is still recovering from the shock of her discoveries. We hear phone calls from a couple of sympathisers before we see Müller showing Riefenstahl news footage of migrants being attacked by thugs. When she deplores the violence against women and children, he asks if the scene reminds her of anything. Unwilling to be branded a Neo-Nazi, she refuses to answer and gets cross when he presses the point after she insists that she had never witnessed anything similar in the 1930s.

Müller films her at a filing cabinet filled with folders relating to the defamation cases that Riefenstahl brought against her accusers. She calls the `Gypsy' lie the worst of them all and swears it makes her blood boil. Having declared that she had never uttered an anti-Semitic phrase in her life, she is heard asking whether anyone could take a Gypsy's word over her own. Oh, this woman had a genius for not helping herself!

In 1962, Riefenstahl went to Sudan to photograph the Nuba people. Bird states she went there because no one would ask about her past. But this is overly cynical, as she had an interest in anthropology - albeit one that could seem patronising, as her copy for The Sunday Times confirms, when she claims she has always pursued beauty as a subject and is always moved when outer and inner beauty align. Footage shows her doling out treats to the children and staging wrestling bouts in a ring made from bunting supplied by her German sponsor. She has no qualms about letting them use her pictures in return for tents and equipment and seems genuinely happy in the village. Clips show her having the odd tantrum in trying to wrangle the Nuba into position for a shot, but Veiel doesn't really state what he objects to in this sequence. He can hardly be accusing Riefenstahl of being a white supremacist in lording it over the Nuba like a female Kurtz, as her admiration for the Nuba, while perhaps being insensitive and naive, seems quite genuine. Perhaps he's citing her for exploitation, as we see her at book launches and exhibitions (posing at one with Andy Warhol). Yet Jean Rouch, Margaret Mead, and others made similar expeditions to what were the `untouched' parts of the globe. So why is Riefenstahl to be deemed less sincere or more opportunistic? A clue lies in her Tonight interview, when John Timpson asks her about invading privacy and she lies that she had not intruded and had relied on long-distance lenses to take her pictures. When he compares her pursuit of beauty with her German films, she reminds him that this ideal was also current in Ancient Greece and Rome before suddenly slipping out of near-fluent English into a more garbled pronouncement n these films stopping her working for a long time to dead-end the discussion.

We hear her chatting on the phone with Speer about the fees he charges for TV appearances. Over undated footage of her skiing, we also hear her complaining to a Swiss producer about the fact she is introduced as a `Nazi-era film-maker' and claims that she is tired of having to defend herself when she didn't commit any of the atrocities. We see the host of Destins explaining why his interview chair is empty and essentially accusing Riefenstahl of lacking the courage or the clear conscience to face him. It's a smug snippet and its inclusion here feels similarly so. There's also something rather cruel about showing an elderly woman fretting about wrinkles and lighting when she sits down for an outdoor interview for Speer and Hitler: The Devil's Architect (1999).

There's also something sweeping about Bird's narration over Kettner's footage of Riefenstahl revisiting the Blue Light waterfall. He claims that it shows how she would like to be remembered and what she would like to be forgotten. Surely a specious claim for a home movie? And the connection to the ranting of a caller proclaiming her to be honest and her assertion that the German volk will overcome the current period of unrest (when - the extract isn't dated) is entirely Veiel's. It feels a clumsy way to end a film that is often anything but sure-footed in its construction, even though some of its conclusions about Leni Riefenstahl's liability and duplicity are essentially sound.

For all its intimations at offering in-depth analysis, this is a frustratingly selective overview. Largely bypassing Riefenstahl's acting career, Veiel omits to assess her standing with the Weimar public and how familiar most Germans would have been with her work when she made such documentary shorts as The Victory of Faith (1933) and Day of Freedom: Our Armed Forces (1935), neither of which merits a mention. Nor does the director's final film, Impressions Under Water (2002), which was released to mark her 100th birthday.

Veiel also fails to present any box-office information to allow the audience to gauge how many Germans actually saw Triumph of the Will and the two parts of Olympia, Festival of Nations and Festival of Beauty. Some have noted the absence of either support for Riefenstahl's craft from such respected critics as Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert or denunciations from such cultural commentators as Susan Sontag, who berated Riefenstahl in the 1974 essay, `Fascinating Fascism'. But it's more important to determine how widely the films for which she was investigated by the Allies were actually seen and what impact they had on a population that was already living under a totalitarian dictatorship.

None of this is designed to distract from Riefenstahl's dangerous delusions as a propagandist or the disingenuous dissembling to which she resorted in a bid to salvage her reputation as an artist after the regime she had served with such enthusiasm was defeated. She almost certainly witnessed the execution of the Jews at Końskie and patently lied about the fate of the Sinti and Roma extras. But Veiel doesn't make enough of his other accusations stick.

This is partly down to the trickiness of the task. Conclusive evidence is hard to come by and Riefenstahl made a decent job of covering her tracks - in spite of keeping a good deal of incriminating material in her archive, as though she intended that truths would emerge after she no longer had to face the consequences. Veiel accuses Riefenstahl of using disorganisation within the archive to hide a multitude of sins. Yet his own approach borders on the scattershot and often falls far short of the expected standards of rigour in regards to dates and places when presenting contentious material. He also fails to identify footage not filmed by Riefenstahl herself, while including it to convey the false impression that it has been culled from her canon.

The flaws in his methodology mean that this is every bit as emotionally manipulative as one of Riefenstahl's own films. Ironically, this suggests the enduring nature of her influence on documentary film-making, Veiel consistently juxtaposes footage for effect, insinuating mendacity and guilt when there is no hard evidence in several of the extracts demonstrably to prove either. There is some incredible material here. But it's too often used in a grandstanding, gotcha-like way, which feels disappointingly slipshod for such a momentous subject.

THE LAST MUSICIAN OF AUSCHWITZ.

Shown on BBC2 on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp by the Red Army on 27 January 1945, Toby Trackman's The Last Musician of Auschwitz is now getting a theatrical release in the week of VE Day.

As a 19 year-old, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch told the BBC on the liberation of Auschwitz: `First, I would like to say a few words about Auschwitz. The few who have survived are afraid that the world will not believe what happened there.' Captions recap the brutal realities of what happened here, as a string quartet plays Mozart's `Eine Kleine Nachtmusik' in the darkness outside the camp's main gate. Various survivors recall the shock of hearing such beautiful music at a death factory. But there was method in what appeared to be madness.

Before the war, Anita had lived contentedly in Breslau and had been encouraged to play the cello by her violinist mother. Jonathan Freedland points out that Weimar Germany was a good place to be a Jew, as many had prospered, while the likes of Mendelssohn and Mahler had given them a certain cachet in the musical world.

In Prague, Ilse Weber was so concerned about the imminence of war that she sent son Hanus to London as part of the Kindertransport initiative. Historian Ulrike Migdal recalls the poisonous atmosphere towards Jews in Czechoslovakia and Freedland explains the Stab in the Back theory that Adolf Hitler exploited to justify his racial policies. As music meant a lot to Weber (who is played by Rosalyn Mitchell), she wrote `And the Rain Runs' for her absent son and it's poignantly performed.

Caught by the Nazis attempting to flee to France on forged papers, Anita and sister Renate were imprisoned before being sent separately to Auschwitz. Playing the young Anita, Katie Shalka describes the need to face the fears that had long been haunting her. She describes being forced to strip and being identified as a cellist during the so-called `welcoming ceremony'. This talent saved her life, as she became part of one of the 15 orchestras that were ordered to play in Auschwitz-Birkenau to maintain morale and distract from the hideous realities of camp life.

Anita remembers playing marches to send the slave labourers off to the nearby factories and greet them back at night. Conductor Adam Kopyciñski and violinist/composer Szymon Laks were part of the musical cadre and the latter's son, André, explains how he came to be in the camp after having lived in Paris. He started as a slave worker before his musicianship was recognised during an enforced game of bridge with a bored officer.

Freedland discusses the concept of German cultural superiority, while Raphael Wallfisch plays `Traumerei' from Schumann's `Kinderszenen', as his mother had been ordered to play it by camp doctor, Josef Mengele. She remembers having to give Sunday concerts in addition to playing the marches that one unnamed male survivor claims were as much an act of sadism as withholding food as punishment.

Laks wrote `Funerals' about his time in Auschwitz and his son plays it on the piano, as Dan Blaskey, playing his father reasons that it was possible to get used to the nightmarish regime and feel a sense of escape from the barbarity of the gas chambers. Anita accepts that some resented the musicians for having an easier time, but she hopes they offered a degree of solace when they could.

As Freedland points out that the Sinta and Roma peoples were also persecuted, musicologist Petra Gelbart outlines the long tradition of prejudice against `Gypsy' communities. She reveals that many Roma twins were tortured by Mengele and introduces a song that her grandmother had sung at the camp, `There's a Big Building At Auschwitz'. Filmed survivors delight in the defiance they had shown in singing in their barracks to retain a sense of identity. Francesco Lotoro collects camp songs and he cues up `Kolysanka', a lullaby that had been composed at Auschwitz by Adam Kopyciñski.

We also hear part of the 3rd String Quartet that Szymon Laks wrote and rehearsed in secret as an act of resistance. It's played in the camp grounds over home movies of happy families. Laurence Dobiesz, the actor portrying Laks, remembers having to lie to an SS man who overheard the piece that it had been composed by an obscure Austrian. Even though the music was rooted in Polish folk songs, the officer cheerfully boasted that it was so good that it could only be Germanic.

Gelbart recalls the night that around 4000 Roma and Sinti were gassed, while survivors testify to the stench from the chimney of the crematoria (which they had been told was a bakery) that burned corpses at a rate of 10,000 a day so the ashes could be sold off as fertiliser. Ironically, as Freedland notes, the extermination camps reached peak efficiency as the war started to turn against Germany in the summer of 1944.

Isa Weber spent two years at Theresienstadt in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Here, she ran an infirmary for sick children and she insisted on accompanying them when they were sent to Auschwitz. A member of the Sonderkommando advised her to sing with the children when they got inside the gas chamber, as they would breathe in the Zyklon more rapidly and avoid being trampled when the panic set in. A guard testified that she sang the lullaby, `Wiegala', which is performed here. Four weeks later, Auschwitz was liberated.

Krzysztof Kulisiewicz explains how his father, Aleksander, devoted his life to making sure those who perished were not forgotten and he did so using the `Jewish Death Song', which had been written by his composer friend, Rosebery d'Arguto. It is performed with great power in a cemetery and provides a fitting finale to a potent commemoration, which ends with captions outlining how Laks, Kopyciñski, and Lasker-Wallfisch continued to make music long after they were freed.

Potent and poignant, this is a noble tribute not just to those who played in the Auschwitz orchestras, but to all who suffered and died or survived in the camps. It always feels more like a TV programme than a feature film, but content matters far more than form in this instance - although it does feel odd that the speakers in the archive clips are not identified on screen.

The guests speak with insight and solemnity, with Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland providing useful background to the origins and the workings of the Holocaust. The use of actors to speak the words of the four featured musicians isn't entirely successful, especially as 99 year-old Lasker-Wallfisch can seem marginalised, which is puzzling considering the fact that she is the person to whom the title of the film refers. However, the musical performances are deeply moving, as they remind us not only that the Final Solution failed, but also that the culture it tried to eradicate continues to survive with indelible memoriousness and defiant pride.