Leni Riefenstahl

Helene Bertha Amelie Riefenstahlknown as Leni Riefenstahl (pronounced) ############## (?·i); Berlin, August 22, 1902-Pöcking, September 8, 2003), was an actress, filmmaker and photographer. It is considered to be one of the most controversial figures in the history of cinema: its critics have catalogued its work as propaganda of National Socialism, although for others it was an innovative and creative filmmaker, whose works were exploited for propaganda purposes by the Third Reich.

A swimmer and artist in her childhood, she was also interested in dance, though she gave it up due to a knee injury. She made her acting debut after seeing a promotional poster for the 1924 feature film The Mountain of Destiny (Der Berg des Schicksals). Between 1925 and 1929 she appeared in five successful films.. In 1932 she became one of the few Germans to direct a film in the Weimar Republic, when she made her own production The Blue Light (Das Blaue Licht). That same year he met the main leaders of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) at a political event in Berlin. In a meeting with their leader, Adolf Hitler, she was chosen to shoot the party's films, a promise that came to fruition when the Nazis came to power.

He directed Triumph des Willens and Olympia, for which he received worldwide attention and recognition. Some critics consider them to be among the most impressive and technically innovative propaganda films ever made.However, his involvement in NSDAP films significantly damaged his career and reputation after World War II. The exact nature of his relationship with Hitler remains a matter of debate, although a good friendship is known to have existed between them, particularly during the production of the feature films. Some critics have argued that Riefenstahl's complicity was essential in bringing the films to fruition. the Holocaust mission.

Arrested and tried at the end of the war, she was classified as a "travel companion" (Mitläufer) and was not associated with Nazi war crimes. Throughout his life, he denied knowing about the Holocaust and won nearly fifty libel cases in court. In addition to directing, he wrote an autobiography and several books on the Nuba tribes of Sudan, criticized as reminiscent of the Holocaust. totalitarian aesthetic of fascism. She died of cancer on September 8, 2003 at the age of 101 and was buried in the wooded cemetery in Munich. Posthumously lauded for her body of work, she remains one of film's most acclaimed directors.

Early Years

Leni Riefenstahl and his brother Heinz in 1914.

She was born in Berlin on August 22, 1902. Her father, Alfred Theodor Paul Riefenstahl, owned a heating and ventilation company and wanted his daughter to follow him into the business world. Because she was the only child for several years, her father wanted her to keep the family name and secure the family fortune. However, her mother, Bertha Ida (Scherlach), who was a part-time seamstress before marriage, had faith in her daughter and he believed his future lay in show business. Riefenstahl lived with his family on Prinz-Eugen-Straße in Wedding (Berlin-Mitte) in his early years, then the family moved into their own home in Zeuthen, near from the capital. He had a younger brother, Heinz (1905-1944), who died at the age of 39 on the Eastern Front of the war against the Soviet Union.

He studied at the Neukölln elementary school in 1908. He then attended the Kollmorgensche Lyzeum, a private secondary school in Tiergarten, which he left in 1918. He became interested in the arts in his childhood: he began painting and writing poetry at the age four; after graduating from school, he received painting and drawing classes at the Berlin State School for Applied Arts. In his free time, he took piano lessons and was enthusiastic about sports from an early age; at the age of twelve she joined a women's gymnastics and swimming club in Charlottenburg. Her mother was confident that she would grow up to succeed in the field of the arts and gave her full support, unlike her father, that he was not interested in his daughter's artistic inclinations.

In 1918, when she was sixteen, she attended a performance of Snow White, which interested her deeply and led her to want to be a dancer, but her father wanted to give her an education that might lead her to an occupation. "more dignified" However, her mother continued to support her passion for dance. Without her father's knowledge, he enrolled her in dance and classical dance classes at the Grimm-Reiter Dance School in Berlin, where she quickly became a star pupil.. There she learned, among other things, rhythmic gymnastics and dance, improvisation and fantasy dance. When Riefenstahl stood in for the ailing Anita Berber at a school dance performance at the Blüthner Theater in Berlin, her father found out about her secret dance lessons and sent her to a boarding school for a year in Thale in the mountains. from Harz. She continued to practice dancing, did theater, and attended outdoor performances with her boarding schoolmate Hela Gruel. From 1920 to 1923 she worked as a secretary in her father's company, where she learned typing, shorthand, and bookkeeping. During this time she was allowed to continue her dance classes at Grimm-Reiter and also took classical ballet classes from 1921 to 1923 with teacher Eugenie Eduardowa. She also learned expressive dance at the Jutta Klamt School on Fasanenstraße and took boxing lessons. by Sabri Mahir. In 1923 she attended Mary Wigman's dance school in Dresden for a few months, where she apprenticed with Gret Palucca, Vera Skoronel and Yvonne Georgi; around this time she had her first relationship with professional tennis player Otto Froitzheim.

Career in dancing and acting

In 1923 she met banker and future film producer Harry Sokal on a vacation on the Baltic beaches, and he financed her debut as a solo dancer on October 23, 1923 in Munich, as well as a six-month tour with almost seventy appearances in Germany and abroad. She was also engaged by Max Reinhardt for two solo performances in chamber works at the German Theater in Berlin. The following year she went on a study trip to New York with the Dutch composer Jaap Kool, possibly funded by Sokal; she entered the excursion through Jutta Klamt's dance group, for whom Kool had prepared musical pieces.The journalist Fred Hildenbrandt described Riefenstahl's dance style:

Dieses sehr schöne Mädchen ringt wohl inständig um einen Rang neben den dreien, die man ernst nimmt: der Impekoven, der Wigman, der Gert. Und wenn man dies vollkommen gewachsene hohe Geschöpf in der Musik stehen sieht, weht eine Ahnung daher, dass es Herrlichkeiten im Tanz geben könnte, die keine von jenen dreien zu tragen und zu hüten bekam, nicht der Aber dann beginnt dieses Mädchen ihren Leib zu entfalten, die Ahnung verweht, der Glanz ergraut, der Klang verrostet [...].

This very beautiful girl fights for a position next to the three that take this seriously: Impekoven, Wigman and Gert. And when you look at this tall creature and completely grown up standing during the music, you think there would be glories in the dance that none of the three could achieve and protect, neither the heroic gong blow of Mary, nor the sweet violin of Niddy, nor the cruel drum of Valeska: the glory of the dancer that returns every thousand years. However, when this girl begins to develop her body, the feeling will be gone, the shine will become grey, the sound will be oxidized [...].

In April 1924, the German art critic and dance historian John Schikowski gave his opinion of Riefenstahl's performance in a matinee performance at the Volksbühne in Berlin:

Knie- und Hüftgelenke erscheinen zuweilen etwas eingerostet, die früher so wunderbar suggestive Sprache der Arme ist teilweise verstummt; an ihre Stelle trat ein äußerlich effektvolles, aber oft seelenloses Spiel der Hände.

Sometimes the knees and the joints of the hips seemed somewhat rusty and the body language of the arms that was previously wonderfully suggestive has almost been silenced; instead there was a seemingly effective hand play, but often discouraged.

She used to earn nearly 700 Imperial marks for each performance and was very devoted to dancing. She drew the attention of expressionist painters Ernst Oppler, Eugen Spiro, Leo von König, and Willy Jaeckel, who painted her portraits in the theater. Praga began to suffer a series of foot injuries that led to knee surgery and eventually thwarted her dance career. While attending a doctor's appointment, she saw a poster for the movie The Mountain of Fate (Der Berg des Schicksals) from 1924 and attended the screening in a cinema on Nollendorf Square. She was so impressed that she decided to become an actress and also went to film shows.A year later she separated from Froitzheim, to whom she had become engaged.

Picture of the documentary Paths to strength and beauty (1925), his first performance in the cinema; Riefenstahl, on the right, taking a “Roman bath”.

She made her film debut in a gymnastics scene in the 1925 documentary Roads to Strength and Beauty (Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit). In a hotel in the Dolomites, she met Luis Trenker, actor of The Mountain of Destiny, with whom she had a brief affair. At a meeting organized by her friend Gunther Rahn, she met Arnold Fanck, director of that production and pioneer of the mountain movie genre and who happened to be working on one in Berlin. After Riefenstahl commented how much he admired her work, she convinced him of her acting ability and persuaded him to cast her in one of his films, so Fanck sent her a package containing the script for The Mountain. sacred (Der Heilige Berg) in which she would have the role of a dancer. In an interview, Fanck commented:

Als ich Leni Riefenstahl sah, war mein erster Eindruck: Naturkind. Keine Schauspielerin, keine ¬Darstellerin‘. Diese Frau tanzt sich selbst. Man musste ihr also eine Rolle schreiben, die aus ihrem Wesen geboren ward.

When I saw Leni Riefenstahl, my first impression was: daughter of nature. She was not an actress, nor an “intérprete”. This woman danced, so you had to write her a role of her nature.

For the 18-month shoot, he learned to ski while shooting outdoors in the Swiss Alps. Fanck also explained the functions of the movie camera and showed him how to use the lenses, the different focal lengths and the effect of color filters. After filming was complete, he also taught her how to manipulate, copy, and cut the footage. Riefenstahl received mixed reviews for his performance. The Berliner Morgenpost published on December 19, 1926: “Leni Riefenstahl could not contribute anything in terms of acting. He didn't seem to have made much progress either.” On the other hand, critic Oskar Kalbus said:

Zwischen diesen herrlichen Männern steht eine für die Kinoleinwand neue Frau: die junge Tänzerin Leni Riefenstahl, ein beinahe unwahrscheinlich zartes, von feinsten Rhythmen beseeltes Geschöpf, keineswegs nur Tänzerin

Among these magnificent men is a new woman on the big screen: the young dancer Leni Riefenstahl, an almost incredibly delicate creature, inspired by the best rhythms, in no way just a dancer, but also an actress with abundant natural interior.

Riefenstahl in an advertising postcard of Alexander Binder (1928).

Riefenstahl auditioned for the role of Gretchen in Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's Faust (Faust – eine deutsche Volkssage), a 1926 German folktale. She was shortlisted, but lost the role before then-unknown actress Camilla Horn. From May to November 1927, also under the direction of Fanck, the physically demanding filming of the sports film The Great Leap (Der große Sprung) took place in the Dolomites. For the role, he learned mountaineering and climbing from Hans Schneeberger, who along with Trenker played one of the two leading male roles. Riefenstahl and Schneeberger later maintained a private relationship for three years. The feature film was a success, but she left her associated with the image of "a woman between two men" in the adventure and mountain environment, for which she had no other offers. Only with Rolf Raffé's historical drama The Fate of the Habsburgers ( Das Schicksal derer von Habsburg ) from 1928 did she manage to switch roles with the incarnation of Maria Vetsera.

One of the films that brought her into the spotlight was The White Hell of the Piz Palü (Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü) from 1929, directed by Fanck and Georg Wilhelm Pabst. The external shots, which took the film crew to the Bernina massif, were filmed under Fanck's command, while Pabst took over directing the interior shots. Riefenstahl had persuaded Pabst to take part in the project because he wanted to become into a serious actress under his acting leadership, having assisted Greta Garbo in 1925's Under the Mask of Pleasure (Die freudlose Gasse). October 11, 1929 in Vienna, the film became a great national and international success and Riefenstahl received the positive response he wanted for his performance. The newspaper B.Z. am Mittag described it:

Leni Riefenstahl, schauspielerisch so gut wie noch nie zuvor, zeigt bei aller fraulichen Anmut jungenhafte Courage und Gewandtheit, sie ist die wohl sympathischste und brauchbarste Hochtouristin deutschen Film.

Leni Riefenstahl, acting better than ever, shows youthful courage and skill with all her feminine grace. It is probably the most sympathetic and useful tourist in German cinema.

In Berlin, he met director Josef von Sternberg in the late 1920s; she visited him during his work at the UFA film studios in Babelsberg and, according to film critic Hans Feld, is said to have had hopes for the role of Lola Lola in The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel), a film adaptation of the novel Professor Unrat by Heinrich Mann, with which Marlene Dietrich became an international film star. Riefenstahl turned down Sternberg's offer to accompany him to Hollywood because of her relationship with Schneeberger, although the latter parted ways with her for another woman shortly thereafter. His next film, Storms over Mont Blanc (Stürme über dem Mont Blanc) from 1930, recorded without sound, was dubbed after filming was completed. To make the leap from silent to talkies, where many successful actors such as Vilma Bánky, Pola Negri or Lars Hanson failed, Riefenstahl took diction lessons with director Eugen Herbert Kuchenbuch.

With the filming team Storms about Mont Blanc (1930), talking to his mentor, director Arnold Fanck.

In addition to acting, he began writing scripts and production reports. She published the first one in the magazine Film-Kurier about the sports film The White Stadium (Das weiße Stadion ) by Fanck. In 1931 he wrote the first version of the script for his feature film The Blue Light (Das Blaue Licht), co-written by Carl Mayer and Béla Balázs. The plot deals with a mysterious blue glow on a mountain peak during full moon nights that magically attracts the youth of a mountain town, who then have a fatal accident while ascending. Riefenstahl founded his first film company (L.R. Studiofilm) and convinced his patron Harry Sokal to invest in the project. She took on the lead female role, directing, managing production and editing; she played an innocent peasant girl, but hated by the villagers because they believe she is evil and they expel her, so she takes refuge in a glowing mountain grotto., in which farmers from the Sarentino Valley in Italy were amateur actors, took place from July to September 1931. The film was released on March 24, 1932 and, despite mixed reviews, was a success: in 1934, the National Board of Film Critics of New York considered The Blue Light among the best foreign films and the film won the Silver Medal at the Venice Film Festival, but was not universally well received, for which he blamed the mostly Jewish critics. Upon its re-release in 1938, the names of Balázs and Sokal, both Jews, were removed from the credits; some reports say that it was at the request of the director herself Riefenstahl claimed that she received invitations to travel to Hollywood to shoot movies, but she turned them down to stay in Germany with her boyfriend.

On February 27, 1932, she attended a National Socialist event at the Sports Hall in Berlin, where Adolf Hitler gave a speech, and was fascinated by his talents as a public speaker. Describing her experience in her memoirs, she recounted: "I had an almost apocalyptic vision that I could never forget. It seemed as if the surface of the Earth stretched out in front of me, like a hemisphere that suddenly splits in the middle, spewing out a huge jet of water, so powerful that it touches the sky and shakes the earth." he requested in a letter a personal meeting, which took place in May 1932 in Horumersiel, near Wilhelmshaven. According to Riefenstahl's memoirs, Hitler took this opportunity to tell him that he had been impressed with The Blue Light and added:

Wenn wir einmal an die Macht kommen, dann müssen Sie meine Filme machen.

Once we get to power, you have to make my movies.

Since then, she was a recurring guest at official ceremonies and receptions for high-ranking Nazi officials, where she met Joseph and Magda Goebbels, Hermann Göring, Albert Speer, and Julius Streicher.

In 1933 he appeared in the German-American co-productions of S.O.S. Eisberg by Arnold Fanck and Tay Garnett, filmed simultaneously in English and German and produced and distributed by Universal Studios. The crew moved to Greenland in June 1932 and the Swiss Alps in early 1933. Their first book < i>Battle in Snow and Ice (Kampf in Schnee und Eis), published in 1933, was the result of a series of articles on the experiences in Greenland that he wrote for the German magazine < i>Tempo and the lectures he gave about the film. At this point, he had already started filming The Victory of Faith in Nuremberg. In order for him to attend the first exhibition of S.O.S. Eisberg in Berlin, Hitler provided her private plane, which took her back to Nuremberg that same night.Her performance in S.O.S. Eisberg was her only role in Anglo-Saxon cinema.

Directing career

"Reich Film Director"

Adolf Hitler congratulated her for The victory of faith in 1934.

By the 1930s, Riefenstahl had caught the eye of Hitler, who was greatly taken with his work. For him, it fit the ideal of Aryan femininity, a characteristic he had noticed when he saw her performance as the lead in The Blue Light. After meeting Hitler, she was offered the opportunity to direct The Blue Light. Victory of Faith (Der Sieg des Glaubens), a one-hour propaganda film about the fifth National Party Convention in 1933, which presented a great opportunity for her Hitler ordered to Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda to hand over the film commission to Riefenstahl, though she later claimed that the agency never informed her. She agreed to direct the film despite only being given a few days to prepare before the rally. In the course of filming he formed a friendly relationship with Hitler that lasted twelve years. The propaganda film was fully financed by the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP).

Because she was not a member of the NSDAP, had no experience in the documentary genre, and was also a woman, the decision to engage her in the project initially generated resentment within the party. Arnold Raether and Eberhard Fangauf, who worked in Department IV (Cinema) of the Ministry of Propaganda, tried to sabotage it by refusing film material and their cameramen and requesting proof of their Aryan ancestry. Hitler's political secretary Rudolf Heß also he tried to expel her from the project by accusing her of “defamation of the Führer”. Nevertheless, Riefenstahl managed to prevail against his rivals in the NSDAP with the protection of Hitler, who did not want a sober exhibition of the fifth congress, but a staging of propaganda centered on him and intended to impress and inspire the audience. Therefore, he trusted Riefenstahl's artistic and visionary talent and officially named her "Reich Film Director" (Reichsfilmregisseurin ), a position she held until the end of World War II.

Riefenstahl took the direction, wrote the script and chose Sepp Allgeier, Franz Weihmayr and Walter Frentz as cameramen. The filming of The Victory of Faith took place from August 27 to September 5, 1933, although the congress was held from August 30 to September 3. The film was released on December 1 of that year and was enthusiastically received. However, she was dissatisfied with the final version due to some cosmetic blemishes. She argued that she did not have enough time to prepare and was hampered during filming, so little footage was available in the end. Her complaints to Hitler infuriated Goebbels.

During the filming of The Victory of Faith, Hitler had been at the side of Ernst Röhm, leader of the SA, with whom he had a close working relationship. Röhm was assassinated on Hitler's orders shortly thereafter during the purge of the SA, known as the "night of the long knives" (Nacht der langen Messer) or the "Röhm coup" (Röhm-Putsch). It has been verified that, immediately after the murders, Hitler ordered the destruction of all copies of the film, although Riefenstahl always denied that this had happened. It was considered lost until a 16 mm copy appeared in the archive of 1986 the German Democratic Republic.

Riefenstahl instructing your recording equipment The triumph of the will in Nuremberg (1934). Heinrich Himmler (on the left).

Impressed with the tape, Hitler asked him to film The Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens), a new propaganda film about the 1934 NSDAP congress. in Nuremberg, in which more than a million Germans took part in the demonstration. On this occasion, he was assured artistic freedom and the NSDAP provided almost unlimited funds and a team of 170 employees, including thirty-six cameramen in land and nine by airplanes. The 110-minute feature film took seven months to complete, which proved a great success when it premiered on 28 March 1935 at the UFA-Palast in Berlin. The following month it achieved record earnings in seventy German cities. Triumph of the Will is considered by some critics to be the best propaganda film ever made. Featuring innovative editing techniques, unusual camera movements and suggestive background music, his work became one of the most important propaganda media for the National Socialists. More than twenty million Germans saw it in the cinema and it was also shown in schools. With the archive material, he published the book Behind the scenes of the Nazi party congress film (Hinter den Kulissen des Reichsparteitag-Films). In an interview with the media, he said that at first he resisted directing and did not want to work for the NSDAP anymore, but to make a film adaptation of Earth baja (Tiefland) by Eugen d'Albert, a very popular opera in Berlin in the 1920s and based on the novel of the same name (Terra baixa) by Ángel Guimerá. For The Triumph of the Will, he received the 1935 National Film Award, the Best Foreign Documentary Award at the Venice Film Festival in 1935, and the Grand Prix in the 1937 Paris International Exposition.

Hitler was able to convince her to film Triumph of the Will on the condition that she would not be required to make any more films for the party. The film is recognized as an epic and innovative work of cinema. propaganda and raised his career to a new level, with greater international recognition. However, despite the promise with Hitler, he also directed Freedom Day: Our Armed Forces (Tag der Freiheit! – Unsere Wehrmacht), 28 minutes, about the German army in 1935. One of the reasons was that, due to the extensive filming of Triumph of the Will, other Nazi film productions were neglected. The short film was made on the occasion of the reintroduction of compulsory military service and due to the fact that in September 1934, due to bad weather conditions, the Wehrmacht was unable to make useful recordings for the documentation of that feature film. i>The Victory of Faith and The Triumph of the Will, was filmed at the NSDAP's annual congress in Nuremberg. Riefenstahl told the press that the short film was a sub-theme of < i>The Victory of Faith, added to appease the German army which did not feel well represented in The Triumph of the Will. For most post-war critics, the film shows an army prepared for a war of aggression. However, in an interview with Ray Müller for the 1993 documentary The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (Die Macht der Bilder: Leni Riefenstahl), Riefenstahl said that there was only filmed a military exercise, a show, "nothing more".

In January 1936, she was received by Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini in Rome. The Duce had seen the NSDAP trilogy and wanted to win over Hitler's director for the filming of the recovery of the Pontine Lagoons. However, Riefenstahl turned down this offer to focus on his next project in Berlin.

Photographed working on the film cutting table (1935).

She was invited to film the 1936 Summer Olympics, scheduled to take place in the German capital, in a film she claimed had been commissioned by Carl Diem, secretary general of the Olympic Organizing Committee, but was secretly financed by the Nazi regime. In the fall of 1935 he began preparing for filming; Riefenstahl assembled a great team of cameramen—including Walter Frentz, Willy Zielke, Gustav Lantschner, and Hans Ertl—who took the first test images in May 1936. Two months before the start of the Olympic Games, he visited Greece to photograph the route of the inaugural torch relay and the original site of the games at Olympia, where he was assisted by Greek photographer Nelly's (Elli Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari). The crew moved to Berlin for the recording of the opening ceremony on August 1. The film was divided into two parts, and over ten months the director selected, archived, and collected the archival footage—around 400,000 frames. in total— for both segments: Festival of Nations (Fest der Völker) and Festival of Beauty (Fest der Schönheit ).

This material became Olympia, a blockbuster film that has since been widely recognized for its technical and aesthetic achievements. Riefenstahl was one of the first filmmakers to use tracking shots in a documentary, in which he placed a camera on rails to follow the movement of the athletes. The film is also notable for its slow-motion shots; underwater shots, extremely high and low angles of filming, aerial panning shots, and tracking shots were also experimented with to allow for fast-paced action. Many of these techniques were relatively unknown at the time, but with heavy use they established an industry standard. His work on Olympia has been cited as a major influence on modern sports cinematography. Riefenstahl filmed to competitors of all ethnicities, such as African-American Jesse Owens, in what later became significant archival material.

Riefenstahl in conversation with Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda, in 1937.

According to Riefenstahl, Goebbels was upset when she ignored his sexual advances and that he was jealous of her influence on Hitler, seeing her as an insider threat; nor that her diary entries could not be trusted, describing her as friendly to him and his wife Magda, attending the opera with them and going to their parties. According to later accounts, Goebbels was highly appreciative of the film production of Riefenstahl, but was furious at what he saw as his overspending of Nazi-provided film budgets. In his diary, Goebbels wrote on November 6, 1936:

Frl. Riefenstahl macht mir ihre Hysterien vor. Mit diesen wilden Frauen ist nicht zu arbeiten. Nun will sie für ihren Film eine 1⁄2 Million mehr und zwei daraus machen. [...] Sie weint. Das ist die letzte Waffe der Frauen. Aber bei mir wirkt das nicht mehr.

Miss Riefenstahl has become hysterical. You can't work with these wild women. Now she wants for her movie a million and a half more and do two with it. [...] She started crying. It's the woman's last weapon, but that doesn't work on me anymore.

In the summer of 1937, Hitler personally arranged a reconciliation meeting in the presence of press photographers at Riefenstahl's new residence in Berlin.

Olympia premiered on Hitler's 49th birthday in 1938. The German press, which since late 1936 had been prohibited from art criticism by the "art spectator decree" (Kunstbetrachter-Erlaß) by Goebbels, reported positively without exception. For international distribution, dubbed versions were produced in English, French and Italian, although the UK was prevented from releasing. Her international debut led her to organize a publicity tour in the United States, in an attempt to secure its commercial release.. In February 1937, she enthused to a correspondent for The Detroit News:

To me, Hitler is the greatest man who ever lived. He truly is without fault, so simple and at the same time possessed of masculine strength

To me, Hitler is the greatest man ever. It is really impeccable, so simple and at the same time with a male force.

Avery Brundage, President of the International Olympic Committee, praised the film and congratulated its director. Apart from the 1938 National Film Award, he received the Coppa Mussolini, the Swedish Polar Prize, the Greek Government Honorary Award in 1938, the Japanese Kinema Junpo Award in 1941 and the Olympic Gold Medal Diploma from the International Olympic Committee in 1948 at the Lausanne Film Festival.

After documenting the success of American athletes such as Jesse Owens and Forrest Towns at Olympia, he hoped to establish himself in the movie business in the United States. Time magazine had already dedicated a cover to her in February 1936 with the title "Hitler's Leni Riefenstahl" (Hitler's Leni Riefenstahl ). However, when he arrived in New York on November 4, 1938, with the tapes in his luggage, he was confronted with the news of "Kristallnacht" five days later, for which, when questioned by journalists, she publicly defended Hitler. On November 18, she was received by Henry Ford in Detroit and the tape was shown at the Chicago Engineers & # 39; Club two days later. The Anti-Nazi League and the Motion Picture Artists Committee called for a boycott of Olympic films, and anti-Riefenstahl posters were hung in Hollywood. Among the few who received her are director King Vidor and producers Louis B. Mayer and Walt Disney, who on December 8 showed her the ongoing production of Fantasia. However, the meetings did not they were successful, so he returned to Germany in January 1939.

World War II

As a war correspondent in Poland in 1939.

When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, the "Special Riefenstahl Film Troop" (Sonderfilmtrupp Riefenstahl) was formed on Hitler's orders, which included her, the sound engineers Hermann Storr, Walter Traut, the brothers Gustav and Otto Lantschner, Sepp Allgeier and four other technicians. They were equipped with two six-seater Mercedes limousines, a BMW motorcycle with a sidecar and fuel cards for seven hundred liters of gasoline, a sound recording vehicle, and specially designed uniforms with gas masks and pocket pistols. The film crew was sent to the Eastern Front on September 10, 1939 to document the invasion of Poland. Riefenstahl collaborated because she wanted to feel useful; in that country she was photographed wearing military uniform and carrying a pistol on her belt in the company of soldiers. Germans.

On 12 September, she was in the town of Końskie when thirty civilians were executed in retaliation for an alleged attack on the Nazi army. According to her memoirs, she tried to intervene, but was held at gunpoint by an irate soldier and held threatened to shoot him on the spot; she also claimed that she was unaware that the victims were Jews. There are several black and white photos documenting this event; one of these photos, which a German had taken of her, is captioned "Leni Riefenstahl faints at the sight of dead Jews". Later, she claimed that she only heard gunshots. "in the distance": "Neither I nor my staff saw anything!"

By October 5, he was back in occupied Poland, accompanying Hitler's victory parade through Warsaw, while Sepp Allgeier and the Lantschner brothers filmed the event under the direction of Fritz Hippler. Afterwards, he left Poland and decided not to make any more Nazi-related films, furthermore, he turned down Goebbels's offer to make a documentary about the "Siegfried-Linie" (Siegfried-Linie). June 1940, the day Paris was declared an open city by the French and occupied by German troops, he sent a telegram to Hitler's headquarters:

Mit unbeschreiblicher Freude, tief bewegt und erfüllt mit heißem Dank, erleben wir mit Ihnen mein Führer, Ihren und Deutschlands größten Sieg, den Einzug Deutscher Truppen in Paris. Mehr als jede Vorstellungskraft menschlicher Phantasie vollbringen Sie Taten, die ohnegleichen in der Geschichte der Menschheit sind. Wie sollen wir Ihnen nur danken? Glückwünsche auszusprechen, das ist viel zu wenig, um Ihnen die Gefühle auszusprechen, die mich bewegen.

With an indescribable joy, deeply moved and full of ardent gratitude, we share with you, my FührerHis greatest victory and that of Germany, the entry of the German troops in Paris. You overcome everything that human imagination has the power to conceive, accomplishing facts without parallel in the history of humanity. How can we ever thank you? Happiness is too little to express my feelings.

He later explained: "Everyone thought the war was over and in that spirit I sent the cable [telegram] to Hitler."

In the shooting Groundland in 1940.

After the Nuremberg and Olympia trilogy, he began work on the feature film he had tried and failed to direct in the 1930s: Lowland (Tiefland). It was the third most expensive film produced during the Third Reich: on Hitler's direct order, the German government paid seven million imperial marks in compensation and Riefenstahl received private funds to the production, but the exterior shots could not be done in the Spanish Pyrenees, where the plot took place, due to the entry of Italian troops into the south of France, so the project was relocated to the Alps. the leading female role and served as director, co-producer and screenwriter. From September 23 to November 13, 1940, she filmed in Krün near Mittenwald. To give his film authenticity, he cast Mediterranean-looking gypsy extras to play Spanish women and farmers, who were taken from the Salzburg-Maxglan concentration camps and forced to work under harsh conditions. Eighteen months later, in April In 1942, filming of interior shots began at Johannisthal's Tobis Studios and the UFA complex at Babelsberg near Berlin. This time, they occupied Sinti and Roma (Gypsies) from the Marzahn concentration camp near Berlin. In October 1944, avoiding bombing raids on German territory, the production of Lowland moved to Barrandov Studios in Prague for interior filming. Barrandov's luxurious sets made these shots some of the most expensive of the film, which was not edited and released until almost ten years later, on February 11, 1954, in Stuttgart.

Despite overwhelming evidence that the concentration camp inmates were forced to work on the film without compensation, he claimed that all the extras in Lowland had survived and that he had been reunited with several of them after the war:

Wir haben alle Zigeuner, die in Tiefland mitgewirkt haben, nach Kriegsende wiedergesehen. Keinem einzigen ist etwas passiert.

We met with all the gypsies who worked in Groundland after the war ended. Nothing happened to anyone.

Regarding this controversy, in 1985 he sued the filmmaker Nina Gladitz for affirming that she had personally chosen the extras in the concentration camp; Gladitz found one of the surviving Roma and compared his memory with footage from the film for his documentary Time of Silence and Darkness (Zeit des Schweigens und der Dunkelheit), which was preparing and that Riefenstahl tried to force the suppression of several scenes. The Karlsruhe Higher Regional Court ruled largely in favor of Gladitz, stating that Riefenstahl knew that the extras were from a concentration camp, but also that she had not been informed that they would be deported to the "gypsy camp" ( Zigeunerlager Auschwitz) from the Auschwitz death camp after filming was completed. The matter resurfaced in 2002, shortly before her death, when a group of Roma took her to trial for denying that the Nazis attempted to exterminate his people, but the case was dropped due to lack of public interest. Riefenstahl apologized, saying: "I am sorry that Sinti and Roma have suffered during the period of National Socialism. Today we know that many of them were murdered in concentration camps."

On March 21, 1944, she married Peter Jacob, an officer in the Mountain Troop, whom she had met in 1940 while filming in Mittenwald. Shortly after their wedding, her last known personal meeting with Hitler at the Berghof on Obersalzberg. Her relationship with him declined sharply in 1944, after her brother Heinz was killed on the Eastern Front. As Germany's military situation became untenable in early 1945, she left Berlin and was hitchhiking with a group of men, while trying to communicate with her mother, when US troops detained her. She was released from a detention camp and began a series of escapes and arrests through the chaotic landscape. Finally, returning home on her bicycle, she discovered that US troops had seized her residence and she was surprised at how kindly they treated her.

Frustrated projects

In March 1939, he discussed with Albert Speer the construction of a 225,000 m² film studio site, specially tailored to his needs and the costs of which would be borne entirely by the NSDAP. However, due to the World War II, this project was never completed. Since the beginning of that year, Riefenstahl had also been preparing the film version of Heinrich von Kleist's drama Penthesilea, in which she herself would assume the role of the Amazon queen. She founded Riefenstahl-Film GmbH with state funds and retired to Sylt to write the script. Filming was to begin in Libya at the end of the summer of 1939, but the plan was thwarted by the outbreak of war on September 1, 1939.

Riefenstahl filming a complicated scene Olympia with his cameraman Walter Frentz.

Most of his unfinished projects were lost towards the end of the war. The French government confiscated all of his editing equipment, along with the production reels of Lowland. After years of legal disputes, they were returned to her in 1953, but she claimed that the French government had damaged some of the films while trying to develop and edit them, with some key scenes missing, though she was surprised to find the original negatives of Olympia in the same shipment. He was denied entry to the Cannes Film Festival shortly after the premiere of Lowland; although he lived for almost fifty more years, that was his last feature film He made several attempts to direct more films in the 1950s and 1960s, but was met with resistance, public outcry, and strong criticism. Many of her film companions had fled Germany for Hollywood and were unsympathetic to her. Her involvement in Nazi propaganda and her closeness to Hitler left a stain on her career, causing investors in the German film business of the postwar they distanced themselves from her. Harry R. Sokal, who had supported many of her projects between 1923 and 1932 and remained in contact with her after 1945, no longer had the necessary financial means. The scripts he wrote —The Florence Ballerina (Der Tänzer von Florenz), Eternal Summits (Ewige Gipfel) and The Red Demons (Die roten Teufel)—had no financing and no producer for the film Frederick the Great and Voltaire (Friedrich der Große und Voltaire).

In 1954, Jean Cocteau, an admirer of Lowland, insisted that the film be shown at the Cannes Film Festival, which he was directing that year. In 1960, Riefenstahl tried to prevent filmmaker Erwin Leiser from juxtaposing scenes from The Triumph of the Will with images of concentration camps in his film My Struggle (Mein Kampf ). He had high hopes of a collaboration with Cocteau on Frederick the Great and Voltaire, in which he would play two roles; they thought the work could symbolize the love-hate relationship between Germany and France, but Cocteau's illness and death in 1963 put an end to the project. A musical version of The Blue Light (The blue light) with an English production company.

In the 1960s he became interested in the African continent by Ernest Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa and the photographs of George Rodger of ceremonial wrestling matches of the Nuba. He first visited Kenya in 1956 and then Sudan. On an expedition to the second country in 1962 he met Masakin-Qisar, one of the approximately one hundred Nuba tribes, and stayed there until August 1963. Since then, he visited the Nuba every two years, studied their way of life and learned their language. She was accompanied by her partner Horst Kettner, who received training as a cameraman. Although her film project about the modern slave trade between East Africa and southern Arab countries, titled The Black Cargo (< i>Die Schwarze Fracht), was able to sell the images of the expedition to magazines in various parts of the world. While scouting locations for the shoot, he nearly died in a truck accident. After being comatose in a Nairobi hospital, she finished writing the script, but she was soon thwarted by uncooperative locals, the Suez crisis and bad weather; in the end, the project was cancelled. Two other projects in Africa, the film African Symphony (Afrikanische Symphonie) and the documentary The Nile (Der Nil), could not be implemented for financial reasons either. Even so, in 1974 President Jaafar al-Numeiry granted her Sudanese citizenship for her services to the country, making her the first foreigner to receive a Sudanese passport.

Detention and trials

In 1945, novelist and sportswriter Budd Schulberg, assigned by the US Navy to the Office of Strategic Services for intelligence work while attached to John Ford's documentary unit, was ordered to arrest her at her villa in Kitzbühel, ostensibly for her to identify Nazi war criminals in German film footage captured by Allied troops shortly after the war. Riefenstahl defended herself by claiming she was unaware of the nature of the internment camps: "She gave me a Common excuse in these cases. And she said, “Of course, you know, I really misunderstood. I'm not a politician," Schulberg recounted.

Between 1945 and 1948 she was detained in various Allied-controlled prison camps in Germany. At Dachau she was interrogated several times about her role within the Third Reich and was confronted with images of the concentration camps. On June 3, 1945, she was released and returned to Kitzbühel, then occupied by the French. A year later, on April 15, 1946, Riefenstahl, her husband, and her mother were expelled from Austria, so they settled in Königsfeld im Schwarzwald. In May 1947, the French occupation forces sent her to a psychiatric institution in Freiburg due to alleged depression, where she recounted that she was treated with electric shocks for several months Two months later, she divorced Peter Jacob.

She moved to Schwabing with her mother after her release from the mental institution. Between 1948 and 1952 she was subjected to four denazification processes. In the first two trials—in Villingen in November 1948 and July 1949 in Freiburg—she was labeled "unrelated" (nicht betroffen). However, in the third trial in Freiburg, on December 16, 1949, she was declared a "travel companion" (Mitläufer), that is, a Nazi sympathizer. there were no sanctions apart from the loss of the right to vote, it was finally confirmed by a decision of the Berlin Court of Appeal on April 21, 1952. Although he was not prohibited from working, after 1945 he could not do any other work. film project aside from the completion of the feature film Lowland. they were not clear.

Last years

Africa, photography, books and final film

His first photos of the Nuba tribe were published in the illustrated magazine Kristall in 1964. They were followed by a photographic series entitled African Kingdom by Time Life, as well as in the magazines Paris Match, L'Europeo and Life. In December 1969, Stern published On the cover is an article illustrated with twenty photos: Leni Riefenstahl photographed the Nuba: images that no one has seen (Leni Riefenstahl fotografierte die Nuba – Bilder die noch keiner sah heraus). His books with photographs of the Nuba tribes were published in 1974 and 1976, respectively, as The Nuba: Men Like Otherworldly (Die Nuba – Menschen wie vom anderen Stern), which mainly documents the daily routines of the Nuba, such as harvesting, body painting and ritual battles between men, and The Nuba of Kau (Die Nuba von Kau), centered on portraits and images of ceremonies with dancing women. Although heralded as outstanding color photographs, they were heavily criticized by American leftist activist Susan Sontag, who wrote in a review that the books were further evidence of the " Riefenstahl's fascist aesthetic». In 1975, more of his photos of that tribe appeared in the series The Feast of Knives and Love (Das Fest der Messer und der Liebe), designed by Rolf Gillhausen for Stern magazine. She was awarded a gold medal by the Art Directory of the Club of Germany for the best photographic achievement of 1975. She was an accredited photographer of the Games 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich and did an illustrated series of rock star Mick Jagger and his wife Bianca for The Sunday Times. She was guest of honor at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal. 1982's My Africa (Mein Afrika) was his third book illustrated with photographs of the African continent. In the 1990s, a series of exhibitions opened in everyone who talked about her facet as a graphic artist and her work; She began with the exhibition Leni Riefenstahl – Life , designed by Eiko Ishioka, at the Bunkamura Museum in Shibuya, where the filmmaker was present for the opening ceremony in December 1991.

In 1978, he published a book of his underwater photographs called Coral Gardens (Korallengärten), followed by Underwater Wonder (< i>Wunder unter Wasser) in 1990. At ninety years old she was still photographing marine life and earned the distinction of being one of the oldest scuba divers in the world. On August 22, 2002, her 100th birthday years ago, he released the film Underwater Impressions (Impressionen unter Wasser), an idealized documentary of life in the oceans and his first film in more than fifty years.

In 1987 he published his memoirs, which he had been working on since 1982. They were translated into several languages and were on best-seller lists, especially abroad. In 1992, he participated in the biographical documentary The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (Die Macht der Bilder: Leni Riefenstahl) by Ray Müller, in which she gave extensive interviews, visited the filming locations of her films and sketched her work diary. In addition, the filmmaker's 90th birthday celebration and photo shoots of her with Siegfried and Roy in Las Vegas and Helmut Newton were filmed. The documentary was released in 1993 and was awarded an Emmy. On August 30, 1997, Riefenstahl received a Lifetime Achievement Award for her from the Cinecon Filmmakers Association in Glendale, California, for representing "all facets of cinematography".

In early 2000, it was announced that Jodie Foster intended to bring the director's life to the big screen. The Oscar winner had already discussed the script with Riefenstahl, but the start of filming was repeatedly postponed. In 2011, Foster finally said that she had given up on the plan. Madonna had also shown interest, but she eventually dropped out of the project.

In February 2000, Müller accompanied the filmmaker to Sudan for the filming of the documentary Leni Riefenstahl: Her African Dream (Leni Riefenstahl: ihr Traum von Afrika). In March, on the return flight to Khartoum, the helicopter crashed near El Obeid and Riefenstahl survived badly injured; she was airlifted to a hospital in Munich where she received treatment for two broken ribs. In October of that year, she was present at the Frankfurt Book Fair for the launch of her biography Leni Riefenstahl: Five Lives (Leni Riefenstahl: fünf Leben) by Angelika Taschen.

She had a relationship with her cameraman Horst Kettner, forty years her junior who helped her with the photographs. Since 1979 they lived in a self-designed villa on 1,700 m² of land in Pöcking, near Lake Starnberg. Riefenstahl was a member of Greenpeace for eight years, with the aim of "raising awareness of what the world will lose if nothing is done to prevent the destruction of the oceans".

Death

Riefenstahl tomb in the tree-lined cemetery in Munich.

She celebrated her 101st birthday on August 22, 2003 at a hotel in Feldafing, on Lake Starnberg (Bavaria), near her home, but fell ill the next day. She had been suffering from cancer for some time and her health deteriorated rapidly in the last weeks of her life. Her partner, Kettner, said in a 2002 interview: “Mrs. Riefenstahl is in a lot of pain and she has grown very weak. She is taking painkillers ».

He died at his home in Pöcking in his sleep around 10:00 p.m. on September 8, 2003, at the age of 101. Her remains were cremated and her urn was interred on September 12 in the Wooded Cemetery in Munich. After her death, there was a mixed reaction in obituaries in major publications, although most acknowledged her technical advances in film. Her widower, Horst Kettner, kept the photographic and film archive in their shared villa (called Haus unter den Eichen, German for "House under the oaks") in Pöcking. In 2018, the material was handed over to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin. As well as being an "innovative aesthetic work", upon accepting it the foundation stated that it bore "also a special responsibility for critical discussion", especially in the context of National Socialism.

Criticism and legacy

Elements and techniques of expression

He emphasized harmonious, aesthetic, and symbolic scenes in his films. Influenced by his mountaineering film mentor Arnold Fanck, he had developed a feeling for the impact of landscapes and architecture, so he chose the picturesque backdrop of Brenta in Trento for the fairytale plot The Blue Light in her directorial debut. She concentrated on the mysticism of the story through the use of mist, light, and shadow. The blue glow emanating from a crystal grotto on full moon nights symbolizes the unattainable ideals of the mountain girl Junta, played by Riefenstahl. She also experimented with color filters: by using a red filter, she made the daytime blue sky appear almost black, so she could record without doing it at night. She cut out long scenes to make the action look more entertaining, a technique she had also learned from Fanck.

Riefenstahl reviewing a film camera The triumph of the will in 1934 in the Zeppelin field of Nuremberg. The members of their team wore a SA uniform to maintain the overall vision of the demonstration, as the groups deployed were uniformed.

According to Riefenstahl, The Triumph of the Will had to be more interesting than the static weekly news from the Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro. To do this, he placed his cameramen in various places to capture from different angles, which it allowed him a more dynamic edition. The moving shots of him were among the first in documentary film history. Cameramen filmed on skids and from moving vehicles, placed the camera on a flagpole lift, or drove with it on rails. Riefenstahl designed the transitions of the individual scenes as smoothly as possible by coordinating the gray tones. and a specific use (J-cut). It also distorted the diegetic sound, suggesting an influence from German art cinema, which, stimulated by the classic Hollywood film style, used music to enhance the narrative, give a sense of grandeur and enhance the emotions in a scene. In this production, Riefenstahl used traditional music to accompany and intensify takes of him. Morgan (2006) commented on this distortion of sound «In Triumph of the Will, the material world leaves no auditory impression beyond the music. When the film combines diegetic noise with the music, the effects used are human (laughter or cheering) and offer a rhythmic extension of the music rather than contrast. Replacing diegetic sound, Riefenstahl's film employs music to combine the documentary with the fantastic." According to Riefenstahl, the music replaces the live sound of the event and works to convey the meaning of his shots and its background: national pride.

Her experience as a dancer influenced the rhythm of the images in The Triumph of the Will and the choreography of the marching troops. The montage combined dramatic contrasts between the faceless crowd and Hitler, who in one scene showed him in close-up and with exaggerated staging due to the low-angle view of the camera. According to Saunders (2016), Hitler was the crosshairs of the film. camera: “While denying that 'unbridled masculinity' (the 'sensuality' of Hitler and the SS) serves as a target, I would suggest that desire is also directed towards the feminine. This does not occur in the familiar sequences of adoring women greeting Hitler's arrival and the ride through Nuremberg. In these, Hitler clearly remains the center of attraction, especially in the visual treatment of the wide following of him. Rather, he is encoded in representation of flags and banners, captured in a way that makes them visually desirable, as well as potent political symbols." Above this, the flag serves as a symbol of masculinity, equated with national pride and dominance and channeling men's sexual and masculine energy. The cinematographic framing of the flags encapsulated her iconography: «The effect is a significant double transformation: the images mechanize human beings and give life to the flags. Even when the wearers are not mostly submerged under the sea of colored cloth and when facial features are visible in profile, they do not achieve character or distinction. Men are still ants in a vast sea. Rather, paradoxically, the flags, whether a few or hundreds occupying the frame, assume distinct identities.” Since the film employed no narrator, she let images, chants, swastika flags, and other symbols do the talking.

Riefenstahl and Walter Frentz preparing for a long follow-up on the athletic track of the Berlin Olympic Stadium (1936).

In directing Olympia, he was inspired by ancient Greece: he staged the athletes with ancient sculptures and heroic archetypes in slow motion on half-naked iron bodies and movements of dancers. To get as close as possible athletes, the team developed many new recording techniques. Pits were dug from which they could film the pole vaulters in the open air. To record sprints, he designed a catapult camera that could go next to the athletes. Aerial, underwater, and railway cameras were also used. For the first time, cameramen used telephoto lenses with a focal length of 600 mm to take close-up images of distant athletes.

Olympia is characterized by the use of a camera that alternates between scenes (similar to a report), panoramic shots, low-angle shots, slow motion, subjective shots, and parallel movements. The montage focused on symbolic exaggeration through optical transitions, on emotional music or the tension between sporting competition and crowd-pleasing. Another design feature is the transition between musically illustrated scenes and parts that appear to have been authentically staged. commented on by speakers and reactions from the audience. Riefenstahl used footage of training, which could not be captured in actual competition and was later inserted into the footage, to create film-level drama. to make the marathon monotonous, he also used cinematic elements. The recordings show the exhausted racers, but at the same time, the recorded driving music conveys their unwavering will to reach the finish line. In addition, the high jump scenes were played at different speeds and sometimes in reverse..

Assessment of the work and its influence on pop culture

For film scholars, the NSDAP trilogy and Olympia are not just documentaries, but propaganda films and artistic productions of a cult of the Führer and the body. In her 1975 essay Fascinating Fascism, Susan Sontag wrote: "Those who defend Riefenstahl's films as documentaries, if the documentary is distinguished from propaganda, they are being insincere. In The Triumph of the Will, the document (the image) is not only the record of reality; "reality" was constructed to serve the image". Film critic Jürgen Trimborn opined in his biography of the filmmaker: "No documentary on National Socialism today can do without the images of The Triumph of the Will. No other film has shaped our visual idea of what National Socialism was as profoundly as she did." Martin Loiperdinger, Professor of Information Sciences, assessed it differently: "[The Triumph of the Will represents] a unique historical source, but not just for National Socialism as it really was, but as a document of how National Socialism liked to look."

While The Victory of Faith is considered aesthetically flawed due to some blurry images and forced comic scenes, The Triumph of the Will is viewed as a masterpiece perfectionist and one of the best propaganda films ever made. Among the hallmarks of these party conference films are the visual exaggeration of Hitler and elegant crowd choreography. In 1956, despite an American boycott from the late 1930s, Olympia was voted one of the "Ten Greatest Films of All Time" by a Hollywood jury. The idealized portrayal of strength, elegance, and power based on of muscular and impeccable bodies is characteristic of that work. Although Riefenstahl did not invent the fascist aesthetic, she was the one who ingeniously introduced it to the medium of cinema and did not hesitate to eroticize National Socialism. After the publication of her illustrated books of the Nuba tribe, Sontag accused her of glorifying physical strength and courage. in the photographs with the Nazi ideology and link them without hesitation with his propaganda feature films of the 1930s.

Although his works remain controversial, there is a broad consensus among researchers and film critics that Riefenstahl set cinematic standards with his highly dynamic editing technique, revolutionary for its time, and the use of entirely new camera perspectives. His films, especially Triumph of the Will and Olympia, have influenced generations of subsequent artists. For example, George Lucas adapted a scene from The Triumph of the Will at the Massassi Temple Ceremony from Star Wars (1977), Quentin Tarantino also was inspired by his works during the preparations for Inglourious Basterds (2009) and the band Rammstein released in 1998 a cover of the Depeche Mode song "Stripped", accompanied by a video with images of < i>Olympia. His works continue to have a lasting influence on films and advertising campaigns, documentaries and sports photography.

Riefenstahl's self-perception

He viewed his works strictly as documentaries and vehemently rejected accusations of Nazi propaganda:

Triumph des Willens ist ein Dokumentarfilm von einem Parteitag, mehr nicht. Das hat nichts zu tun mit Politik. Denn ich habe aufgenommen, was sich wirklich abgespielt hat und habe es insofern überhöht, als ich keinen Kommentar dazu gemacht habe. Ich habe versucht, die Atmosphäre, die da war, durch Bilder auszudrücken und nicht durch einen gesprochenen Kommentar. Und um das ohne Text verständlich zu machen, musste die Bildsprache sehr gut, sehr deutlich sein. Die Bilder mussten das sagen können, was man sonst spricht. Aber deswegen ist es doch keine Propaganda.

The triumph of the will It is a documentary of a party congress, nothing more. It has nothing to do with politics. Because I recorded what really happened and exaggerated it to the point of not telling it. I tried to express the atmosphere that was there through images and not a comment. And for this to be understandable without text, the visual language had to be very good, very clear. The images had to say more than was spoken. But that's not why it's propaganda.

In her memoirs and various interviews, she also stated that she initially resisted shooting the NSDAP trilogy, was unaware of her skills as a documentary filmmaker, and really only wanted to work as an actress. However, she claimed that Hitler had pressured her until she finally agreed, albeit on the condition that she would never again have to make a film for him or the NSDAP.

She always stressed that she was not interested in politics and had not thought about the effects of her works. He defended that his artistic work was always aesthetic, not ideology. However, there is evidence that he used his influence in favor of the interests of the NSDAP, so that in 1936 he intervened with Goebbels against the appointment of the German Archaeological Institute's candidate for the position of head of the branch institute in Athens, in order to place an applicant who was the leader of the NSDAP/AO in Greece. He also expressed enthusiasm for Hitler's book My Struggle (Mein Kampf) to a British journalist in 1934: "The book made a great impression on me," he confessed. "I became a staunch National Socialist after reading the first page." At the end of the war, she acknowledged she was a "political naive" and ignorant of war crimes. In 1949 she wrote to Manfred George, editor-in-chief of the German-Jewish newspaper < i>Aufbau in exile: "I have almost gone mad from this and I fear that I will never be able to free myself from the nightmare of this tremendous suffering." However, in subsequent interviews he always condemned Nazi crimes, but, at the same time, At the same time, he resisted any notion of guilt: «[…] where is my guilt? Tell me, I did not drop atomic bombs, I have not denied anyone. Where is my fault?"

Relationship with Hitler

Hitler and Riefenstahl at the premiere of the first part of Olympia in 1938.

There was much speculation as early as the 1930s and 1940s about the relationship between Riefenstahl and Hitler. It was alleged several times that he had had a sexual relationship with the chancellor. Even after Hitler's suicide, rumors were repeatedly fed with alleged revelations. For example, the alleged diaries of Eva Braun, which Riefenstahl's colleague Luis Trenker had given to a tabloid weekly, indicated that the filmmaker danced naked before Hitler. In 1948 relatives of Braun and Riefenstahl took legal action against the publisher. The court ruled that the records were a free representation by an unknown author. Trenker's explanation of how he obtained the documents was flimsy and he later admitted that he "was just kidding."

Riefenstahl always denied that there was anything more than a purely professional relationship between her and Hitler. Although she felt that he "wanted her as a woman," there was never any intimacy. The correspondence between them that has been made known is cordial and formal at the same time and supports her statements. The NSDAP's press officer, Otto Dietrich, spoke of a lasting and friendly artistic bond between the two, Riefenstahl saying that he had differentiated between the politician and "the man" in Hitler, although he never denied having fallen for his personality. She believed in the good in him and she recognized the demonic too late due to delusion: “I was one of the millions who thought that Hitler had all the answers. We only saw the good things; We didn't know bad things would come.” She also expressed that her biggest regret was having met Hitler: “The biggest catastrophe of my life. Until the day I die, people will continue to say "Leni is a Nazi", and I will continue to answer "But what did I do?"

For his part, Hitler, who said that women who interfered in political and military affairs were "abominations" (Greuel), valued her for her work and once said: "I had four Leading Women: Ms. Troost, Mrs. Wagner, Mrs. Scholtz-Klink and Leni Riefenstahl". Some authors cite the similarity in character as the explanation for the friendship between Riefenstahl and Hitler. Both were described as having very determined, dominant, narcissistic and egocentric personalities, whose relationship was characterized by mutual identification and the satisfaction of their longings. According to the psychoanalyst Margarete Mitscherlich-Nielsen, one discovered in the other "his self-portrait of the soul, which it matched her own fantasies about perfection, superiority, and the art of seduction."

Public perception

"The Leni Riefenstahl of Hitler"Hitler’s Leni Riefenstahl), cover of the magazine Time February 1936.

Leni Riefenstahl was considered a legend in her lifetime, and public interest in her continued even after her death. Her life and work has been covered and analyzed in numerous scientific and non-scientific publications, and she has been more polarizing than almost anyone else in film history. Some have branded her as Hitler's "henchman" (Steigbügelhalterin) and a propagandist for Nazi ideology and fascist aesthetics; others consider her a talented artist, doomed to the Third World. Reich misused his works for propaganda purposes.

By the 1930s, she was recognized as the "mountain film star" and later, by Hitler's appointment, "Reich film director". However, after the November 1938 pogroms, Hitler's "Lady Friend" was boycotted internationally, mainly in the United Kingdom and the United States. In Germany, her high reputation reversed after 1945. With the reports on the denazification process, which Riefenstahl had to face from 1948 to 1952, her once celebrated works were now critically appraised and the filmmaker's purely artistic motivation began to be questioned. On May 1, 1949, the weekly Revue first reported on Sinti and Roma extras forced to work on the film Lowland and later murdered. Riefenstahl took legal action against the magazine and, among other things, succeeded in having publisher Helmut Kindler convicted of defamation by the Munich District Court. It was the first of approximately fifty successful defamation lawsuits.

Reporting waned in the 1960s, when his first photographs of the Nuba tribe were published. Beginning in the 1970s, the term "Riefenstahl Renaissance" began to be used, especially outside Germany: the artist and her documentaries were rediscovered and an increasing number of uncritical reviews circulated. At the Telluride Film Festival in 1974, was honored with the Silver Medallion for her services to the art of cinematography, an award she shared with Gloria Swanson and Francis Ford Coppola. Other artists expressed their admiration and promoted the filmmaker's rehabilitation. However, critical voices and isolated protests continued. when her public appearances were announced. violent argument with the other guests during the live broadcast.

Reactions were divided again when he published his memoir in 1987. While The New York Times described the 900-page work as "captivating" — even though he put his work at the service of the Nazis —and included it among "The Hundred Remarkable Books" of 1993, others criticized its lack of self-reflection and critical analysis of the past; for example, Mitscherlich-Nielsen described it in 1994 as a "super-denier" ( Superverleugnerin). On her 100th birthday on August 22, 2002, and on the occasion of her death on September 8, 2003, numerous media published retrospectives on her life and work. In her obituary, The British newspaper The Times summarized the opinions about his life and work:

Leni Riefenstahl is the only woman who by general consent has yet achieved absolute greatness as a film-maker. But that is the only thing about her on which there is agreement. For she has been portrayed as an arch-villain and a selfless heroine; as a mess, a cheat, a dupe, a racist, a victim of a patriarchal society and a triumphant model of the artist-for-art’s sake. Perhaps the film historian Liam O’Leary summed up the contradictions best when he said: “Artistically she is a genius, and politically she is a nitwit. ”

Leni Riefenstahl is the only woman who, by general consensus, has achieved absolute grandeur as a filmmaker. Although that's the only thing about her in what's agreed. She has been portrayed as an archvillain and a disinterested heroine; as a liar, cheat, naive, racist, victim of a patriarchal society and triumphant model of the artist's good for art. Perhaps the film historian Liam O’Leary better summed up the contradictions when he said, “Artistically, he is a genius and, politically, a bobalicone.”

Works

Filmography

Books

• Riefenstahl, Leni (1933). Kampf in Schnee und Eis (in German). Leipzig: Hesse und Becker Verlag. OCLC 314568984.
• ——— (1935). Hinter den Kulissen des Reichsparteitag-Films: der Film „Triumph des Willens“ wurde im Auftrag des Führers geschaffen (in German). Munich: Franz Eher Nachfolger. OCLC 34378283.
• ——— (1937). Schönheit im Olympischen Kampf: mit zahlreichen Aufnahmen von den Olympischen Spielen 1936 (in German). Berlin: Deutschen Verlag. OCLC 890183140.
• ——— (1973). Die Nuba: Menschen wie von einem anderen Stern (in German). Munich: Ready. ISBN 978-3-423-01734-3. OCLC 10148770.

Spanish translation: The Nuba: Men Like Other World. Barcelona: Blume. 1973. ISBN 978-8-470-31097-3. OCLC 77597355.

• ——— (1976). Die Nuba von Kau (in German). Munich: Ready. ISBN 978-3-471-78521-8. OCLC 499888845.

Spanish translation: The nuba of Kau. Barcelona: Blume. 1978. ISBN 978-8-470-31098-0. OCLC 802978534.

• ——— (1978). Korallengärten (in German). Munich: Ready. ISBN 978-3-471-78527-0. OCLC 243903903.
• ——— (1982). Mein Afrika (in German). Munich: Ready. ISBN 978-3-471-78531-7. OCLC 239744255.
• ——— (1987). Memoiren (in German). Munich: Albrecht Knaus. ISBN 978-3-813-50154-4. OCLC 906513315.

Spanish translation: Memories. Barcelona: Lumen. 1991. ISBN 978-8-426-41208-9. OCLC 75308946.

English translation: Leni Riefenstahl: a memoir. New York: Pictor. 1995. ISBN 978-0-312-11926-3. OCLC 31607825. Disclosure summary – Transition (1997).

• ——— (1990). Wunder unter Wasser (in German). Munich: Herbig. ISBN 978-3-7766-1651-4. OCLC 442637559.
• ——— (2002). Africa (in German). Cologne: Taschen. ISBN 978-3-8228-16-5. OCLC 799313225.
• ——— (2002). Olympia: dokumentation zum Olympia Film (in German). Cologne: Taschen. ISBN 978-3-8228-1945-6. OCLC 473831666.

Awards and distinctions

Venice International Film Festival