Riefenstahl, Berta Helene Amalie

▪ 2004

“Leni” 

      German filmmaker (b. Aug. 22, 1902, Berlin, Ger.—d. Sept. 8, 2003, Pöcking, Ger.), was the first female director to gain international renown and was acclaimed as perhaps the finest and most influential female director of the 20th century, but her association with Adolf Hitler made her almost as much reviled as admired. She employed innovative filming and editing techniques to create two documentaries—the powerful Triumph des Willens (1935; Triumph of the Will), which covered a Nazi Party rally in Nürnberg, and the two-part Olympische Spiele (1938; Olympia), which celebrated the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin and, especially, the physical beauty of the athletes. While hailed as works of genius, these films were also reviled for their propagandistic glorification of Hitler's regime and the Nazi goal of Aryan racial purity. Riefenstahl had a brief career as a dancer in the 1920s before seeing her first motion picture. She appeared in a number of so-called mountain films while at the same time learning the technical aspects of filmmaking, and in 1931 she formed Leni Riefenstahl-Produktion. Das blaue Licht (1932; The Blue Light), which Riefenstahl wrote, produced, directed, and starred in, won a medal at the Venice Film Festival and brought her to Hitler's attention; and a short film about a 1933 Nazi rally, Sieg des Glaubens (1933; Victory of the Faith), paved the way for her two masterpieces. Following World War II she was investigated for complicity with the Nazis but, maintaining that she was unaware of the Holocaust, was finally cleared in 1952 and completed a film she had begun years earlier, Tiefland (1954; Lowlands). In 1973 Riefenstahl published Die Nuba (The Last of the Nuba), a book of photographs of the Nuba people in The Sudan that she had taken in the 1960s and '70s. She took up scuba diving and underwater photography and in 2002, at age 100, released another film, Impressionen unter Wasser (Underwater Impressions).

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