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Leni Riefenstahl

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Bertha Helene Amalie "Leni" Riefenstahl (August 22 1902 – September 8 2003) was a German athlete, actor, director and filmmaker widely noted for her aesthetics and advances in film technique. Her most famous works are documentary propaganda films for the German Nazi Party. Rejected by the film industry after World War II, she later pursued still photography and continued to make films of marine life.

Contents

Biography

Dancer and actor

Born in Berlin, Riefenstahl began her career as a self-styled and well-known interpretive dancer. In a 2002 interview, she said dancing was what made her truly happy. After injuring a knee, she attended a film about mountains and became fascinated with the possibilities of the medium. She went to the Alps for about a year and when she returned, confidentially approached Arnold Fanck, the director of the film she'd seen earlier, asking for a role in his next project. Riefenstahl went on to star in a number of Fanck's bergfilme, presenting herself as an athletic and adventurous young woman with suggestive appeal. Riefenstahl's career as an actor in silent films was prolific, and she became highly regarded by directors and publicly popular with German film-goers. When presented with the opportunity to direct Das Blaue Licht in 1932, she took it. Her main interest at first was in fictional films. Her last acting role before moving to directing was in the 1933 film SOS Eisberg (U.S. title SOS Iceberg); this film was released on DVD in the U.S. in November 2005.

Documentary filmmaker

She heard Adolf Hitler speak at a rally in 1932 and was mesmerized by his powers as a public speaker. Upon meeting Riefenstahl, Hitler, himself a frustrated artist, saw the chance to hire a visionary who could create the image of a strong, proud Wagnerian Germany radiating beauty, power, strength, and defiance, an image he could sell to the world. During a personal meeting he asked Riefenstahl to make a documentary and, in 1933, she directed the short film Der Sieg des Glaubens (Victory of Faith), an hour-long feature about the Nazi party rally at Nuremberg in 1933 (released on DVD in 2003). Reports vary as to whether she ever had a close relationship with Hitler but, impressed with her work, he then asked her to film the upcoming 1934 Party rally in Nuremberg. After initially turning down the project because she did not want to make "a prescribed film", Riefenstahl began making another film titled Tiefland. She hired Walter Ruttmann to direct it in her place. When she fell ill, Tiefland was cancelled. Upon her recovery, she reviewed Ruttmann's initial footage and found it to be terrible. She eventually relented to Hitler's pressure, and resumed her role as director of the film. She was given unlimited resources, camera crews, budget, complete artistic control and final cut of the film. Triumph of the Will was a documentary glorifying Hitler and widely regarded as one of the most effective pieces of propaganda ever produced. It is generally regarded as a masterful, epic, innovative work of documentary filmmaking. Because it was commissioned by the Nazi party and used as propaganda, however, critics have said it is nearly impossible to separate the subject from the artist behind it. Triumph of the Will was a rousing success in Europe, but widely banned in America.

Triumph of the Will won many international awards as a ground-breaking example of filmmaking. She went on to make a film about the German Wehrmacht, released in 1935 as Tag der Freiheit (Day of Freedom).

In 1936 Riefenstahl qualified as an athlete to represent Germany in cross-country skiing for the Olympics but decided to film the event instead. This material became Olympia, a film widely noted for its technical and aesthetic achievements. She was the first to put a camera on rails, a technique which is commonly called A Tracking Shot, was used to film the crowds in the stadium as well as the movemnet of the runners in track and field events. Riefenstahl's achievements in the making of Olympia have proved to be a major influence in modern sports photography. Still today her influence is seen in goverment "photo ops", major movies, television, and advertisement.

World War II

During the Polish-German War of 1939 Leni Riefenstahl accompanied German troops in Poland. On 28 september 1939 she was present in the town of Końskie during an execution of 30 civilians carried out in retaliation of an attack on German soldiers. According to witnesses when Leni tried to intervene a furious German officer held her at gun point and threatened to shoot her on the spot. There are close-up pictures showing a despaired Leni from that day. As a result of the events Leni left her work and immediately went to Berlin where using her personal influences she demanded an audience with Adolf Hitler.

The nervous breakdown that Leni Riefenstahl suffered after the massacre in the town Końskie did not last long. On 5 October 1939 she was back in occupied Poland and filming Hitler's victory parade in Warsaw. In order to prevent assassination attempts during the celebrations, the Germans held 412 Polish civilians as hostages.

After World War II

After World War II, she spent four years in a French detention camp. There were accusations she had used concentration camp inmates on her film sets, but those claims were not proven in court. Being unable to prove any culpable support of the Nazis, the court called her a sympathizer. In later interviews Riefenstahl maintained, with little success, that she was "fascinated" by the Nazis but politically naïve and ignorant about the war crimes they committed.

In order to understand in a broader context the conclusions of the court, it's important to know that after the war, every German had to be “denazified”. For that purpose, every person's case was examined and his or her connections with the Nazi regime were linked to a degree of connection, from 1 (for the war criminals like Hermann Göring) to 5 (the latter meant completely innocent of any connection). Leni Riefenstahl belonged in group 4, not completely innocent but the lowest degree of relationship with the regime. Some other directors like Veit Harlan (who made the film Jud Süß (The Jew Süss) in 1940) were considered as to belong in category 5.

The History Channel, on its sister channel, History International, did a documentary entitled, Hitler's Women: Leni Riefensthal[link]. In it, the accusation is made that Riefenstahl was accutely aware that her films were propaganda. They point to evidence such as the fact that Hitler had a sit-down discussion between Riefenstahl and Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels at her personal German villa, as seen in this [picture], to resolve differences the two were having which was causing strife in Hitler's early regime. Even more damning are the film clips of Riefenstahl dining with Goebbels and Himmler, and other top men of both the Brownshirt and SS branches of NSDAP, intercut with interviews with German historians and WWII scholars questioning how any one could appear at state dinners with top Nazi officials (eating at the high table with them, no less) and be completely unaware of what politics they were supporting. Furthering the connection, they cite the fact that Riefenstahl sent a celebratory telegram to Hitler after his invasion of France, "Your deeds exceed the power of human imagination. They are without equal in the history of mankind. How can we ever thank you?" (something that was even present in her [obituary] and other [articles]).

Lastly, they detail interviews with actual Gypsy survivors of the Holocaust, who refute Reifensthal's claims that the concentration camp victims she used for filming were not killed, which have also been refuted through acticles such as [this] and [this].

The documentary comes to the conclusion that Riefenstahl suffered from a deep denial of her actual culpability, to the point that she even began to believe her own lies regarding her innocence.

Post War Career, Legacy and Personal Life

Riefenstahl attempted to make films after the war but each attempt was met with resistance, protests, sharp criticisms and an inability to secure funding. In 1944, she married Peter Jacob, which ended in divorce, and in the 1960s took a man, Horst Kettner, who was forty years her junior. He remained her faithful companion to the end of her life. She became a photographer and was later the first to photograph rock star Mick Jagger and his wife Bianca as a couple holding hands after they were married, as they were both admirers. Jagger told Riefenstahl he had seen Triumph of the Will at least 15 times.

Later, embracing a cult of "primitivism", she became interested in the Nuba tribe in Sudan. Her books with photographs of the tribe were published in 1974 and 1976. She survived a helicopter crash in the Sudan in 2000.

In her late 70s, Riefenstahl lied about her age to get certified for scuba diving and started a career in underwater photography. She released a new film titled Impressionen unter Wasser (Underwater Impressions), an idealized documentary on life in the oceans, on her 100th birthday - August 22, 2002.

In October 2002, German authorities decided to drop a case against her for Holocaust denial, citing her age and possible dementia. She had allegedly falsely claimed that "every one" of the Roma people which had been drawn from a concentration camp to appear in her film Tiefland had survived the war. A Gypsy group had filed the case, claiming she used them for the film and sent them back when she no longer needed them. In addition to Riefenstahl having signed a withdrawal of her claim, the prosecutor cited Riefenstahl's considerable age as a reason for dropping further action.

Leni Riefenstahl died in her sleep on September 8 2003, at her home in Pöcking, Germany a few weeks after her 101st birthday. She had been suffering from cancer. In her obituaries Riefenstahl was said to be the last famous figure of Germany's Nazi era to die.

Riefenstahl is renowned in film history for developing new aesthetics in film, especially in relation to nude bodies. While the propaganda value of her early films repels many, their aesthetics are cited by many filmmakers as outstanding.

Works

Actor

Director

Photographer

Author

First editions, they are all in German:

Bibliographies

References

External links


Films by Leni Riefenstahl
Das Blaue Licht (1932) | Der Sieg des Glaubens (1933) | Triumph of the Will (1934) | Tag der Freiheit (1935) | Olympia (1938) | Tiefland (1954) | Underwater Impressions (2002)

 

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