Leni Riefenstahl was born in August 1902. She was christened Helene Bertha Amalie. She was born into a prosperous family. Her father owned a successful heating and ventilation company and he wanted Leni to follow him into the world of business. However, her mother believed that Leni's future was in show business. In 1918, when she was 16, Leni started dance and ballet classes at the Grimm-Reiter Dance School in Berlin, where she quickly became a star pupil.
Early Film Career:
Riefenstahl gained a reputation on Berlin's dance circuit and she quickly moved into films. She made a series of films for Arnold Fanck, and one of them, "The White Hell of Pitz Palu", which was co-directed by G W Pabst, saw her fame spread to countries outside of Germany. In 1932, Riefenstahl produced her own work called "The Blue Light". This film won the Silver Medal at the Venice Film Festival. In the film, Riefenstahl played a peasant girl who protected a glowing mountain grotto. The film attracted the attention of Hitler. He believed she epitomized the perfect German female.
Association with the NAZI party in Germany:
Adolf Hitler was a great admirer of Riefenstahl and in 1933 he appointed her as film executive of the Nazi Party. She made a series of films that reflected fascist ideology. This included Reichsparteitag (1935), a film of a party conference.
In 1933, Riefenstahl made a short film about the Nazi Party's rally of that year. She was asked to make a much grander film of the 1934 event. This led to probably her most famous film - "Triumph of the Will". The film won awards in both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy but also, ironically, in 1937, it won the Grand Prix in Paris. The film used camera angles rarely seen before and frequently used shadowy images as opposed to images that were visually clear. The cameramen also did some of their work on roller skates.
Comment on some of her films:
"This is more often self-portrait than portrait; like Hitler in Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, she's presented as a fully formed deity without family background or ideology save a reverence for beauty and strength."
--Jonathan Rosenbaum
"However misdirected, Riefenstahl's talent is here in full bloom. And audience members may leave with their own contradictory feelings about her life and what it means."
-- John A. Nesbit
Life after the war:
Immediately after the war, Riefenstahl was arrested and held for a short time at a lunatic asylum. She was rapidly 'denazified' in 1945 and not charged with any crime. However, she was forbidden from making films and her films remained banned in post-war Germany for years. This concerned some as Veit Harlan, the maker of "Jew Süss", a virulently anti-Semitic film made during Hitler's regime, was allowed to return to film making after the war ended. Some believed that Riefenstahl was forbidden to return to film making simply because she was female - in an industry dominated by men.
Eventually, Riefenstahl did return to film making and photography. She produced underwater films of the Red Sea. In 2002, she became the only person over 100 to release a film - "Underwater Impressions" which was a selection of footage from film clips made by Riefenstahl from the previous thirty years.
Leni Riefenstahl died in her sleep on the late evening of September 8, 2003 at her home in Pöcking, Germany, a few weeks after her 101st birthday. She had been suffering from cancer. She was buried in the Waldfriedhof cemetery in Munich.
Legacy:
Her greatest success she made with the documentary film »Triumph des Willens« named after the Reich Party Congress 1934 in Nuremberg which got the highest awards: The gold medal in Venice in 1935 and the gold medal at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1937. However, at the end of the war this film destroyed Leni Riefenstahl's career, for now it had no longer been recognized as a piece of art but been condemned as a National Socialist propaganda film. Her world-famous film about the Olympic games made the same experience. That film included two parts, part I »Fest der Völker« and part 2 »Fest der Schönheit« , and did also get the highest awards: the gold medal in Paris in 1937, the first price in Venice as the world's best film in 1938, the Olympic Award by the IOC in 1939, and in 1956 it had been classified as one of the world's best ten films.
