Leni Riefenstahl

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Leni Riefenstahl

Born Helene Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl
August 22, 1902(1902-08-22)
Berlin, Germany
Died September 8, 2003 (aged 101)
Pöcking, Germany
Years active 1925 - 1954, 2002
Spouse(s) Peter Jacob (1944-1947)

Helene Bertha Amalie "Leni" Riefenstahl (August 22, 1902 – September 8, 2003) was a German film director, dancer and actress widely noted for her aesthetics and innovations as a filmmaker. Her most famous film was Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), a propaganda film made at the 1934 Nuremberg congress of the Nazi Party. Riefenstahl's prominence in the Third Reich along with her personal friendships with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels thwarted her film career following Germany's defeat in World War II, after which she was arrested but never convicted of war crimes.[1]

The propaganda value of her films made during the 1930s repels most commentators but many film histories cite the aesthetics as outstanding.[2][3][4] After her death the Associated Press described Riefenstahl as an "acclaimed pioneer of film and photographic techniques."[5] Der Tagesspiegel newspaper in Berlin noted, "Leni Riefenstahl conquered new ground in the cinema."[6] The BBC said her documentaries "were hailed as groundbreaking film-making, pioneering techniques involving cranes, tracking rails, and many cameras working at the same time."[7] Reviewer Gary Morris called Riefenstahl "an artist of unparalleled gifts, a woman in an industry dominated by men, one of the great formalists of the cinema on a par with Eisenstein or Welles."[8] Riefenstahl later published her still photography of the Nuba tribes in Africa and made films of marine life.

Contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] Dancer and actress

Riefenstahl was born in the working class neighbourhood of Wedding in Berlin. She began her career as a self-styled and well-known interpretive dancer. After injuring her knee while performing in Prague, she saw a nature film about mountains and became fascinated with the possibilities of film. She went to the Alps to meet the film's director Arnold Fanck, hoping to secure the lead in his next project. Instead Riefenstahl found an actor who had starred in Fanck's films who wrote to the director about her. Riefenstahl went on to star in many of Fanck's mountain films as an athletic and adventurous young woman with a suggestive appeal. Riefenstahl had a prolific career as an actor in silent films. She was popular with the German public and highly regarded by directors. Her last acting role before becoming a director was in the 1933 film SOS Eisberg (U.S. title SOS Iceberg).

When presented with the opportunity to direct Das Blaue Licht in 1932 she took it. Breaking from her mentor's style of setting realistic stories in fairytale mountain settings, Riefenstahl filmed Das Blaue Licht as a romantic, wholly mystical tale which she thought of as more fitting to the terrain.[1]

[edit] Propaganda/documentaries

Riefenstahl heard Adolf Hitler speak at a rally in 1932 and was mesmerized by his talent as a public speaker. Describing the experience in her Memoiren, Riefenstahl wrote: "I had an almost apocalyptic vision that I was never able to forget. It seemed as if the earth's surface were spreading out in front of me, like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, spewing out an enormous jet of water, so powerful that it touched the sky and shook the earth."[9]

According to the Daily Express of 24 April 1934, Leni Riefenstahl had read Mein Kampf during the making of Das Blaue Licht. This newspaper article quotes her as having commented, "The book made a tremendous impression on me. I became a confirmed National Socialist after reading the first page. I felt a man who could write such a book would undoubtedly lead Germany. I felt very happy that such a man had come."[10]

Hitler already admired Das Blaue Licht and during a personal meeting he asked Riefenstahl to direct the 1933 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). Ernst Röhm was featured in the film but when he was murdered during the purge of the SA (Night of the Long Knives) Der Sieg des Glaubens became a political embarrassment and was removed from theaters in May 1933.[11]

Nonetheless impressed with Riefenstahl's work, Hitler asked her to film the upcoming 1934 Party rally in Nuremberg. The result, Triumph of the Will, was a documentary generally recognized as a masterful, epic, innovative work of documentary filmmaking. Triumph of the Will became a rousing success in Germany. However, it was widely banned in America as a propaganda film for the Nazi Party. The film won many international awards as a ground-breaking example of filmmaking and is widely regarded as one of the most effective pieces of propaganda ever produced.

In interviews for the 1993 film The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, Riefenstahl adamantly denied any deliberate attempt to create pro-Nazi propaganda and said she was disgusted that Triumph of the Will was used in such a way.[12] In 2003, The Economist magazine cited Triumph of the Will as having "sealed her reputation as the greatest female filmmaker of the 20th century."[13]

In 1935 Riefenstahl madeTag der Freiheit: Unsere Wehrmacht (German for Day of Freedom: Our Armed Forces), a lesser-known film about the German Wehrmacht. Like Der Sieg des Glaubens and Triumph of the Will, this was made at the annual Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg. Over a million Germans had participated in the 1934 Nuremberg Rally and later yearly rallies held there got even bigger. The 1935 rally is noted for pronouncements about the status of Jews in Germany.[14] These became known as the Nuremberg Laws which for Jews in Europe would soon become matters of life and death.

In 1936 Riefenstahl was invited to film the Olympic Games in Berlin. She also went to Greece to take footage of the games' original site at Olympia, where she was aided by Greek photographer Nelly's. This material became Olympia, a film widely noted for its technical and aesthetic achievements. She was one of the first film makers to use tracking shots in a documentary, placing a camera on rails to follow the athletes' movement. Riefenstahl's work on Olympia has been cited as a major influence in modern sports photography.[15]

[edit] World War II

During the Invasion of Poland Leni Riefenstahl was photographed in Poland wearing a military uniform and a pistol on her belt in the company of German soldiers.[16] On 12 September 1939 she was in the town of Końskie when 30 civilians were executed there, in retaliation for an alleged attack on German soldiers. According to her memoir Riefenstahl tried to intervene but a furious German soldier held her at gunpoint and threatened to shoot her on the spot. Closeup photographs of a distraught Leni survive from that day. By 5 October 1939 Riefenstahl was back in occupied Poland filming Hitler's victory parade in Warsaw.

On June 14, 1940, the day Paris was declared an open city by the French and occupied by German troops, Riefenstahl wrote to Hitler in a telegram, "With indescribable joy, deeply moved and filled with burning gratitude, we share with you, my Führer, your and Germany's greatest victory, the entry of German troops into Paris. You exceed anything human imagination has the power to conceive, achieving deeds without parallel in the history of mankind."[17] Riefenstahl was friends with Hitler for twelve years and reports vary as to whether she ever had an intimate relationship with him.[18]

After the Nuremberg rallies trilogy and Olympia Riefenstahl began work on a feature film based on Hitler's favorite opera, Eugen d'Albert's Tiefland. The German government paid her 7 million reichsmarks in compensation (on Hitler's direct order).[19] From September 23 until November 13, 1940 she filmed in Krün near Mittenwald. For the extras playing Spanish women and farmers, gypsies (Sinti) detained in a camp at Salzburg-Maxglan were forced to work with her. Filming at the Babelsberg Studios near Berlin began almost one and a half year later in April 1942 and lasted well into summer. This time Sinti and Roma from the Marzahn detention camp near Berlin were compelled to work as extras.[20] A surviving document from camp Marzahn shows a list of 65 inmates who were ordered to serve in the production.[21] 50 stills from the filming in Krün near Mittenwald were later found and from these, surviving prisoners were able to identify 29 camp inmates who worked for Riefenstahl and were then deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in the first weeks of March 1943 following Himmler's December 1942 decree.[22][23] Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, to the end of her life, Riefenstahl continued to maintain that all the film extras survived the war and she had met them after the war.[24]

In October 1944 the production moved to Barrandov Studios in Prague for interior filming. Lavish sets made these shots some of the most costly in the film but they were finished within days. Editing for Tiefland wasn't completed until after the war and the film did not premier until 11 February 1954.

Leni Riefenstahl married Peter Jacob on March 21, 1944 shortly after she introduced him to Hitler in Kitzbühel, Austria but they divorced in 1947.

[edit] Post-war detention

After World War II ended in 1945, writer Budd Schulberg (then on Naval assignment with John Ford's documentary unit) was ordered to arrest Riefenstahl at her chalet in Kitzbühel, Austria, ostensibly to have her identify the faces of Nazi war criminals in German film footage captured by the Allied troops. Riefenstahl claimed that she wasn't aware of the nature of the internment camps. According to Schulberg, "She gave me the usual song and dance. She said, 'Of course, you know, I'm really so misunderstood. I'm not political.'"[25] But when she later claimed that she had been forced to follow Goebbels' order under threat of being sent to a concentration camp, Schulberg asked her why she should have been afraid, if she didn’t know that concentration camps existed.[26]

Riefenstahl continued to maintain that she was "fascinated" by the National Socialists but politically naïve and ignorant about any war crimes.[27] She spent four years in a French detention camp, but, although she was tried twice by postwar authorities, she was never convicted either for her alleged role as a propagandist or for the use of concentration camp inmates in her films.

[edit] Later life

Riefenstahl attempted to make films after the war but was met with resistance, public protests and sharp criticism. As a result she could not secure funding, but did begin work on a few projects which never came near completion.

In the 1960s she began a lifelong companionship with Horst Kettner who was forty years her junior.

In her later years, Riefenstahl took up photography, documenting a diverse array of subjects. She developed an interest in the Nuba tribe in Sudan where she sporadically lived among them. Her books with photographs of the tribe were published in 1974 and 1976. Pictures taken at a 1971 social event show a camera-wielding Riefenstahl snapping photos of rock star Mick Jagger and his wife Bianca. Years later she was similarly photographed with Las Vegas entertainers Siegfried and Roy. At age 72, Riefenstahl began pursuing underwater photography, after lying about her age to gain certification for scuba diving (she claimed she was 52). On August 22, 2002 (her 100th birthday) Riefenstahl released a film called Impressionen unter Wasser (Underwater Impressions), an idealized documentary of life in the oceans.

She survived a helicopter crash in the Sudan in 2000.

In 2003 at the age of 101 Riefenstahl married Kettner.[28]

[edit] Death

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 in Munich.

In his book The Story of Film film scholar Mark Cousins claims, "Next to Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, Leni Riefenstahl was the most technically talented Western film maker of her era."

[edit] References and notes

  1. ^ a b Leni Riefenstahl. (1993). The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl [motion picture]. Germany, Africa: Ray Müller.
  2. ^ Koster, Ron, Leni Riefenstahl's Film Début, 2004, retrieved 6 January 2008
  3. ^ New York Times, Janet Maslin, Just What Did Leni Riefenstahl's Lens See?, 13 March 1994, retrieved 6 January 2008
  4. ^ Pysmon, Leni Gallery, retrieved 6 January 2008
  5. ^ Bulldog News, Hitler's Filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl Dead at 101 (after Associated Press), 9 September 2003, retrieved 5 January 2008
  6. ^ bbc.com, Leni Riefenstahl the Devil's Diva, 10 September 2003, retrieved 5 January 2008
  7. ^ bbc.com, Film-maker Leni Riefenstahl dies, 9 September 2003, retrieved 4 January 2008. Text from article: "Her Nazi documentaries were hailed as groundbreaking film-making, pioneering techniques involving cranes, tracking rails, and many cameras working at the same time."
  8. ^ Bright Lights Film Journal, Lonesome Leni (film review), November 1999, retrieved 4 January 2008
  9. ^ Leni Riefenstahl, Memoiren, München, 1987
  10. ^ Fraser, J., 'An ambassador for Nazi Germany', Films II/5 (London, April, 1982) 12. He quotes from the Daily Express 24 April 1934.
  11. ^ Leni Riefenstahl: A Life by Jürgen Trimborn, trans. Edna McCown, Faber & Fabar 2007. ISBN 978-0-374-18493-3 and 0-374-28493-3 p. 102
  12. ^ Interview with Leni Riefenstahl by Ray Müller: The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (DVD), 1993
  13. ^ The Economist, Leni Riefenstahl: Hand-held history, September 2003, added 5 January 2008
  14. ^ The Nuremberg Race Laws
  15. ^ Schneider, Stier, The Sport Journal, "Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia, Brilliant Cinematography or Nazi Propaganda?", 2003, retrieved 5 January 2008
  16. ^ Riefenstahl in military uniform, image from: Steven Bach (2007). Leni - The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl. [1];Ścinki Taśmy, Polityka, 2003-10-05
  17. ^ Die Neue Rechte, by Kay Sokolowsky, Konkret 3, 1999: "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 Fantasie 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."
  18. ^ See Infield, Glenn B. Eva and Adolf New York:1974--Grosset and Dunlap (Interviews with former SS officers who had been close to Hitler and Eva Braun)
  19. ^ Jürgen Trimborn : Riefenstahl, Berlin 2002, page. 325
  20. ^ Kein Vergessen, 70. Jahrestag der Errichtung des Zwangslagers für Sinti und Roma in Berlin - Marzahn. [2] The photo on page 13 shows Riefenstahl during the making of the film. See also: Leni Riefenstahl's 'Gypsy Question', by Susan Tegel, in: journal Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Volume 23, Issue 1 March 2003, pages 3 - 10
  21. ^ Sozialausgleichsabgabe für die Zigeu­ner bei dem Film Tiefland ab 27.4.42
  22. ^ In a decree dated December 16, 1942, Himmler ordered the deportation of Gypsies and part-Gypsies to Auschwitz--Birkenau. See: Sinti and Roma, ed. Hlocaust Museum [3]
  23. ^ Fourteen of them, with concentration camp numbers, were: Robert Adler (Z-5792); Karl Dewüs (Z-4145), Heini Ernst (Z-5696), Wilhelm Ritter (Z-4883), Albrecht Rose (Z-752), Charlotte Rosenberg (Z-5406), Werner Rosenberg (Z-4860), Otto Schmelzer (Z-5448); Karl Steinbach (Z-4875), Ludwig Weisenbach (Z-4857), Hermann Weiß (Z-644), Johann Weiß (Z-643), Willy Zander (Z-5933); Hans Zens (Z-178). Berliner Zeitung, 17.02.2001, Riefenstahls Liste. Zum gedenken an die ermordeten Komparsen, by Reimar Gilsenbach and Otto Rosenberg [4]
  24. ^ Leni Riefenstahl: A Life by Trimbonr, p. 206-8
  25. ^ Washington Post article, November 29, 2005; Page C01
  26. ^ New York Times, Clive James review, "Reich Star", March 25, 2007
  27. ^ Happy Birthday, Leni Riefenstahl
  28. ^ TZ Online, Leni Riefenstahl: Letztes Geheimnis geleftet! retrieved 04 October 2007

[edit] Bibliography

  • Leni Riefenstahl Bibliography (via UC Berkeley)
  • Over 1400 references in English, German and French
  • Loiperdinger, Martin/David Culbert: "Leni Riefenstahl, the SA and the Nazi Party Rally Films, Nuremberg 1933-1934: 'Sieg des Glaubens' and 'Triumph des Willens' ", in: Historical Journal of Film and Television, 8/1/1988, S.3-38.
  • Loiperdinger, Martin: "Sieg des Glaubens. Ein gelungenes Experiment nationalsozialistischer Filmpropaganda", in: Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, 31/1993, S.35-48.
  • Fabe, Marilyn: Triumph of the Will. The Arrival of Hitler. Notes and Analysis. Mount Vernon/N.Y. 1975.
  • Heinzelmann, Herbert: "Die Heilige Messe des Reichsparteitags. Zur Zeichensprache von Leni Riefenstahls 'Triumph des Willens' ", in: Bernd Organ/Wolfgang W. Weiß: Faszination und Gewalt. Zur politischen Ästhetik des Nationalsozialismus, Nürnberg 1992, o. S.
  • Loiperdinger, Martin/David Culbert: "Leni Riefenstahl, the SA and the Nazi Party Rally Films, Nuremberg 1933-1934: 'Sieg des Glaubens' and 'Triumph des Willens' ", in: Historical Journal of Film and Television, 8/1/1988, S.3-38.
  • Schwartzman, R.J.: Racial Theory and Propaganda in 'Triumph of the Will' ", in: Florida State University on Literatur and Film, 18/1993, S.136-153.
  • Leni Riefenstahl - A Memoir, St. Martin's Press, 1993, ISBN 0-312-09843-X
  • A Portrait of Leni Riefenstahl by Audrey Salkeld, 1996, ISBN 0-7126-7338-5
  • The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, documentary film directed by Ray Müller (1994)
  • Leni Riefenstahl: The fallen film goddess by Glenn B. Infield (Crowell, 1976, ISBN 0-690-01167-9)
  • Leni Riefenstahl: The Seduction of Genius by Rainer Rother, translated by Martin H. Bott (Continuum International Publishing Group reprint edition, 2003, ISBN 0-8264-7023-8)
  • The Films of Leni Riefenstahl by David B. Hinton, Scarecrow Press 3rd edition, 2000, ISBN 1-57886-009-1)
  • Leni Riefenstahl: Five Lives by Angelika Taschen, 2000, ISBN 3-8228-6216-9)
  • Leni Riefenstahl: A Life by Jurgen Trimborn, Translation by Edna McCown, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007, ISBN 0-3741-8493-3
  • Bach, Steven (2007). Leni - The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl. Knopf. , ISBN 0-3754-0400-7

[edit] Works

[edit] Actress

[edit] Director

[edit] Photographer

[edit] Author

  • Kampf in Schnee und Eis (Leipzig, 1933)
  • Hinter den Kulissen des Reichsparteitags-Films[1] (München, 1935)
  • Schönheit im olympischen Kampf (Berlin, 1937)
  • Die Nuba (München, 1973)
  • Die Nuba von Kau (München, 1976)
  • Korallengärten (München, 1978)
  • Mein Afrika (München, 1982)
  • Memoiren (München, 1987)
  • Wunder unter Wasser (München, 1990)

In translation:

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
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Persondata
NAME Riefenstahl, Leni
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Riefenstahl, Helene Berta Amalie
SHORT DESCRIPTION German film director, dancer and actress
DATE OF BIRTH August 22, 1902(1902-08-22)
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin, Germany
DATE OF DEATH September 8, 2003
PLACE OF DEATH Berlin, Germany