Leni Riefenstahl's technical brilliance and her Nazi propaganda were never separable
A dancer turned mountain-film actress became one of very few women directing in Weimar Germany. Then she made Triumph of the Will and Olympia, films still ranked among the most inventive propaganda ever shot. She lived to 101, insisting until the end that she had never known about the Holocaust.
Berlin was her birthplace, on 22 August 1902, and her father ran a prosperous heating and ventilation firm and hoped she would join the business; her mother, a former part-time seamstress, pushed her toward the stage. As a girl she painted, wrote poems from the age of four and joined a swimming and gymnastics club at twelve. Seeing Snow White performed at 16 made her want to dance, and she later toured Europe with Max Reinhardt in a show financed by the Jewish producer Harry Sokal.
Foot injuries and knee surgery threatened that career. On the way to a doctor she noticed a poster for the 1924 picture Mountain of Destiny, and it redirected her life. She talked its director, Arnold Fanck, a pioneer of the mountain genre, into casting her, starting with The Holy Mountain in 1926, and learned acting and editing on his sets. Between 1925 and 1929 she starred in five hit films.
In 1932 she produced and directed The Blue Light, with a script shared between Béla Balázs and Carl Mayer, playing a peasant girl shunned by villagers as diabolical. It took a silver medal at Venice, yet she blamed its mixed reviews on critics, many of them Jewish. When it was re-released in 1938, Balázs and Sokal had vanished from the credits, reportedly at her request. Her 1935 rally film and her 1938 Olympics documentary brought global acclaim, and Hitler worked closely with her on at least three major Nazi productions.
After 1945 she was arrested and classed as a Nazi fellow traveller, though never charged with war crimes. Her denials of any knowledge of the Holocaust made her, in one critic's phrase, the spokeswoman for the excuse that ordinary Germans could not have known. She kept working: Tiefland appeared in 1954, followed by photography, underwater pictures, two books on the Nuba peoples of southern Sudan and an autobiography in 1987. She died on 8 September 2003.
Source: Leni Riefenstahl
