Riefenstahl, Leni

Riefenstahl, Leni (1902-2003), German film actress and director, born Helena Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl in Berlin. Trained as a painter and dancer, Riefenstahl entered films in Arnold Fanck’s Der Heilige Berg (1926; The Sacred Mountain). She continued to appear as an actress and climber in these “Bergfilme” (mountain films) and finally directed one of them, Das Blaue Licht (1932; The Blue Light), a visually striking blend of mountain climbing, love, and peasant mysticism.

After this, Riefenstahl became a favourite with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany, and directed a series of documentaries backed by them. Of these, Triumph des Willens (1935; Triumph of the Will) was a strikingly filmed glorification of the Nazi Party using their specially staged 1934 Nuremberg rally, and Olympiad (1938) a two-part documentary of the 1936 Olympic Games. Brilliantly used, novel camera positions, slow motion, long lenses, and creative editing enhanced the beauty of athletics. During World War II Riefenstahl spent years making Tiefland, a non-musical (and non-political) version of d’Albert’s opera of that name. This was not shown until 1954, after she had been released from imprisonment for her collaboration with the Nazis. After that, Riefenstahl worked as a stills photographer, mostly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Her autobiography, Leni Riefenstahl, a Memoir, was published in 1993.

In 2002, at the age of 99, Riefenstahl completed work on the documentary Underwater Impressions, made up of footage from over 2,000 dives she had made off the coast of Indonesia since the 1970s, her first film since Tiefland.