Leni Riefenstahl

German filmmaker and photographer

• Born: August 22, 1902
• Birthplace: Berlin, Germany
• Died: September 8, 2003
• Place of death: Pöcking, Germany

Riefenstahl, considered by many the greatest documentary filmmaker of the twentieth century, produced infamous propaganda for the Nazis before and during World War II. Critic Susan Sontag argued that Riefenstahl presented a “fascist aesthetic.” Her films, nevertheless, had a major impact on renowned American film directors such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Francis Ford Coppola.

Early Life

Leni Riefenstahl (LEHN-ee REE-fehn-shtahl) was born Berta Helene Amalie Riefenstahl in Berlin, the daughter of Alfred Riefenstahl, who owned a plumbing engineering firm. Biographer Steven Bach describes her father as “a striver: rigid, efficient, conservative.” Her mother, Bertha Scherlach, was another strict disciplinarian, although she identified with her daughter’s desire for a more loving household even as she dared not countermand Alfred’s rules.

Riefenstahl exhibited a romantic nature as a young child. She was drawn to painting, dancing, and nature all aspects of an aesthetic view of life that would become the focus of her films. She described herself as a child living in a sort of fairy tale existence. Her protective parents fostered this talent for creating a world out of her own desires.

Riefenstahl attended a gymnasium (primary or elementary school) and, later, art school, intending to become a commercial artist, but she also took lessons in ballet and modern dance and formed an ambition to be a stage performer. In 1924, a knee injury ended her hopes of becoming a professional dancer. That ambition was soon replaced by her fascination with director Arnold Fanck’s bergfilme, or mountain films. Set in the Alps, his productions featured heroic individuals in outdoor settings testing their wills against the elements. The display of daring athletic ability, especially in the film Mountain of Destiny (1924), entranced Riefenstahl, as did Fanck’s exciting photography and fast-paced editing.

Demonstrating her characteristic determination, Riefenstahl sought out Fanck and soon became part of his acting entourage, starring in films such as Der Heilige Berg (1926; the holy mountain), which portray her climbing peaks in her bare feet. The image of Riefenstahl as the healthy, innocent, outgoing Aryan had enormous appeal for Adolf Hitler, who from the beginning of his chancellorship (1933) decided to elevate her as the premier filmmaker of the Third Reich.

Life’s Work

Riefenstahl directed her first film, Das blaue Licht (The Blue Light ) in 1932, in which she also starred as a simple mountain girl named Junta who leads a Viennese visitor to the source of a mysterious blue light feared by superstitious villagers. The visitor discovers that the light emanates from precious crystals, which the villagers then plunder. Junta, later spurned as a witch, falls to her death from a mountain peak: Without the blue light, in other words, she is lost.

The Blue Light mesmerized Hitler and spoke to his mystical worship of nature and of heroic individuals who are at odds with conventional Christian society. In his public speeches he often emphasized how the Nazi Party had survived only because a handful of his followers kept the faith. He believed one had to be true to one’s vision and opposed to the cant that corrupted society.

Riefenstahl became the inevitable choice to direct a film that would glorify the Nazi Party’s rise to power. Hitler provided her with virtually unlimited resources to document the 1934 Nuremberg party rally. Indeed, it is doubtful that any documentary filmmaker in the history of cinema has had the kind of financial and technical support that Riefenstahl enjoyed.

The result of this unprecedented backing was her masterpiece Triumph des Willens (1935; Triumph of the Will ), which begins with a brief on-screen written prologue extolling Germany’s renaissance the achievement of Hitler’s National Socialist Party. Hitler’s arrival in Nuremberg aboard a Junkers plane (he was one of the first politicians to exploit the symbolism of flying) transforms him into a god descending from the clouds. The camera then follows his triumphal entrance into the city as he is greeted by adoring crowds. Hitler himself is shot from the rear, standing up in his Mercedes touring car so that viewers get the sense that they are in the back seat of the car looking up at him. The plethora of low-angle shots in this film emphasizes his stature an erect figure towering above the cheering people.

Riefenstahl captured the panoramic spectacle of the Nazi Party rally with more than 125 camera placements, including a camera in an elevator that ascends a flagpole and provides stupendous overviews of thousands of marchers in magnificently ordered formations. Her documentary itself was an epic event. She minimized the length of public speeches by ruthlessly cutting them so that they amounted to little more than a sentence or two, an effect that allowed each message to neatly dovetail into the next. Several set pieces show Hitler on platforms addressing huge crowds as roving cameras one of which moves on a 360-degree track capture him from every angle.

Although the propaganda aspects of the film became obvious in retrospect, in 1935, Hitler was still a much-admired leader because of his bold leadership and his revival of the German economy. It is not surprising the Triumph of the Will won several international awards.

Riefenstahl admitted her enthusiasm for Hitler, a loyalty she held until the very last stages of World War II, and she maintained always that she knew nothing about the Holocaust. After the war, she was incarcerated and investigated but eventually released for lack of direct evidence that she was part of the Nazi regime. It was never proven, for example, that she had been a member of the Nazi Party.

Riefenstahl maintained that her films, including her other masterpiece, the two-part Olympia (1938), a documentary of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, were not political. She said she had no political intentions, only an aesthetics that drew her to strong subjects and to beauty. Although Hitler’s ideology is evident in the film, Riefenstahl’s romanticism is evident as well. Olympia dwells on the beauty and strength of the human form, which she equates with the building of civilization itself (symbolized in the film’s opening by her intimate, kinetic shots of Greek temples and sculptures).

Nevertheless, Riefenstahl’s association with Hitler ruined her career. Even later successes such as her book of photographs of the Nuba of Africa, which became a best seller, were attacked as just another glorification and equation of power and beauty. Prominent Riefenstahl critic Susan Sontag labeled Riefenstahl’s work nothing more than an evocation of a “fascist aesthetic” in her now-classic essay “Fascinating Fascism” (1974).

Riefenstahl would release only one more film during her lifetime, the documentary Impressionen unter Wasser (2002; Underwater Impressions ) about the underwater world. Even that film, however, features a fascination with the beauty and terror of nature, an aesthetic that defines most of her work.

Significance

Riefenstahl remains a controversial figure not only because of her allegiance to Nazi Germany but also because of her lifelong insistence that art and politics are separable, that an artist’s only responsibility is to art. She believed that regardless of the subject matter, the criterion should be an aesthetic one: The artist should create a form and style and a unity of material that results in beauty and an execution of perfection. Even Riefenstahl’s fiercest critics have not denied her talent some considered her a genius but have suggested that art, contrary to Riefenstahl’s position on the matter, cannot exist for its own sake alone. In other words, the artist has certain moral and ethical responsibilities and, therefore, Riefenstahl, as an artist, also had moral and ethical responsibilities.

Regardless of how Riefenstahl is judged as an artist, her work has secured a place in the canon of twentieth century film. Both Triumph of the Will and Olympia are regarded as classics, innovative contributions to the history of the documentary film. Both in terms of her shooting style and her editing, Riefenstahl remains in the first rank of filmmakers. Furthermore, although she never claimed to be feminist, her ability to succeed in a male-dominated world indeed, in a militaristic environment during the Nazi regime ensured an intensification of interest in her work, which began in the 1970’s and has continued into the twenty-first century.

Bibliography

Bach, Steven. Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. A comprehensive biography, containing new material drawn from interviews with Riefenstahl’s associates and friends. Bach, a biographer of figures in film and theater, as well as a producer of major motion pictures, writes with an authority and clarity that make this an indispensable source. Includes a comprehensive bibliography and discussion of the biographer’s sources.

Giesen, Rolf. Nazi Propaganda Films: A History and Filmography. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2003. An encyclopedic compilation that examines the Nazi propaganda feature films and feature-length documentaries released to the German public between 1933 and 1945. Films arranged by subject. A scholarly yet accessible work.

Hau, Michael. The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social History, 1890-1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Deals with the German obsession with physical culture and beauty which was at the root of Germans’ ultimate acceptance of Nazi-espoused racism and the illusion of German superiority.

Riefenstahl, Leni. Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Although dismissed by critics as merely an apologia, this book is valuable as an exploration of Riefenstahl’s working methods. It is also an emotional and powerful story that goes a long way toward understanding why Riefenstahl was so successful and yet also such a stupendous failure.

Sontag, Susan. “Fascinating Fascism.” In Under the Sign of Saturn. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975. Sontag’s influential essay that explores Riefenstahl’s fascist aesthetic. Sontag’s attack so troubled Riefenstahl that the director answered Sontag’s critique in her memoir. Riefenstahl also takes issue with Sontag in Ray Müller’s documentary The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1994).

Trimborn, Jürgen Trimborn. Leni Riefenstahl. New York: Faber & Faber, 2007. An expert in German films, especially of the Nazi era, Trimborn effectively demolishes Riefenstahl’s argument that she was not directly involved with the Nazi Party. While giving her full credit for her innovative art, the biographer also furthers the argument that art and politics are not as separable as Riefenstahl claimed. Select bibliography, chronology.