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Leni Riefenstahl in her own words

She has been hailed as a pioneering artist whose cinematic techniques changed filmmaking. But in the 1930s Leni Riefenstahl made her two most notorious documentaries, Triumph of the Will and Olympia, for the Nazi regime in Germany. Thirty years later, she was still facing hard questions about her relationship with Adolf Hitler and her role as a propagandist. In a wide-ranging CBC interview woven through with film clips, Riefenstahl insists she had total artistic freedom when making her movies.
• Leni Riefenstahl was born Helene Berta Amalie Riefenstahl in Berlin in August 1902. As a young woman she began a career as a dancer, but an injury at 22 forced her to give it up.
• Riefenstahl turned to film instead. As an actress, she starred in several German films in the 1920s. In 1932 she directed and appeared in a feature, The Blue Light.

• After seeing Adolf Hitler speak at a rally - an experience she later said was so compelling it left her feeling "paralyzed" - Riefenstahl wrote to the soon-to-be Fuehrer in hopes of meeting him.
• In 1933 Hitler asked Riefenstahl to film a Nazi rally. But she was dissatisfied with the result, and tried again at the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremburg in 1934. According to film critic Roger Ebert, the rally was staged largely for the benefit of her cameras.

• For Triumph of the Will, Riefenstahl shot about 400 kilometres of film which took almost two years to edit into a 114-minute documentary. It was a success, winning several awards and showcasing techniques such as attaching a moving camera to a flagpole to capture panoramic crowd shots.
• "There were other documentaries about the Nazi rallies," wrote Ebert in 1994, "but nobody remembers the others; only hers, because it was so good."

• In 1936 the German Olympic Committee commissioned Riefenstahl to document the Berlin Olympics. With a crew of 170, she tried innovations such as digging a hole in the ground to position cameras for the long jump and pole-vaulting events.
• The New York Times said in 2003 that Olympia is "not blatantly propagandistic," in part because it shows the gold-medal wins of African-American sprinter Jesse Owens. Adolf Hitler is seen only very briefly.

• Riefenstahl was briefly a war correspondent before reverting to filmmaking during the Second World War. At war's end, she was labeled a Nazi sympathizer and held for four years by the Americans and French for denazification.
• "I cannot regret that I lived in that time," Riefenstahl said in a 1993 documentary about her. "No anti-Semitic word has ever crossed my lips. I was never anti-Semitic. I did not join the party. So where then is my guilt?''

• Unable to secure loans for her film projects after the war, Riefenstahl turned to photography. In the 1960s she traveled to Sudan and lived among the Nuba tribe; later, she took up scuba diving to photograph marine life and in 2002 released Underwater Impressions, her first film in 48 years.
• In 1999, actor Jodie Foster announced plans to produce a film biography of Riefenstahl. Foster also planned to star in the film, but Riefenstahl refused to grant Foster the rights to her published memoirs.

• Dr. Rafael Medoff, of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, also objected to Foster's proposed film. "Instead of defending Riefenstahl as an alleged victim of 'libel', Jodie Foster should frankly confront the reality that Riefenstahl is an example of how art can be perverted to promote fascism, racism, and genocide," he said in 2005.
• In 2003 Riefenstahl died at the age of 101.

Medium: Television
Program: Other Voices
Broadcast Date: May 11, 1965
Guest(s): Leni Riefenstahl
Interviewer: Charles Wasserman
Duration: 27:55
Film excerpts from Olympia (Olympia Film, Tobis Filmkunst).

Last updated: March 15, 2012

Page consulted on May 6, 2013

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