She was born Helene Berta Amalie Riefenstahl in Berlin on August 22, 1902, and raised in a comfortable middle-class home. Her mother encouraged her artistic flair from a young age and she began dancing in an Isadora Duncan-like free style at the age of 16 and soon found work, in Max Reinhardt's Theater troupe. Her career was quite successful until a knee injury at the age of 22 forced her to switch vocations.
Around this time, Riefenstahl saw one of Arnold Fanck's silent films, Mountain of Destiny (1925) and promptly sought out the director. Enchanted by the young performer, Fanck cast her in several of his "mountain films" -- a genre peculiar to Germany that had been popularized by Fanck -- among them: The Holy Mountain (1926), The Big Jump (1927), Avalanche (1930), Ski Chase (1931), The White Hell of Piz Palu (1929) and S.O.S. Iceberg (1933). These films were big commercial hits in Germany and Riefenstahl, complete with a blue-eyed, high cheekboned beauty, and an attractive athletic persona, became a star.
Having learned the craft of directing and photography from Fanck, Riefenstahl expressed a desire to write and direct a film herself. The result was The Blue Light (1932), a charming, mystical Alpine fable, in which she also starred as a warm-hearted peasant girl. The Blue Light was a huge commercial success, and among those impressed by her filmmaking talent was Adolph Hitler. When he came to power in 1933, he appointed Riefenstahl "film expert" to the National Socialist Party. The following year, with the full cooperation of Hitler and with 30 cameras and 120 assistants at her disposal, Riefenstahl made a film of the fourth Nuremberg rally, Triumph of the Will (1934). Her images of that film, which took almost a year to edit, included such pioneering techniques as attaching a camera to a flagpole behind the speaker's podium that provided sweeping panoramic views; the use of telephoto lenses to create a foreshortening effect; and the use of "real sound" with no accompanied commentary. The film won Riefenstahl great critical recognition and she was soon commissioned by the German Olympic Committee to record the 1936 Berlin Games.
Olympia (1937), wasn't as blatantly propagandistic as Triumph of the Will; most notably, it showed Jesse Owens's stirring moments of victory while Hitler was seen for only a mere 15 seconds on the single occasion he visited the Olympic stadium. Instead, Olympia emphasized the dazzling celebration of an athlete's physique and Riefenstahl's cinematic brilliance is on full display here: the slow-motion shots of the athletes, the telephoto lens used for close-ups of the events, the ground-level shots, the overhead panoramas taken from blimps, the drama of the pole vault and long jump events (where she cleverly had holes for the cameras dug beside the sandpit where the athletes landed), and the four camera shots for the high diving event (including one underwater) to capture the movement of divers from all angles - these are all her innovations and methods that are still the benchmark for sports documentarists and broadcasters today.
Riefenstahl's profile would be relatively low after Olympia. Her last feature film would be the obscure Lowlands (1944, although not released until 1954), an adaptation of the Eugen D'Albert operetta in which she also played the role of a Spanish Gypsy dancer. After World War II, Riefenstahl was arrested and pronounced a Nazi sympathizer by the Allies and spent four years in a French detention camp. She underwent several more years of persecution on the grounds that she had been a top-ranking Nazi official, but she had never joined the Nazi Party. In 1952, the War tribunals ultimately cleared her of any wrongdoing and she was finally exonerated of all charges.
Unable to get financing for any films, Riefenstahl sank into poverty, living with her mother in a one-room apartment. Her professional career took an upswing in the early '60s, when, inspired by a photograph by George Rodger of a muscular Nuba wrestler, she made several trips to a remote area of southern Sudan to live among and photograph the fascinating rituals of the Mesakin Nuba tribe; this eventually led to much respect and acclaim as a stills photographer. She then learned to dive when she was 72, lying about her age by 20 years to gain admittance to a class and soon specialized in underwater photography as well, diving in the Maldives, the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, and off Papua New Guinea to capture all sorts of undersea flora and fauna. She has published two books representing her work: The Last of the Nuba (1974) and Coral Gardens (1978).
Riefenstahl would spend the last decade of her life with amazing activity. In 1992 she published her own 669-page autobiography, Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir and in the following year was the subject of Ray Muller's documentary, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993). In 1997, she oversaw an exhibition of her work - the first in postwar Germany - in a gallery in Hamburg. Phenomenally, at the age of 100, she released her final film, Impressions Underwater (2002), based on her dives. She was married once, briefly in the early '40s, to Army Major Peter Jacob, but the couple's union only lasted a few years; no children survive her.
by Michael T. Toole
