She points out that the rally in Triumph of the Will was staged and was created with the intention of filming it. International Committee of the Fourth International. When local peasants try to remove the crystal from its grotto, believing that this would rescue them from a life of poverty, the crystal loses its magic powers. Several unsuccessful film sequences, such as the appearance of Julius Streicher, were later reworked in the studio. The would-be artist Hitler had admired The Blue Light, and was interested in meeting an acclaimed artist who already had an international reputation. Shaken by the collapse of the Third Reich and discredited by her role in Nazi Germany, Riefenstahl had problems picking up the pieces of her film career after the Second World War. Consequently, she was the natural choice –the perfect candidate– to serve as the most visible, celebrated, and enduring of the dozens of filmmakers involved in creating the lies that fueled Hitler’s propaganda machine. The incident may have planted a seed of doubt in Riefenstahl's mind, but it did not prevent her from filming Hitler's triumphal parade into Warsaw just weeks later. Adolf Hitler is perhaps the most hated war hero of all time. It embodies beauty and completeness, but at the same time has disruptive consequences. (Spiegel 18.08.1997), 2. View the list of all donors. 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW This appealed especially to those petit-bourgeois layers whose lives had been ruined by years of hyper-inflation and political instability during the Weimar Republic. Riefenstahl read widely and was interested in modern schools of art, including the expressionists. Nevertheless, she had problems finding producers willing to finance her films. This time they gave her not only artistic but also total organisational control of the project. Leni Riefenstahl found fame in Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany. For the indoor scenes, filmed in Berlin-Babelsberg in 1942, Riefenstahl used as extras at least 66 Roma and Sinti inmates, virtually all males, from the Berlin-Marzahn camp for Gypsies. Above all, it was the mysticism of the film which so appealed to the churchmen.”. Leni Riefenstahl, the German filmmaker whose daringly innovative documentaries about a Nazi rally in Nuremberg in 1934 and the Berlin Olympics … Working with a massive production team, her budget of 1.5 million reichsmarks (rms) was later augmented by a further 300,000 rms. Along with National Socialism, her career lay in ruins. In May 1932, Riefenstahl met Hitler for the first time. Riefenstahl won a number of prizes for Triumph of the Will, but many filmmakers were more circumspect. Born in Berlin on August 22, 1902, Riefenstahl began her long and extraordinary career as an interpretive dancer. Skiing was her first real introduction to the attractions and mysteries of the mountains. Her father, Alfred Riefenstahl, was a prosperous businessman dealing in heating and ventilation. All the great men of Germany—Friedrich, Nietzsche, Bismarck—have all had faults. Leni Riefenstahl: Actress, Filmmaker Contributor to Nazi Mayhem . His actions held the world in horrific awe as he was responsible for the murder of millions of women and children during his reign. Gladitz said it was important to bring the case to light now because Riefenstahl was 'trying to wipe the last spot of dirt from her holy white clothes as she nears the end of her life. Success as a dancer gave way to film acting when she attracted the attention of film director Arnold Fanck, subsequently starring in some of his mountaineering pictures.With Fanck as her mentor, Riefenstahl began directing films. At the end of the Olympiad, a dome of light rose above the athletes and the audience. The German film director Leni Riefenstahl (born 1902) achieved fame and notoriety for her propaganda film Triumph of the Will and her two part rendition of the 1936 Olympic Games, Olympia, both made for Adolf Hitler's Third Reich.. Leni Riefenstahl was one of the most controversial figures in the world of film. She became the star of a number of German director Arnold Fanck's silent motion pictures, typically set in the Alps (so-called Bergfilme), in which the young Riefenstahl figured as the athletic and daring female lead. At a time in the 1970s when theories of cultural relativism were being widely disseminated, Riefenstahl’s books represented a glorification of backward society. In memoirs and interviews, she constantly claimed she was “naïve,” a non-political person who never joined the Nazi party and was only interested in her art, someone who only did what many others did, and so on. Immediately after the Second World War, allied forces arrested Riefenstahl but then set her free as “unchargeable.” She was subject to further investigations between 1948 and 1952, but was eventually declared innocent of any participation in the crimes of the Nazis. Leni Riefenstahl, the German filmmaker whose collaborations with Hitler were admired for their technical innovation and reviled for their role in glorifying the Nazi terror, died Monday at 101. Leni Riefenstahl's choices literally meant the difference between life and death to millions of people during World War II. At the age of 80, she learned a new sport—deep sea diving—and spent her last years underwater filming aquatic life. Riefenstahl, in fact, was herself involved in planning the rally. Leni Riefenstahl. Leni Riefenstahl died yesterday at her home near Munich, at age 101. But she was able to make a living, not least because the German government agreed to continue paying her royalties for the showing of her films made under the Nazis. 6. Her last assignment was an underwater film. Hitler saw Leni Riefenstahl as a director who could use aesthetics to produce an image of a strong Germany imbued with Wagnerian motifs of power and beauty. Washington, DC 20024-2126 The conference praises the achievements of the recently deceased Reich president Hindenburg, and greets the numerous foreign guests, press representatives and diplomats. The sources of this mystical light, expressing harmony, were in fact more prosaic—a large proportion were anti-aircraft illumination lamps. After her success with Triumph of the Will, Riefenstahl was the undisputed choice of the Nazi leadership for the filming of the Games. Riefenstahl initially rebuffed Hitler's commission for the film, but relented when she received unlimited resources and full artistic license for the picture. For her part, Riefenstahl was prepared to assist. Leni Riefenstahl was born in 1902 into a well-to-do family and was able to fully indulge her considerable intellectual and physical interests. Hitler saw Leni Riefenstahl as a director who could use aesthetics to produce an image of a strong Germany imbued with Wagnerian motifs of power and beauty. The NSDAP poured huge resources into the project and mobilised artists and professionals to help. Chaplin’s 1940 film showed the “Thousand-Year Reich” as an overblown, fragile façade and demystified Hitler at a time when he still enjoyed sympathy among the international elite. In the same year, Riefenstahl had heard Hitler speak at a public rally and was riveted by his oratorical style and his ability to mesmerize audiences. In order to enhance the story's “gypsy” flavor, Riefenstahl aides arranged to “borrow” some 51 young Roma prisoners from the nearby labor camp at Maxglan-Leopoldskron as extras. She pocketed an honorarium of 250,000 rms—an amount to which Goebbels, entranced by the film, later added another 100,000 rms. Leni Riefenstahl has been surrounded by controversy ever since being commissioned by Hitler to make propaganda films. The German author Jürgen Trimmborn comments on Triumph of the Will: “No documentation of National Socialism today is released without pictures from this film, no other film has formed our visual impression of what National Socialism was, as much as this film.” (Trimmborn, p. 200) Writer Lutz Kinkel is more perceptive: “Few filmmakers understood that this picture was a get-up, a ‘beautiful sham,’ with which the Nazis and their helper Riefenstahl tried to delude the public” under conditions where “a unity of the people never existed.” (Kinkel, p. 87) [4]. Her mother, Bertha Sherlach, had been a part-time seamstress before she married. Riefenstahl claimed she told Hitler that she had no experience in making documentaries, and couldn’t even tell the SS from the SA. Recently published material also reveals that she was a witness of war-time Nazi atrocities and was also complicit herself in allowing extras in her films to be sent to concentration camps. Mackenzie calls Riefenstahl “the unofficial film auteur of the Nazi Party,” while noting that Olympia, her two-part documentary of the games, is “less clearly propagandistic.” The similarities between the documentary and Riefenstahl’s propaganda are clear. Although no evidence exists that she was ever a member of the NSDAP, the films she made before, during and even after the Third Reich continually deal with themes that have a firm place in Nazi ideology—a patronising and contemptuous attitude towards the broad mass of the population, the glorification of past societies at the expense of modernity, the embrace of ritual and religion combined with a fierce individualism. Her skiing proficiency and good looks were noticed by geologist, mountain climber and filmmaker Dr. Arnold Fanck, who cast her as leading actress in his silent film The Holy Mountain (1926). The Fichte volumes were inscribed with the dedication: “‘To my dear Führer with deepest admiration,’ Leni Riefenstahl.”, 3. In discovering whether or not Triumph of the Will was a work of propaganda or documentary, it's important to decide for oneself the motivations and effects behind these two genres of films. Together with the construction of the Olympiad, the Oranienberg concentration camp was also built and in September already held around 1,000 prisoners. Three years after the Nazi takeover, Germany was to be portrayed as a society rid of social and political conflict with a sound economy and the latest in science and technology. The Games were planned on a scale hitherto unknown and were broadcast for the first time on television. In post-war Germany, recovering from the devastation of the war, the sort of massive projects favored by Riefenstahl were no longer viable. (The annual average wage for a skilled worker at that time in Germany was around 2,000 rms.). At the same time, they recognised that beauty is a property of the real existing world, which must be uncovered. Arguably the most famous piece of propaganda ever filmed is Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. Early in the Polish campaign, an incident seemed to have shaken Riefenstahl's confidence in the movement she had glorified in cinematic images. Riefenstahl was immediately gripped by what she saw and heard. Leni Riefenstahl gave him two books on the Berlin Olympics and an eight-volume set of the complete works of the 19th-century German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte in a rare first edition. At the same time, Riefenstahl was entirely conscious of the implications of National Socialism in practice. She lied about her biography, her motives, her creative process. Shot on location near Kitzbühl, Austria, the filming dragged out over nearly four years. When the cameraman, Schunemann, refused to work on the film, Riefenstahl complained to the Propaganda Ministry film department that he was boycotting an “order from the Fuhrer.” [3]. Preparations for staging this “work of art” included mass arrests of political oppositionists, Jews and gypsies by the police and the Gestapo, with the stated aim of making Berlin “safe and attractive” for visitors to the Games. In interviews after the war, she asserted that the driving force in her life was the search for “beauty and harmony”—“reality does not interest me.” [1] Her career clearly shows, however, that far from being just an innocent victim of Nazi political propaganda, she was instrumental in creating a charade of “beauty and harmony” for the most barbaric and reactionary regime in modern history. It was given by god, who created our people.”. While accompanying German troops near Konskie, the filmmaker witnessed the execution of Polish civilians shot in retaliation for a partisan attack on German troops. Her films offer a welter of evidence to demonstrate that Riefenstahl shared much of the outlook of her Nazi mentors. In 1989, Leni Riefenstahl's memoir was about to be published by Doubleday when the book's editor and its translator received threatening phone calls and the project was dropped. By her own account, the advent of World War II and the rapid escalation of violence under the Nazi regime had an unfavorable effect on both Riefenstahl and her career. Although never a member of the Nazi Party, Riefenstahl found it difficult to overcome her association with the propaganda films she had made during the early Nazi period, and encountered difficulties in regaining her position in the German cinematic community. The rally takes the form of a gigantic ceremony—on the one hand, massed ranks of disciplined party faithful marching rigidly in unison, and on the other, the leader, the expressive and artistic Fuhrer uniting the masses as he swears allegiance to the spirit of national unity. Susan Sontag in her 1975 essay Fascinating Fascism makes several notes that contradict Riefenstahl’s version of events. Quotes from Riefenstahl—Eine deutsche Karriere, Jürgen Trimmborn, and Die Scheinwerferin—Leni Riefenstahl und das Dritte Reich, Lutz Kinkel. Leni Riefenstahl was a Hitler-loving Nazi sympathiser. In her post-war memoirs, she seeks to rebut any accusations of anti-Semitism by emphasising her friendly relationships with Jewish artists, but this did not prevent her from forming a close friendship with Julius Streicher, the publisher of the notorious anti-Semitic hate-journal Der Stuermer. This outlook is evident in her Nuba books, which show the self-inflicted violence of the tribesman arising from rituals, but fails to deal with any of the hardships and privations that characterise the day-to-day life of primitive forms of society. During the Third Reich, she could stipulate her own conditions regarding the budget and production of her films. When an injury to her knee put an end to her dancing, Riefenstahl switched to skiing. The Nazi regime regarded the 1931 decision by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to award Berlin the 1936 Olympic Games as an enormous opportunity to conduct propaganda for Nazi Germany. Riefenstahl was evidently shattered by the collapse of the Third Reich. Some of her previous romantic inclinations are evident in The Blue Light. On February 27, 1932, she attended a meeting of the German National Socialist Party (NSDAP) at the Berlin Sportpalast, where the main speaker was Adolf Hitler. Central to the film is the loyalty creed of the Fuhrer’s followers. The plot of the film centers on a crystal with magic powers. In 1933, he asked Riefenstahl to direct a short film, Der Sieg des Glaubens (The Victory of Faith), shot at that year's Nuremberg Nazi Party Rally. Riefenstahl had shot a small amount of footage of the Wehrmacht for Triumph, but it rained and the footage was unusable. 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