The result was the extraordinary "Triumph of the Will" (1935), arguably the most honest and compelling fruit of the fascist temperament. The film, "Victory of Faith" (1934) - withdrawn after Hitler's purge of party leadership that year - never received a public viewing but earned her a return trip to Nuremberg for the next year's revelries. Impressed by her work on "The Blue Light," Hitler invited Riefenstahl to shoot a documentary about the Nazi Party's annual rally at Nuremberg in 1933. "The Blue Light" brought Riefenstahl critical acclaim and the attention of Adolf Hitler, whose acquaintance Riefenstahl wanted to make after seeing him address a rally and reading his book Mein Kampf. In 1932, she formed her own production company, Leni Riefenstahl Studio Films, and made her directing and co-writing debut, "The Blue Light" (1932), a Fanck-like mountain film in which she played a free-spirited climber who becomes ostracized by her community after making a dangerous climb. In fact, she often found herself involved in the camera work and collaborating with the directorial crew on his films. Riefenstahl began stepping away from acting and moved toward directing after having learned the fundamentals of mise-en-scene and the value of aerial shooting, among other film techniques, from Fanck. After her first talkie, "Avalanche" (1930), she lost out on starring in Josef von Sternberg's "The Blue Angel" (1930), a role that went instead to Marlene Dietrich and made her an international star. She made her debut in "Peaks of Destiny/The Holy Mountain" (1926), playing a dancer-turned-mountaineer, and went on to appear in a number of subsequent mountain films for Fanck, including "The Great Leap" (1927) and "The White Hell of Piz Palu" (1929), their most popular work together.Įmbodying an inflated spirit of heroic idealism, which went hand in hand with growing Nazi fervor, Reifentstahl's work with Fanck made her a fast-rising star of his film series. ![]() Riefenstahl transitioned from dancer to acting after signing a contract with director Arnold Fanck, pioneer of the German mountaineering film. But a knee injury in 1924 while performing in Prague ended her dancing career. Riefenstahl quickly developed a reputation for being a good interpretive dancer and attracted the attention of director Max Reinhardt, who sent her on a tour of Europe in a program of modern dances of her own creation. When she was 16 years old, she attended the Mary Wigmann School for Dance, where she learned Russian ballet, and continued her studies at the Jutta Klamt School for Dance. 22, 1902 in Berlin, Germany, Riefenstahl was raised in a prominent home by her father, Alfred, the owner of a heating and ventilation company, and her mother, Berta, who encouraged her daughter's artistic ambitions. Though she came to terms with her past on a personal level, Riefenstahl lived her public life in association with the Nazi party until the end.īorn on Aug. Riefenstahl turned to photography instead and found personal reconciliation through taking pictures of the Nuba tribe in Africa. But that freedom was limited, as her reputation prevented her from making another film. After the war, Riefenstahl spent time under arrest and faced several inquiries, but was ultimately allowed her freedom. While she depicted the German athletes as somewhat godlike, keeping to Hitler's ideal of Aryan superiority, Riefenstahl did focus much of her attention on American hero, Jesse Owens, an African-American who bested Germany's top athletes to take home four gold medals. ![]() Meanwhile, she kept Hitler in the background for her other documentary masterpiece, "Olympia" (1938), which chronicled the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Though the film was hailed as masterpiece, Riefenstahl was unable to live down her reputation for being a Nazi sympathizer - a label that dogged her for the rest of her life. In fact, her extraordinary talent proved to be her downfall she used her genius to create the breathtaking, but frightening "Triumph of the Will" (1935), a chronicle of Hitler's famed Nuremberg rally that portrayed the Fuehrer as a god come to Earth to save the German people. An undeniably brilliant filmmaker who broke new ground with pioneering techniques, Leni Riefenstahl nonetheless lived in infamy for her friendship with and adulation of Adolf Hitler during the reign of Nazi Germany.
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