Leni Riefenstahl

At 101 years old, Leni Riefenstahl physical status not available right now. We will update Leni Riefenstahl's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Helene Bertha Amalie "Leni" Riefenstahl (22 August 1902 – 8 September 2003) was a German film director and actress.A talented swimmer and artist, she also became interested in dancing during her childhood, taking dancing lessons and performing across Europe.

After seeing a promotional poster for the 1924 film Der Berg des Schicksals ("The Mountain of Destiny"), Riefenstahl was inspired to move into acting.

Between 1925 and 1929, she starred in five successful motion pictures.

Riefenstahl became one of the few women in Germany to direct a film during the Weimar Period when, in 1932, she decided to try directing with her own film called Das Blaue Licht ("The Blue Light"). In the 1930s, she directed the Nazi propaganda films Triumph des Willens ("Triumph of the Will") and Olympia, resulting in worldwide attention and acclaim.

The movies are widely considered two of the most effective, and technically innovative, Nazi propaganda films ever made.

Her involvement in Triumph des Willens, however, significantly damaged her career and reputation after the war.

Hitler was in close collaboration with Riefenstahl during the production of at least three important Nazi films, and they formed a friendly relationship.

Some have argued that Riefenstahl's visions were essential to the carrying out of the mission of the Holocaust.

After the war, Riefenstahl was arrested, but classified as being a "fellow traveler" or "Nazi sympathizer" only and was not associated with war crimes.

Throughout her life, she denied having known about the Holocaust.

Besides directing, Riefenstahl released an autobiography and wrote several books on the Nuba people. Riefenstahl died of cancer on 8 September 2003 at the age of 101 and was buried at Munich Waldfriedhof.

Early life

Helene Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl was born in Berlin on 22 August 1902. Her father, Alfred Theodor Paul Riefenstahl, owned a successful heating and ventilation company and wanted his daughter to follow him into the business world. Since Riefenstahl was the only child for several years, Alfred wanted her to carry on the family name and secure the family fortune. However, her mother, Bertha Ida (Scherlach), who had been a part-time seamstress before her marriage, had faith in Riefenstahl and believed that her daughter's future was in show business. Riefenstahl had a younger brother, Heinz, who was killed at the age of 39 on the Eastern Front in Nazi Germany's war against the Soviet Union.

Riefenstahl fell in love with the arts in her childhood. She began to paint and write poetry at the age of four. She was also athletic, and at the age of twelve joined a gymnastics and swimming club. Her mother was confident her daughter would grow up to be successful in the field of art and therefore gave her full support, unlike Riefenstahl's father, who was not interested in his daughter's artistic inclinations. In 1918, when she was 16, Riefenstahl attended a presentation of Snow White which interested her deeply; it led her to want to be a dancer. Her father instead wanted to provide his daughter with an education that could lead to a more dignified occupation. His wife, however, continued to support her daughter's passion. Without her husband's knowledge, she enrolled Riefenstahl in dance and ballet classes at the Grimm-Reiter Dance School in Berlin, where she quickly became a star pupil.

Source

Dancing and acting careers

Riefenstahl completed her training at academies and became well-known for her self-styled interpretive dancing abilities, touring around Europe with Max Reinhardt in a show supported by Jewish producer Harry Sokal. Riefenstahl performed well over 700 RM for each show and was so committed to acting that she didn't think about filmmaking. She began to suffer a string of foot injuries that culminated in knee surgery that ended her dancing career. It was during a doctor's appointment that she first saw a poster for the 1924 film Mountain of Destiny. She was inspired to work in filmmaking and began attending film screenings and attending film premieres.

Riefenstahl encountered Luis Trenker, an actress who had appeared in Mountain of Destiny, on one of her adventures. Arnold Fanck, the producer of Mountain of Destiny and a pioneer of the mountain film genre, was invited to a meeting by her companion Gunther Rahn. Fanck was filming in Berlin on a film. She told him how much she loved his work, but she also assured him of her acting ability. She begged him not to appear in one of his films. The script of the 1926 film The Holy Mountain was later delivered to Riefenstahl by Fanck. She produced a number of films for Fanck, where she learned from him acting and film editing techniques. The White Hell of Pitz Palu of 1929, co-directed by G. W. Pabst, was one of Fanck's films that brought Riefenstahl to prominence. Her fame has extended to countries outside of Germany.

In 1932, Riefenstahl produced and directed her own work, Das Blaue Licht ("The Blue Light"), which was co-written by Carl Mayer and Béla Balázs. This film received the silver medal at the Venice Film Festival, but it was not universally well received, for which Riefenstahl criticized the critics, many of whom were Jewish. The names of Balázs and Sokal, both Jewish, were deleted from the credits on 1938, although some sources claim this was at Riefenstahl's behest. Riefenstahl played an innocent peasant girl who is feared by the villagers because they suspect she is diabolic and cast out. She is shielded by a brilliant mountain grotto. Riefenstahl received invites to film in Hollywood, but she turned down those opportunities in favour of staying in Germany with a boyfriend, according to her. Hitler was a fan of the film and thought Riefenstahl epitomized the ideal German female. He saw potential in Riefenstahl and called for a meeting.

Riefenstahl appeared in the U.S.-German coproductions of Arnold Fanck's directed, German-language SOS Eisberg and the Tay Garnett-directed English-language S.O.S. Iceberg is the product of icebergs. Both the films were shot in English and German simultaneously and Universal Studios produced and distributed the films. In the United States, her character as an actress has a following. Iceberg was her first English language role in film.

Directing career

Adolf Hitler, the leader of the National Social Democratic Party (NSDAP), was captivated by his charisma as a public speaker at a rally in 1932. "I had a nearly apocalyptic vision that I was never able to forget," Riefenstahl wrote about the experience in her book. It seemed as if the Earth's surface were spreading out in front of me, like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, spouting out a massive jet of water that shook the sky and shaken the earth."

Riefenstahl's art captured Hitler right away. She is described as fitting in with Hitler's ideal of Aryan womanhood, a feature he had noted when she first saw her in Das Blaue Licht. Riefenstahl was given the opportunity to direct Der Sieg des Glaubens ("The Victory of Faith"), an hour-long propaganda film about the fifth Nuremberg Rally in 1933. It was a surprise to Riefenstahl that it was offered such a rare opportunity. Hitler had directed Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry to Riefenstahl, but the Ministry had never advised her. And though she was only given a few days before the rally to plan, Riefenstahl agreed to direct the film. She and Hitler got along fine, initiating a friendly relationship. The NSDAP funded the propaganda film entirely.

During the filming of Victory of Faith, Hitler had stood side by side with Ernst Röhm, the Sturmabteilung's chief, a man with whom he obviously had a close working relationship. A short time later, Röhm was assassinated on Hitler's orders a short time later, during the purge of the SA's term "The Night of the Long Knives." It has been on record that after the shootings, Hitler ordered that all copies of the film be destroyed immediately, although Riefenstahl denies that this has happened.

Hitler ordered Triumph des Willens ("Triumph of the Will"), a new propaganda film about the 1934 party rally in Nuremberg, despite being impressed with Riefenstahl's work. More than a million Germans took part in the march. The film is often thought of as the best propaganda film ever made. Initially, according to Riefenstahl, she resisted and did not want to make further Nazi Party films, instead planning a film based on Eugen d'Albert's Tiefland ("Lowlands"), an opera that was extremely popular in Berlin in the 1920s. Riefenstahl received private funding for Tiefland's production, but the filming in Spain was interrupted and the project was cancelled. (When Tiefland was shot between 1940 and 1944, it was shot in black and white and it was the third most expensive film ever made in Nazi Germany.) Riefenstahl used Romani from internment camps for extras, who were brutally mistreated on set, and when the shooting was complete, they were transported to Auschwitz's death camp.) According to Riefenstahl, Hitler was able to convince her to film Triumph des Willens on the understanding that she would not be required to make further films for the party. The motion picture was widely regarded as a groundbreaking piece of propaganda filmmaking. The film brought Riefenstahl's career to a new degree and gained more international recognition.

Riefenstahl obstructively denied any deliberate attempt to produce Nazi propaganda in interviews for Leni Riefenstahl's 1993 documentary The Enlightening, Horrible Life said she was disgusted that Triumph des Willens was used in such a way.

Despite reportedly promising not to produce any more films about the Nazi Party, Riefenstahl produced the 28-minute Tag der Freiheit: Our Armed Forces" about the German Army in 1935. This was shot at the annual Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, like Der Sieg des Glaubens and Triumph des Willens. This film, according to Riefenstahl, was a subset of Der Sieg des Glaubens, and it was intended to smear the German Army, which said it did not appear well in Triumph des Willens.

Hitler invited Riefenstahl to film the 1936 Summer Olympics, which were scheduled to be held in Berlin, a film that Riefenstahl said had been sponsored by the International Olympic Committee. She travelled to Greece to photograph the inaugural torch relay and the games' original site at Olympia, where she was aided by Greek photographer Nelly's. This footage became Olympia, a hugely successful film that has since been praised for its artistic and artistic achievements. The Nazis' cover up of Olympia. She was one of the first filmmakers to use tracking photos in a film, filming the athletes' movements on rails. The film has also been known for its slow motion shots. Riefenstahl experimented with the idea of slow motion, underwater diving photos, extremely wide and low shooting angles, panoramic aerial photos, and tracking system shots for allowing fast action. Many of these shots were relatively unheardious at the time, but Riefenstahl's usage and enhancement of them set a precedent, which is the reason why they are still used to this day. Riefenstahl's Olympia photographs have been cited as a major influence on modern sports photography. In what later became a hit video, Riefenstahl filmed athletes of all kinds of races, including African-American Jesse Owens.

In 1938, Olympia hosted Hitler's 49th birthday. Riefenstahl's international debut prompted him to begin a press tour in the hopes of securing commercial recognition. "To me, Hitler is the greatest man who has ever lived," Riefenstahl told a Detroit News reporter in February 1937. He truly is without fault, because it's so simple and yet it also has a strong sense of masculinity." She arrived in New York City on November 4th, 1938, five days before Kristallnacht (the "Night of the Broken Glass"). When news of the incident broke in the United States, Riefenstahl defended Hitler explicitly. Henry Ford in Detroit received her on 18 November. Olympia was on display at the Chicago Engineers Club two days later. Avery Brundage, President of the International Olympic Committee, lauded the film and held Riefenstahl in the highest regard. She negotiated with Louis B. Mayer, and Walt Disney brought her on a three-hour tour of Fantasia's continuing production.

Riefenstahl had been friends with Joseph Goebbels and his wife Magda, attending the opera with them and going to his parties, according to the Goebbels Diaries. Goebbels was furious because she opposed his advances and was jealous of her reputation as a threat to internal security, according to Riefenstahl, who saw her as an internal threat. His diary entries could not be trusted, which was therefore surprising. Goebbels' filmmaking was regarded with skepticism by later accounts, but she became outraged with what she saw as her overspending on Nazi-provided filmmaking funds.

Tom Saunders argues that Hitler appears in Triumph of the Will, that the camera's gaze is directed at. "Without rejecting that "rampant masculinity" (the "sexiness") of Hitler and the SS), the object of the gaze, Saunders writes, "I would argue that this attraction is also directed toward the feminine." This is not in the traditional sequences of adoring women celebrating Hitler's arrival and cavalcade through Nuremberg. In these cases, Hitler remains the object of attraction, as well as the physical representation of his mass-following. Rather, it is embedded in flags and banners, which were shot in such a way as to make them physically appealing as well as potent political symbols. The flag is a symbol of masculinity, equated with national pride and clout, and a belief that men's sexual and masculine energies are allegedly conveyed. The flags of Riefenstahl encapsulated its iconography. "The effect is a dramatic double change: the photographs mechanize human beings and bring breath life to flags," Saunders says. Even when the carriers are not completely submerged in a sea of colored fabric, and when facial features are prominent, they have no personality nor distinctness. The guys are still ants in a large industry. By contrast and paradoxically, the flags, whether a few or hundreds peopling the frame, have distinct identities."

In Triumph of the Will, Riefenstahl distorts the emetic sound. Her distortion of sound suggests that she was inspired by German art cinema. Influenced by Classical Hollywood cinema's style, a German art film used music to enhance the story, establish a sense of grandeur, and lift the emotions in a scene. Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will used traditional folk music to accompany and intensify her shots. "In Triumph of the Will, there is no aural impression beyond the music," Ben Morgan writes about Riefenstahl's distortion of sound: "The material world gives no aural picture beyond the music." Where the film incorporates diegetic noise with the music, the effects used are human (laughter or cheering) and provide a rhythmic extension to the song rather than a comparison to it. Riefenstahl's film mixes diegetic sound with music, combining the documentary with the fantastic."

Riefenstahl was photographed in Poland wearing a military uniform and a pistol on her belt in the company of German troops on September 1st; she had gone to Poland as a war correspondent. 30 civilians were killed in retaliation for a suspected attack on German soldiers on September 12th. According to her memoir, Riefenstahl attempted to help her, but a tense German soldier retaliated and threatened to shoot her on the spot. She said she didn't know the victims were Jews because they were Jewish. Photographs of a possibly distraught Riefenstahl have survived from that day. However, Riefenstahl was back in occupied Poland filming Hitler's triumph parade in Warsaw by 5 October 1939. She left Poland and decided not to make any more Nazi-related films.

How can we ever thank you?"

Riefenstahl began filming after the Nuremberg rallies and Olympia. Specifically Tiefland. The German government paid her 7 million RM in compensation in response to Hitler's direct order. She appeared in Krün, near Mittenwald, from September 23 to November 13, 1940. The extras, who were compelled to work with her, were drawn from Romani's detention center in Salzburg-Maxglan. In April 1942, filming at Babelsberg Studios in Berlin began 18 months later. Sinti and Roma prisoners from the Marzahn detention camp near Berlin were asked to serve as extras this time. Almost to the end of her life, despite overwhelming evidence that the concentration camp occupants had been coerced to work on the film unpaid, Riefenstahl continued to film extras, despite the fact that many of the film extras had been missing since the war. Riefenstahl sued filmmaker Nina Gladitz, who said Riefenstahl personally selected the extras at their holding camp; Gladitz discovered one of the Romani survivors and matched his memory with stills of the film for which Gladitz was filming. Gladitz ruled largely in favour of him, saying that Riefenstahl had no idea the extras were from a concentration camp, but that Riefenstahl had not been informed that the Romani would be sent to Auschwitz after filming was complete.

When Riefenstahl was 100 years old and a Roma party was arrested for refusing to kill Romani, the Romans appeared in court again. Riefenstahl said, "I regret that Sinti and Roma [people] had to suffer during National Socialism" a period of National Socialism." Many of them were killed in concentration camps, according to reports today.

Tiefland's production shifted to Barrandov Studios in Prague in October 1944 for interior filming. These shots were some of the more expensive of the film, thanks to the lavish sets. The film was not edited or released until almost ten years later.

It was the last time Riefenstahl had seen Hitler when she married Peter Jacob on March 21, 1944. In 1946, Riefenstahl and Jacob married. Riefenstahl left Berlin and was hitchhiking with a group of guys trying to reach her mother, when American troops took her into custody. She walked out of a detention center, sparking a string of escapes and arrests across the country's chaotic landscape. She discovered that American troops had seized her house after she returned home on a bicycle. She was pleasantly treated by her parents, who were pleasantly surprised.

The bulk of Riefenstahl's unfinished projects were delayed until the end of the war. All of her editing equipment, as well as Tiefland's production reels, was confiscated by the French government. These were returned to her after years of court wrangling, but the French government had reportedly destroyed some of the film stock when trying to design and edit it, with only a few key scenes missing (although Riefenstahl was delighted to discover the original negatives for Olympia in the same shipment). Riefenstahl was financed by the state to establish Riefenstahl-Film GmbH, which was uninvolved with her most prominent performances during Olympia's filming. Tiefland premiered in Stuttgart on February 11, 1954. She edited and dubbed the remaining material. However, it was declined admission to the Cannes Film Festival. Tiefland was her last feature film, despite the fact that Riefenstahl lived for almost half a century.

Riefenstahl attempted to make more films in the 1950s and 1960s, but was met with skepticism, public protests, and scathing criticism. Many of her filmmaking colleagues in Hollywood had left Nazi Germany and were clumsy to her. Although both film professionals and investors were keen to promote her work, the bulk of the projects she attempted were ultimately shelved and with heavy negative coverage about her Nazi Germany.

Jean Cocteau, a huge fan of the film, in 1954, demanded that Tiefland be shown at the Cannes Film Festival, which he was attending that year. In 1960, Riefenstahl attempted to stop filmmaker Erwin Leiser from mixing scenes from Triumph des Willens with footage from concentration camps in his film Mein Kampf. Riefenstahl had hoped for a Cocteau-led collaboration, Friedrich und Voltaire ("Friedrich and Voltaire"), in which Cocteau's Cognac would appear in two roles. They felt the film could represent Germany's love-hate relationship. The project was put to a halt due to Cocteau's illness and 1963 death. Also lost a musical version of Das Blaue Licht ("The Blue Light") by an English production company.

Riefenstahl became interested in Africa in the 1960s, following Ernest Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa and George Rodger's photographs. She visited Kenya for the first time in 1956 and later Sudan, where she photographed Nuba tribes with whom she sporadically lived, learning about their culture so she could photograph them better. Despite the fact that her film project on modern slavery, Die Schwarze Fracht ("The Black Cargo") never finished, Riefenstahl was able to sell the stills from the expedition to magazines in several parts of the world. She nearly died from injuries while scouting shooting sites after a truck crash. After rising from a coma in a Nairobi hospital, she finished writing the script but was soon thwarted by uncooperative locals, the Suez Canal crisis, and bad weather. The film project was postponed until the end. Despite this, Riefenstahl was granted Sudanese citizenship for her work in the region, becoming the first foreigner to obtain a Sudanese passport.

Source