Obituary: Leni Riefenstahl (original) (raw)

The German film director and photographer Leni Riefenstahl, who has died aged 101, will be remembered for two innovative, visually eloquent and lavishly funded documentaries, Triumph Of The Will (1935) and the two-part Olympia (1938). Both are permeated by her intense feeling for the expressive power of bodies in motion, whether they be marching Nazis or high divers.

Triumph Of The Will, a hypnotic account of the massive 1934 Nazi party rally in Nuremberg, glorifying Nazi pageantry and deifying Hitler, earned Riefenstahl a place in film history, and the status of a postwar pariah. She was the first female film director to attract international acclaim, but having enjoyed the privileges of being the führer's favourite filmmaker, her career was curtailed by public, industry and official antipathy. In the 1960s, however, she reinvented herself as a still photographer, producing two successful and accomplished books about the Nuba tribe of southern Sudan.

Born in Berlin, Riefenstahl was the daughter of the owner of a heating and ventilation firm. She achieved fame as a dancer in the style of Isadora Duncan, touring Europe by the age of 22 and gaining employment with Max Reinhardt. Her film ambitions were prompted by Arnold Fanck's 1924 bergfilm (mountain film), Mountain Of Fate, starring the Tyrolean outdoor hero Luis Trencker. The genre's use of cinematic technique - filters, special film stock, slow motion - to endow magnificent natural scenery with dramatic stature provided her with key elements of her towering visual style, and fostered her technical skill.

Riefenstahl made contact with Trencker, who later became her lover - and, in 1946, her antagonist, when he published a fake intimate diary, purportedly by Hitler's mistress Eva Braun, claiming that Riefenstahl, too, had been the führer's lover. She furiously denied the allegation, which pursued her for life.

But it was Fanck, a geologist, adventurer and technical per fectionist, who became Riefenstahl's mentor, writing The Holy Mountain (1926) as her film debut. According to her memoirs, it was the opening sequence, with Riefenstahl performing a "dance of the sea" on a rocky outcrop in Heligoland amid crashing waves, that made Hitler an admirer. It was later to prompt Siegfried Kracauer to discern in its "idolatry of glaciers and rocks" a proto-Nazi irrationalism where modern viewers are likely to see only kitsch.

More bergfilms followed, including a starring role in the genre's finest and most successful entry, The White Hell Of Piz Palü (1929), co-directed by Fanck and GW Pabst. Fanck had surrounded himself with the best cameramen available - the so-called Freiburg school, including Hans "The Snowflea" Schneeburger, another of Riefenstahl's lovers. Many of them would work for her after she began directing, with The Blue Light, in 1932.

Riefenstahl would often invoke The Blue Light as evidence of the non-political nature of her talent. A fairytale bergfilm, starring the director as an outcast luring young men to their deaths with her secret cave of blue crystals in the Tyrolean mountains, it was co-written by the leftwing Jewish intellectual and theorist Bela Balazs. After the war, she would conceive of the heroine's loss of her magic cavern as a metaphor for her own disenfranchisement as a filmmaker.

Riefenstahl had the first of her numerous meetings with Hitler when she was summoned to a resort near Wilmershaven while en route to Greenland to star in Fanck's SOS Eisberg (1933). She had, by her own account, been "mesmerised" by his oratory at a Nazi meeting at the Berlin Sportpalast some months earlier, prompting her to write an admiring letter requesting a meeting.

In 1933, when the Nazis had consolidated their grip on power with the March elections, and had begun their official anti-semitic campaigns with boycotts of Jewish businesses and the introduction of the Arierparagraph banning Jews from working in the film industry, Hitler commissioned her to make Victory Of Faith, a record of the 1933 Nazi party rally. Rediscovered in the early 1980s, this precursor to Triumph Of The Will reveals a clumsiness, both in the construction of the film and in the staging of the rally, that highlights the achievements of the later film.

In Triumph Of The Will, feature-film techniques - including rhythmic montage to Herbert Windt's Wagnerian score - produce moments of extraordinary cinematic power. Its immediate purpose was to demonstrate a united, monolithic Nazi party in the wake of Hitler's 1934 murder of Ernst Röhm and his SA streetfighters. In its cinematic mastery, though, it renders the event and the film indivisible. It remains the most vivid proof of the German Marxist critic Walter Benjamin's contention that "fascism is the aestheticisation of politics".

How much was staged later, or reshot, became a hot issue in debates about its value as a film, or its status as docu- mentary or propaganda. Riefenstahl suggested, somewhat naively, that its lack of a voiceover disqualified it from being propaganda, though when the historian Erwin Leiser intercut sequences from the film with harrowing concentration camp footage in his 1960 documentary Mein Kampf, she sued the producers over breach of copyright.

Riefenstahl's undoubted masterpiece, the two-part Olympia (Festival Of Nations/ Festival Of Beauty) was commissioned by the international Olympic committee for the 1936 Berlin Olympic games, but funded by the Nazis to foster the image abroad of a modern, powerful Germany. With a vast budget, the greatest technicians of the day, state-of-the-art equipment, unprecedented access to the sporting events and an artistic brief, Riefenstahl produced a lavish hymn to sporting prowess and physical beauty and strength.

Conceiving of the athletes in a prologue as classical divine messengers, her mythologising imagery - at its most lucidly effective in the marathon and high-diving sections - extended, uncomfortably for Nazi ideology - to the great, black American athlete Jesse Owens. Owens broke 11 Olympic records that year, but Hitler could neither bear to shake his hand or be photographed with him.

After Riefenstahl had spent nearly two years editing 250 miles of raw footage, Olympia was premiered on the Nazi leader's 49th birthday in 1938, with the führer himself as guest of honour. Following its success at the Venice Biennale, Riefenstahl toured the film throughout Europe and on to the United States, where she was accompanied by, among others, her old friend Ernst Jaeger. He was ex-editor of the influential Film-Kurier, having lost his post for defying an order by Joseph Goebbels to divorce his Jewish wife.

The party arrived in the US in the immediate aftermath of the November 1938 Kristallnacht, on which Nazi youths murdered and brutalised Jews throughout Germany. Riefenstahl was met with hostility - only Hal Roach and Walt Disney publicly received her. After she had left, Jaeger stayed on and wrote a series of articles for the Hollywood Tribune, accusing his friend of having been not only a mistress to Hitler and Goebbels - with whom she professed to have a relationship of mutual hatred - but also to Hermann Goering. This character assassination was, for Riefenstahl, a taste of things to come.

During the second world war, Riefenstahl became, briefly, a war correspondent. She witnessed the massacre of Polish civilians by German soldiers in the town of Konskie, and a German soldier's snapshot of her horrified reaction was later used in a counter-productive blackmail attempt.

She then retreated to Spain to pick up an old, and troubled, project - the opera film Tiefland (Lowlands) - to which she devoted her time for the rest of the war. It was still unfinished in 1945, when she was arrested at her chalet in Kitzbühel, in the Tyrol, by US soldiers - among them the screenwriter Budd Schulberg, who had been involved in organising the prewar Hollywood protests against her. Schulberg echoed Jaeger's condemnation, dubbing Riefenstahl contemptuously as "the Nazi pin-up girl".

Riefenstahl had never been a Nazi party member, and was cleared of active involvement by a de-nazification tribunal, although, after three years' house arrest, she was declared a mitläufer, or fellow traveller, which barred her from ever seeking public office. Cherished film projects - notably her version of Penthesilia - were never completed, though she managed to rescue her mistreated Tiefland footage from the French authorities. Jean Cocteau much admired Tiefland, comparing its imagery to Breughel, and insisted it be shown at the 1954 Cannes film festival, of which he was president.

In the postwar film world, those interested in Riefenstahl's work divided into apologists or detractors. In 1960, when the National Film Theatre invited her to give a lecture, its then controller Stanley Reed declared that "Satan himself is welcome at the NFT if he makes good pictures", but the invitation was hurriedly withdrawn.

In the 1960s, Riefenstahl discovered Africa and still photography. When her project about the slave trade, Black Freight, was stillborn, and after recovering from a serious car accident, she sought out the Nuba tribe in southern Sudan. At that time, the Nuba were still cut off from the outside world, and they fascinated Riefenstahl with their athletic bodies and developed artistic practices: the Nuba consider their bodies the highest form of art, their faces blank canvases for elaborate painted masks.

At the age of 60, Riefenstahl lived with the Nuba for six months, and the relationship produced 3,000 metres of (unseen) film footage and the books The Last Of The Nuba (1974) and People Of Kau (1976). In the 1990s, she added Leni Riefenstahl's Africa and Vanishing Africa. The Last Of The Nuba occasioned Susan Sontag's famous 1974 essay Fascinating Fascism, in which she attacked Riefenstahl for a perceived continuity of her "fascist aesthetic" - of her obsession with strength, youth and beauty - across her career.

Riefenstahl photographed the ill-fated 1972 Munich Olympics for the Sunday Times, as well as producing a spread featuring Mick and Bianca Jagger, but she remained a difficult figure for Germans. She was an unwelcome reminder of a past that many, who continued to thrive in less visible sectors than the film industry (and less visibly within that industry), had disavowed. She successfully took the filmmaker Nina Gladitz to court for suggesting in a documentary that she had promised freedom to the Gypsy extras brought from concentration camps to work on Tiefland, when many later died in the camps. This was the most damaging postwar accusation against her.

A major revival of interest in Riefenstahl occurred in the early 1990s. International stars flocked to her 90th birthday party, Helmut Newton photographed her for Vanity Fair, her 1987 memoirs were translated into English as The Sieve Of Time, and Ray Müller's documentary, The Wonderful, Horrible Life Of Leni Rienstahl, featured a lengthy interview with the defiantly unapologetic nonagenarian.

Despite taking refuge in underwater photography with her companion Horst Kettner (Riefenstahl, remarkably, took up diving in her 70s), she remained a magnet for controversy to the last. The first German commercial exhibition of her photographs, in Hamburg in 1997, drew fierce protests, as did a retrospective of her films at the Filmmuseum in Potsdam in 1998.

The final controversy occurred in 2000, when Riefenstahl revisited the Nuba. Since 1985, the tribe had been involved in an armed conflict with the Arab-orientated Islamic government in Khartoum, which had been accused of conducting genocide. Riefenstahl agreed to visit only those areas controlled by the Sudanese government, thus attracting the criticism that she was acting as a figleaf for a repressive regime.

Interest in her life and work shows no signs of abating. Both Madonna and Jodie Foster spent considerable time in the early 1990s vying for the rights to Riefenstahl's memoirs. Foster is currently producing, directing and starring in a biopic.

One wonders what lessons the film will draw from a life whose greatest achievements survive time's sieve by pre-empting the gigantism of the Hollywood megabuck movie, the mythic use of the camera in sports coverage and even the primacy of the image in politics. Riefenstahl's earlier films remain as a challenge to historians and cinephiles alike, posing difficult questions about the relationship between the 20th century's greatest tragedy and its most powerful art form.

In 1944, Riefenstahl married Major Peter Jacob, but the couple, who had no children, separated three years later. Kettner, her companion of more than 30 years, survives her.

· Hélène Bertha Amelia 'Leni' Riefenstahl, filmmaker, born August 22 1902; died September 8 2003