THERE were no women in filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl's life, only men. Lots of them. The glamour of danger and the attraction of the body beautiful were two forces that drew her towards the champion skier, the tennis star, the daring mountaineer, the flying ace. Occasionally, she settled for something less exciting: the quiet, sound engineer she worked with or the unassuming army officer - whom she actually married. The man who shadowed her whole life, however, was Adolph Hitler and in her book, A Portrait O Leni Riefenstahl, journalist and TV scriptwriter Audrey Salkeld has set out to discover to what extent the accusations levelled against Riefenstahl - that she was a Nazi propagandist - actually hold up.
Helene Bertha Amelie Riefenstahl was born in Germany in 1902, the daughter of a plumbing contractor who was determined to make a lady out of her. To this end, he sent her, after she'd finished school, to art college for a few terms, then to an academy in the mountains where she learned ballet. The ballet lessons paid off and soon Riefenstahl was touring the capitals of Europe, giving solo performances in the style of Isadora Duncan.
On June 4th, 1924, the course of her life changed. It was a significant year: Lenin had just died, Ramsay MacDonald headed the first Labour Government in Britain, Klee and Kadinsky were at the Bauhaus, Thomas Mann was the toast of the literary circles and Hitler was dictating Mein Kampf from a prison cell. The 22 year old Riefenstahl, on her way to a Berlin physician to have a torn ligament seen to, was distracted by a film poster. Abandoning her doctor's appointment, she went to the cinema and was soon enthralled by the movie, Mountains Of Destiny Within weeks, the determined ballet dancer was in the Dolomites, chatting up the star of the film, the ragged Tyrolean, Luis Trenker. She would like to act with him in his next mountain film, she told him. Before the year was out, she had landed both a film contract and Trenker.
The film was well received and Riefenstahl moved on to a new film and a new leading man, Hans Schneeberger, cameraman turned ski star. Acting in films, however, soon gave way to directing them and it was the film The Blue Light (which she both directed and starred in), released in 1932, that brought her to the attention of Hitler, at that time gearing up for his bid for the Reich Chancellery. She must, he said, make a film of one of the party days which the Nazis were organising throughout Germany. The one he wanted filmed would be held in Nuremberg. Riefenstahl's film of the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, Triumph Of The Will, together with her film of the 1936 Olympics - both considered to be cinematic classics of their time - are the two projects which subsequently caused her to be denounced, in Europe and in America, as a Nazi sympathiser and propagandist.
That she made the films at Hitler's request, that they were funded by Nazi money and that she strove, with inexhaustible energy and devotion to her task, to portray the image the Fuhrer demanded, cannot be denied. To what extent, however, she can be associated with the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany, depends upon the reader's ability or indeed willingness to separate the singer from the song.
She herself says she had little choice and that, in any case, this was all before the true character of Nazism emerged.
Riefenstahl's life has been a blighted one. The early days glittered with promise and fulfilment. During the making of a film in Greenland we find her, during a private, idyllic moment, dancing naked on the seashore for her current lover. Film making, in those days, was for real and in the film The Holy Mountain, we see her on a rocky ledge in Heliogoland, dancing to Beethoven's Fifth, performed by a violinist lowered on a rope for the purpose. The fact that this was a silent movie was irrelevant: everything had to be real. If the script required her to be engulfed by an avalanche, she personally was buried in snow - no extras, no mock ups. During the making of The Holy Mountain, she broke an ankle skiing, no fewer than three other members of the cast also suffered broken limbs and the elaborate ice palace sculpted specially for the film melted away when the weather warmed. Life, men and work provided her with a trinity of challenges her energetic spirit thrived on.
THEN Hitler set his eye on her, sent his Mercedes for her and the days of innocence were over. Not that she saw it as that, at the time. For a young, talented film maker, the Germany of 1936 was full of hope and she was part of it. An American journalist described her for hiss readers: "She is a striking, dark haired woman, dressed in the simple but effective fashion of Nazi Germany... her beauty is of a type that has a distinctive appeal in Germany. Lithe, spare, and boyish is her figure. Her mouth is wide and suggestive." She was, he said, athletic and tall and her carriage had such a swagger and haughtiness to it that he was led to think she was the woman behind Hitler.
In fact, the two seem not to have had a sexual relationship. Riefenstahl leans towards a confused mix of self dramatisation and some degree of inaccuracy and most of her recorded meetings with Hitler were to do with her films. They had a couple of disagreements but one or other usually gave way with a measure of grace. There is only one important instance of Riefenstahl standing her ground and that is in relation to Jesse Owens, the 22 year old black student from Ohio University who won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics. Hitler demanded he be removed from the film: Riefenstahl refused.
At the start of the war, she conceived the patriotic idea of filming at the Front and to that end was despatched to Kronskie where she witnessed a bloody massacre of Poles. A photo in the book shows her face distorted with horror but the incident - along with the assertion, among others, that she used a group of gypsies bound for Auschwitz as extras in another film she was making - was used against her when she was summoned to attend the de Nazification court in Villingen after the war. For some, to have been there at all was an indictment. At this and at a later court, her case was heard and dismissed. There was no evidence to show she had been a member of the Nazi party or that she had a close relationship with Hitler. Her innuendos on that score had, it seems, been the elaborations of a vain woman who knew how useful a powerful man can be.
The court rulings, however, did little to satisfy the film world - Hollywood was dominated by Jewish directors forced to flee German anti Semitism - and alter the war, she found herself blackballed by the industry. She sought refuge in Sudan where she recorded the Nuba warriors, thus confirming what many people already believed that she was obsessed with the idea of cultural purity and with the male form, naked where possible.
Though Audrey Salkeld's researches for this book are wide ranging, she never managed to meet up with Riefenstahl: "We made various arrangements which fell through. She's difficult to pin down," she told me. So too is Salkeld, just back from the Himalayas where she was working on a film.
Leni Riefenstahl, now 94, formed her last relationship with a man 40 years her junior. Still protesting her innocence, she has returned with her partner to live in Germany - taking time out, occasionally, to make the odd under water film.
