Coinciding with her 100th birthday, Leni Riefenstahl is releasing her first film in half a century. Made in the Indian Ocean, it combines her diving and directing skills and is a long way from her Nazi-friendly films, she tells Kevin Barry
Leni Riefenstahl was rescued by Eskimos once after being thrown into the sea from a shifting iceberg. In the wild nights of Weimar Berlin she danced for Max Reinhardt at the Deutsches Theater. She has been a nonagenarian skindiver and has conducted orchestras. In the 1930s she hung out with Dietrich, in the 1950s with Cocteau, in the 1970s with the Jaggers. She survived a helicopter crash in Sudan at the age of 98. She has enjoyed humid romances with tennis champs and claims to have rebuffed the advances of many a leading Nazi: "I felt quite stunned at the sight of Goebbels on his knees." She has been accused, then acquitted, of being a Nazi herself, but was branded a fellow traveller. Behind a film camera she has shown genius, directing two of arguably the greatest documentaries ever made. On August 22nd, she will be 100 years old and will release her first film in half a century. She has lately embraced the wired world and, from her home near Lake Starnberg in the Bavarian Alps, has agreed to answer some questions by e-mail. It's hard to know where to start.
Any regrets, Leni?
"Yes. The day I met Hitler."
That fateful day was in the spring of 1932, on the beach at Horumersiel by the North Sea. Hitler and Riefenstahl strolled in the salt air and talked movies. He made a pass, she said no. He was juiced on her film, The Blue Light, admired her feel for Germanic grandeur and sweep. She had seen him at a rally in the Berlin Sports Palace some weeks before and had sent a note.
"It was stunning to experience the kind of hypnotic might Hitler had on the spectators. He had everyone under a spell. It was uncanny, and the spark jumped over to me."
He asked her to film a National Socialist congress in Nuremberg. She insists that it was with great reluctance she agreed. She claims she upbraided him for his anti-Semitism; one of her mentors was the Jewish film theorist Béla Balázs. Hitler praised her plain speaking, she says.
The Nuremberg film, Triumph of the Will, burns off the screen. It's a shudder and a jolt, all cult geometry and sexual charge, somehow lascivious. It's Hitler-as-myth, descending from the skies to reinvigorate a beaten people. Nuremberg was the first great modern media event, staged with filming in mind. Hitler had the warped savvy to twig that politics and show business correlated and snagged neatly. There's no doubt the film gave lustre to his personality cult.
The critic David Thomson has captured the power of the film perfectly: " shrieks with camera aptitude, integrated design, sense of composition, the flush of light, a feeling for martial resolve, for the shapes of crowds, for the splendour of the lone individual, the resonance of banners and trumpets and of torchlight seen through the languorous folds of a flag stirred on a summer night."
Riefenstahl has denied that the film is just hyper-evolved propaganda. "It doesn't contain a single reconstructed scene. Everything in it is true. And it contains no tendentious commentary at all. It is history."
Did she have a strong sense at that time of the medium's power and the potential of her work? "Well, I know my films have tended to have a strong influence on the viewer. With regard to technique, what I was trying to do was to either exhaust the possibilities of film or to enlarge them. My aim has always been to achieve the best effects possible using the simplest methods."
The Russian innovator Eisenstein had turned her head. She adapted his low-slung camera angles to give her material an epic, looming quality, but her greatest work was in the editing suite. She snipped and spliced obsessively and nailed the dynamics of montage. Her film Olympia, the infamous record of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, offers a master class in the editor's art: its fluidity and verve, its sprung rhythms, opened up a new sense of poetics for the documentary form, allowed it to transcend itself. She mastered shadow, too - what's suggested but not shown - and her influence has been enormous. It's evident in film noir and in the work of contemporary directors like George Lucas and Paul Verhoeven, both of whom have frequently hymned her achievement.
Riefenstahl's life has unfolded as an improbable fiction, a garish yarn, and when she looks back now, it must seem like a fever dream, with all its tumult and contradictions, and a darkness at the edges like a nightmare's shade. That darkness came in with the war years. In 1945, she was arrested in the Tyrol and brought to the US army base at Dachau, where she was shown photographs from the concentration camps. She says she was appalled and horrified. There followed almost five years of trials and accusations. It was eventually accepted that she had never been a member of the Nazi party but she was classified a fellow traveller. The most damning accusation, furiously denied and never proven, was that she had used gypsies from the Maxglan camp as extras in her film Tiefland.
That film was eventually allowed an international release in 1954, but by then Riefenstahl had effectively been made a pariah and had no opportunity to work in film.
It took a couple of decades for her reputation to reassert itself. "But I never lost the feeling," she says. "You are born with this feeling, with this creative instinct. It does not simply disappear."
Lauded by the French New Wave in journals such as Cahiers du Cinema, and by the late 1960s breed of American independents, her old films became mainstays on the arthouse circuit and she began to work again. For years she trailed the Nuba tribe around the heat and dust of Sudan, producing some highly accomplished still photography. At the age of 71 she learned to skindive and slowly since then the idea for her new film has been flickering through.
"Whenever I went diving, I took my camera along, it was an automatic thing," she says. "I just filmed whatever I found interesting. It was important to me that I didn't follow a plan. I've dived more than 2,000 times now so I've gathered a lot of material, and the opportunity of cutting the shots and arranging them just presented itself naturally."
The film is called Impressionen unter Wasser (Impressions Under Water) and consists mainly of footage from the Indian Ocean. Giorgio Moroder has just completed the soundtrack.
"I thought this natural world would make an interesting documentary because there would be no traditional storyline or plot, no narrative," she says. "What interests me is the pure design, the extraordinary forms and shapes of the world underwater."
All is hubbub right now at Riefenstahl Produktion in Berlin. The advance word on the film is strong. Riefenstahl is energised by the gathering clamour and, at 99, still revels in the discipline of work.
"I get a lot of mail from all over the world, it comes every day and I'll spend a couple of hours answering it.
Then always there are lots of meetings. As long as it's possible to be active, it's possible to maintain your energies. To work is the most important thing."
SHE was born Helene Amelia Bertha Riefenstahl in the late summer of 1902 to a businessman father and a mother who was a frustrated actress. Against her father's wishes she studied dance and became a star of the Berlin stage. She was considered a great beauty - cheekbones, smoky eyes - and as an actress became an iconic presence in the deeply weird, pantheistic German mountain films of the late 1920s, films such as Der Grosse Sprung (The Large Jump) and Der Heilige Berg ("A Heroic Song From A Towering World Of Heights!") She directed, produced,edited and took the lead role in The Blue Light, which gave her international success in 1932. She almost moved to Hollywood then, but one day she went to a rally at the Berlin Sports Palace.
Pauline Kael described Riefenstahl as "one of the dozen or so creative geniuses who have ever worked in the film medium." Nobody who has seen Triumph of the Will and Olympia can deny she is a great artist, but there has perhaps never been a great artist more compromised by circumstance and affiliation. She told me she's had a lot of happiness - as a dancer, and with the Nuba, and diving, but there's been bitterness too.
"Art, creation, is my life and I was deprived of it. My life became a tissue of rumours and accusations through which I had to beat a path. For 20 years they deprived me of my creation . . . everything was reduced to nothingness. I was dead."
