Leni Riefenstahl 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 general antipathy.
Born in Berlin, the daughter of the owner of a heating 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.
Fanck, a geologist, adventurer and technical perfectionist, became Riefenstahl's mentor, writing The Holy Mountain (1926) as her film debut. According to her memoirs the opening sequence, with Riefenstahl performing a "dance of the sea" on a rocky outcrop in Heligoland amid crashing waves, made Hitler an admirer.
More Bergfilms followed, including a starring role in the genre's finest, The White Hell Of Piz Palü (1929), co-directed by Fanck and G.W. 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.
A fairytale Bergfilm, starring the director as an outcast luring young men to their deaths with her secret cave of blue crystals, it was co-written by the left-wing Jewish intellectual and theorist, Bela Balazs. After the war, Riefenstahl 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 in 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, Hitler commissioned her to make Victory Of Faith, a record of the 1933 Nazi party rally. Rediscovered in the early 1980s, this clumsy, stilted precursor to Triumph Of The Will only highlights its achievements.
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. 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 documentary or propaganda, and when the historian Erwin Leiser intercut sequences from the film with harrowing concentration camp footage in his 1960 documentary, Mein Kampf, she sued for 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 promote 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.
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 counterproductive blackmail attempt.
Riefenstahl had never been in the Nazi party 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.
Hélène Bertha Amelia "Leni" Riefenstahl: born August 22nd, 1902; died September 8th, 2003