February 2002 - Nr. 2
Riefenstahl Returns
TWIG - Spirited is what Leni Riefenstahl has always been. From the day she defied her father and began to study dance, to her diving escapades at the age of 70 in the Indian Ocean, to her insistence on making films right through the ripe age of 99. Her devil-may-care attitude has invariably landed her in one controversy after another. As the Deutsche Welle reports, this week the dynamic director announced that she will dazzle the world with another work, in time for her 100th birthday.
Born on August 22, 1902 in the Wedding district of Berlin, Riefenstahl took up dancing and was performing in European capitals by the age of 21. She choreographed her own repertoire and chose her own costumes and make up until a knee injury spelt the end of her dancing career. Her life then took a dramatic turn one day as she waited for a subway train in Berlin. She happened to see a film poster promoting the film with the prophetic name, Mountain of Destiny, by Arnold Fanck. Leni believed it was a sign meant for her. She sought out Fanck, convinced him that she should appear in his next film and become a star. Between 1926 and 1933, she appeared in five of Fanck’s "mountain films." Riefenstahl always played the role of the beautiful, daring explorer conquering craggy peaks and posing amid magnificent mountain landscapes. Weimar Germany loved the films as they provided a contrast to the dark, defeated, guilt-ridden German films of the time.
The next challenge for Riefenstahl was getting behind the camera. Even her first black-and-white films were well-crafted and exerted a tremendous effect on world cinema. She pioneered and enhanced many of the sports photography techniques that we now take for granted: slow motion, underwater diving shots, panoramic aerial shots and tracking systems for following fast action. But in the words of Ray Mueller, director of a documentary about Riefenstahl’s life, "her talent was her tragedy." Her work has always been overshadowed by her close association with the Nazi regime. Riefenstahl’s stirring and widely acclaimed documentary of the 1934 Nazi party rally in Nuremberg, Triumph of the Will, was, to some, entirely too successful. That along with her 1938 film, Olympia, a documentary on the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games made her a pariah of the film world. The press of the day branded her a "Nazi pin-up" and "Hitler’s girl," labels she declaims to this day as slanderous. In 1945, Riefenstahl faced Allied charges of producing Nazi propaganda films and of having close ties to Hitler, and was imprisoned. It was only after her interrogation that she was officially "denazified" and released.
After her forays into filmmaking and direction, Riefenstahl at the age of 60, took on another profession: stills photographer. Her love of nature and her fascination with different cultures led her to remote Africa, to document disappearing African tribes. She lived among the people of the Land of Nuba, a region in northeast Africa. She learned their language and lived as one of their own. What emerged from this experience were beautiful photographs of face and body painting, graceful African warriors, domestic life, rituals and ceremonies. As always, controversy followed her this time too, as some critics attempted to draw parallels between her images of the Nuba people and those of Nazi Germany. Still, the photographs were exhibited all over the world.
But Riefenstahl did not rest on her laurels. When she reached 70, chronic back pain pushed her into the buoyancy of the ocean and she took up diving. She discovered the wonders of the underwater world during her first snorkeling expedition in the Indian Ocean. She has visited the exquisite coral gardens off the coast of Kenya, in the Red Sea, the Maldives, and the Cocos Island in the Pacific. Two books of her photographs, The Coral Gardens and Wonders Under Water, resulted from these trips.
Riefenstahl, who will turn 100 on August 22, remains invincible. Her latest work, a 45-minute movie, Underwater Impressions, is a compilation of footage from the more than 2,000 scuba dives she made in the Indian Ocean between 1947 and 2000. When it is released on her birthday, it may cap a lifetime of achievements, or merely mark another milestone in the epic life of Leni Riefenstahl.
