Leni Riefinstahl is dead

Director of lots of nazi propaganda such as "Triumph of the Will" and "Olympia"

She was 101

 

She ever do any memoirs? I'll bet she has some shit to tell.

 

She did do a memoir.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...104-2858255-4495960?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

She claims that she was not with them but there is also film of her stading with Hitler during speeches and such. Plus all of her films were used by the Third Reich as propaganda.

The article.


Riefenstahl died Monday night at her home in the Bavarian lakeside village where she had lived for 20 years, the kind of idyllic setting that reflected the well-groomed aesthetic of her films and art. No cause of death was announced.


She made four films for Hitler, the best known of which were "Triumph of the Will," her masterwork recording the Nazi's 1934 rally at Nuremberg, and "Olympia," a meditation on muscle and movement at the 1936 Berlin Olympic games (news - web sites).


Both films accented her artistry, but more troubling to her critics, presented the Nazis to the world as peaceful and tolerant. Her portrayal of Olympic sports was sensual and stunning; her depiction of the Nuremberg rally shows Hitler in godlike poses and apple-cheeked children handing him flowers.


German Culture Minister Christina Weiss said Riefenstahl's life tragically demonstrated the inseparable link between art and politics. "Her career shows that ... art is never unpolitical, and that form and content cannot be separated from one another," Weiss said.


Born Helene Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl on Aug. 22, 1902, the daughter of a heating firm owner started out as a creative dancer. A knee injury made her shift to movies, where she featured in daredevil silent roles set in the Alps.


In 1932 she starred in the self-directed "The Blue Light," which celebrated Germany's Alpine mystique — and reputedly enthralled Hitler.


That same year, Riefenstahl, then 30, heard Hitler speak at a rally and wrote to him offering her talents. In her memoirs, she rapturously described her first impression of him.


"It seemed as if the earth's surface were spreading out in front of me, like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, spewing out an enormous jet of water, so powerful that it touched the sky and shook the earth," she said. "I felt quite paralyzed."


Many suspected Riefenstahl of being Hitler's lover, which she denied.


After the war, Riefenstahl spent three years under Allied arrest. Though war tribunals ultimately cleared her of wrongdoing and she could point out that she never joined the Nazi party, the suspicion of being a Nazi collaborator stuck.


As late as 2002, Riefenstahl was investigated for Holocaust denial after she said she did not know that Gypsies taken from concentration camps to be used as extras in one of her wartime films later died in the camps. Authorities eventually dropped the case.


Riefenstahl herself seemed ambiguous about how close she was to the Nazi center of power. She said she knew nothing of Hitler's "final solution" to exterminate the Jews and learned about concentration camps only after the war. But she also said she confronted the Fuehrer about anti-Semitism.


Speaking to The Associated Press just before her 100th birthday on Aug. 22, 2002, Riefenstahl dramatically said she has "apologized for ever being born" but that she should not be criticized for her masterful films.


"I don't know what I should apologize for," she said. "I cannot apologize, for example, for having made the film "Triumph of the Will" — it won the top prize. All my films won prizes."


Riefenstahl said she was always guided by the search for beauty — whether it was the hypnotic images thousands of goose-stepping soldiers in Nuremberg or in her critically acclaimed photographs of the Nuba people.


"Through my optimism, I naturally prefer and capture the beauty in life," she said.





An acclaimed pioneer of film and photographic techniques, Riefenstahl's career was a quest for adventure. Even as she turned 100 last year, she was strapping on scuba gear to photograph sharks.

Boycotted for years after the war, Riefenstahl made a comeback of sorts in the 1960s when she lived with and photographed the Nuba in Sudan. She next turned to underwater photography, learning to dive at age 72. Around this time she met Horst Kettner, a fellow photographer half her age who became her live-in assistant and companion.

Whenever she exhibited at German galleries, controversy erupted because of her past. Despite — or perhaps because of — her notorious image, Riefenstahl enjoyed a certain pop star status outside of Germany.

She photographed Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger (news) and his then-wife, Bianca, in the 1970s. Clips from "Olympia" appear in music videos. Leni Riefenstahl computer screen savers can be found on the Internet.

Riefenstahl complained about injuries from accidents over the years, including a helicopter crash in Sudan in 2000 that left her in constant pain.

She reportedly had cancer surgery last year.

"I want to fall asleep, feel well, and then everything ends. Goodbye," the native Berliner imagined her death in a magazine interview last year. "That must be very beautiful."

Kettner was at her side when she died at the villa they shared in Poecking, a town of 5,600 south of Munich.

"Her heart simply stopped," he was quoted as saying by the German magazine Bunte.

Few except close neighbors had much contact with her in the 20 years she lived there, Mayor Rainer Schnitzler said Tuesday. The house sits behind high trees on a gated road.

Riefenstahl was married once, in 1944 to army Major Peter Jacob, but the couple split three years later. She had no children, and her only sibling, Heinz, was killed on the eastern front during World War II.

A funeral was planned Friday in Munich.

 

Many films which are considered to be landmarks of cinema often deal with subject matter so abhorrent to the modern viewer that it is difficult to get past the content to understand why they are truly remarkable pieces of work. D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, for instance, with its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan is the most well known of these films. However, whereas Griffith's film is lauded for creating the technical language for the full-length feature film, the template for the documentary, or at least a major one, is Triumph of the Will. There are those who will argue that the film is more Nazi propaganda than a historical document, and while it can't be denied that its purpose was to deify the greatest evil of the 20th century, it also can't be denied that from a simpler perspective it is a masterwork of cinematography and documentary filmmaking. That conclusion is frightening, but it serves to demonstrate how the medium of film can be used in the wrong hands. Though Leni Riefenstahl forever claimed that she was not a Nazi and was simply a director trying to make the best film possible, it's so easy to feel the adoration for Adolf Hitler that pours off the screen that her argument is hard to swallow. The main focus is the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremburg, and the sheer spectacle of the event, along with the knowledge of the historical events that followed, is what gives the film its eerie power. The best version to watch, again from a purely cinematic view, is the non-subtitled edition. This is effective for two main reasons. First, if you are a non-German speaker, it allows you to focus on the images alone and avoid the propaganda that encompasses the speeches. Second, it prevents distractions from looking at the bottom of the screen for the translation. Many of the images, especially for 1934, are rather remarkable. Riefenstahl has almost inevitably become one of history's more intriguing figures based on her gender, her nationality, and her place in time. While arguments about her will rage on for many more years, one fact that can't be disputed is that she was talented. Another interesting film to be sought out is her documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics entitled Olympia. ~ Dan Friedman, All Movie Guide

 

If anyone ever gets a chance to see the olympiad it in many ways is better than the triumph of the will.

 

I have seen both and I completely agree. Olympiad is really amazing.