Leni Riefenstahl

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Helene Bertha Amalie "Leni" Riefenstahl (1902-2003) was a German film director, actress, producer, and photographer who is best known for her documentary films of the 1930s dramatizing the power and pageantry of the Nazi movement.

Riefenstahl studied painting and ballet in Berlin, and from 1923 to 1926 she appeared in dance programs throughout Europe. She began her film career as an actress in “mountain films” and she eventually became a director in the genre. In 1931, she formed a company, Leni Riefenstahl-Produktion, and the following year wrote, directed, produced, and starred in Das blaue Licht.

With the support of the Nazi Party, Riefenstahl directed films that extolled the values of physical beauty and Aryan superiority. They include Sieg des Glaubens (1933), a short subject commissioned by Adolf Hitler; Triumph des Willens (1935), an important documentary study of the 1934 Nazi Party convention at Nürnberg that emphasized the unity of the party, introduced the leaders to the German people, and exhibited Nazi power to the world; and Olympische Spiele (1938), a two-part film on the 1936 Olympic Games that was praised for the effectiveness of its studio-created music and sound effects. Riefenstahl’s films were acclaimed for their rich musical scores, for the cinematic beauty of the scenes of dawn, mountains, and rural German life, and for brilliant editing.

Because her films had aided the Nazi cause, Riefenstahl was detained by Allied forces after World War II, and, although she was officially cleared of complicity in Nazi war crimes, she was blacklisted. In 1954, she completed Tiefland, the production of which had been interrupted by the war, but her career as a filmmaker was effectively over. Die Nuba, a book of her African photographs, was published in 1973. Much of her later life was devoted to photography, and Korallengärten (1978) and Wunder unter Wasser (1990) are collections of her underwater photographs; a documentary on marine life, Impressionen unter Wasser, was released in 2002.

At the age of 91, Riefenstahl was interviewed for director Ray Müller’s highly praised documentary Die Macht der Bilder: Leni Riefenstahl (1993), in which she reveals herself as an undeniably brilliant woman with profoundly mixed feelings about her association with the Third Reich.

Riefenstahl died of cancer on September 8, 2003 at the age of 101 and was buried at Munich Waldfriedhof.