Leni Riefenstahl

Riefenstahl was known for her pre-war Nazi-propaganda films: 1935’s Triumph of the Will, which turned a Hitler rally into a spectacle of high art, and 1938’s Olympia, that did the same for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. She was born in 1902 and had been a celebrated dancer and then a silent movie actress before directing The Blue Light in 1932. That same year she saw Adolf Hitler for the first time at a political rally, and then enthusiastically became his go-to filmmaker as Germany prepared for war. Once hostilities began in 1939, and after Riefenstahl worked briefly as a war correspondent in Poland, she spent the rest of the war years trying unsuccessfully to complete a movie, Tiefland, not about Nazis but based on an opera taken from a Catalan play. When the war ended, she was still struggling to finish it. After Germany surrendered, Riefenstahl was arrested and held for three years in various internment camps while the U.S. military decided what to do with her. She claimed to have been naive about the Nazis and spent her remaining decades trying to rewrite the record of her work for Hitler and Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Riefenstahl spent her post-war years suing newspapers that wrote about her association with Hitler, and she struggled to get her career going again. In 1954, Tiefland was finally released, but her performance on screen was criticized as weak. She later went Africa as she turned to still photography. In 1975, a book of her lush photographs of the Nuba people was published to much acclaim.