[IP] Leni Riefenstahl dead at 101
<http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-090903leni_wr,1,1058937.story?coll=la-home-leftrail>http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-090903leni_wr,1,1058937.story?coll=la-home-leftrail
Hitler's Filmmaker Dead at 101
From Associated Press
8:56 AM PDT, September 9, 2003
BERLIN -- Leni Riefenstahl, whose hypnotic depiction of Hitler's Nuremberg
rally, "Triumph of the Will," was renowned and despised as the best
propaganda film ever made, has died. She was 101.
Riefenstahl died Monday night at her home in the Bavarian lakeside town of
Poecking, mayor Rainer Schnitzler said.
Riefenstahl's companion Horst Kettner said she died in her sleep.
"Her heart simply stopped," Kettner told the online version of the German
celebrity magazine Bunte.
A tireless innovator of film and photographic techniques, Riefenstahl's
career centered on a quest for adventure and portraying physical beauty.
Even as she turned 100 last year, she strapped on scuba gear to photograph
sharks in turquoise waters. She had begun to complain recently that
injuries sustained in accidents over the years, including a helicopter
crash in Sudan in 2000, had taken their toll and caused her constant pain.
Despite critical acclaim for her later photographs of the African Nuba
people and of undersea flora and fauna, she spent more than half her life
trying to live down the films she made for Hitler and for having admired
the tyrant who devastated Europe and all but eliminated its Jews.
Even 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, saying her comments did not rise
to a prosecutable level.
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."
Biographer Juergen Trimborn, who wrote "Riefenstahl: A German Career," said
she could not apologize because the Nazi films were the centerpieces of her
career.
"One can't speak about Leni Riefenstahl without looking at her entire
career in the Third Reich," Trimborn said. "Her most important films were
made during the Third Reich -- 'Triumph of the Will,' 'Olympia,' -- that's
what's she's known for."
The former president of the Goethe Institute honored Riefenstahl as an
aesthetic model for many directors around the world.
"Now that she is dead, we can distinguish between the aesthetic Leni
Riefenstahl and her political entanglements," said Hilmar Hoffman.
But Germany's Culture Minister Christina Weiss said Riefenstahl's life
tragically demonstrated that "art is never unpolitical, and that form and
content cannot be separated from one another."
Riefenstahl said she had always been guided by the search for beauty,
whether it was in her images of the 1934 Nuremberg rallies with thousands
of goose-stepping soldiers and enraptured civilians fawning for their
Fuehrer, in her dazzling portrayal of the 1936 Olympic athletes in Berlin,
or in her still photographs of the sculpted Nuba men.
"I always see more of the good and the beautiful than the ugly and sick,"
Riefenstahl said. "Through my optimism I naturally prefer and capture the
beauty in life."
Born Helene Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl in Berlin on Aug. 22, 1902, she was
the first child of Alfred Riefenstahl, the owner of a heating and
ventilation firm, and his wife, Bertha Scherlach.
Riefenstahl's artistic career began as a creative dancer until a knee
injury led her to switch to movies.
After she saw one of Arnold Fanck's silent films set in the mountains,
Riefenstahl presented herself to him as his new star, and he accepted, as
much for her blue-eyed, high-cheekboned beauty as her daredevil spirit.
She climbed rocks barefoot for the camera and was buried in an avalanche
for the death scene in the 1926 film "Mountain of Destiny." Soon, she was
making her own films, fairy tales such as "The Blue Light" celebrating
Germany's Alpine mystique, in which she was star, screenwriter and director.
She heard Hitler speak for the first time at a 1932 rally and wrote to him
-- again offering her talents. In her memoirs, Riefenstahl describes her
first impression of Hitler's charisma.
"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. I felt quite paralyzed."
Though she said she knew nothing of Hitler's "Final Solution" and learned
of concentration camps only after the war, Riefenstahl said she confronted
the Fuehrer about his anti-Semitism, one of many apparent contradictions in
her claims of total ignorance of the Nazi mission.
Likewise, she defended "Triumph of the Will" as a documentary that
contained "not one single anti-Semitic word," while avoiding any talk about
filming Nazi official Julius Streicher haranguing the crowd about "racial
purity" laws.
Many suspected Riefenstahl of being Hitler's lover, which she also denied.
Nonetheless, as his filmmaker, Riefenstahl was the only woman to help shape
the rise of the Third Reich.
She made four films for Hitler, the best known of which were "Triumph of
the Will" and "Olympia," a meditation on muscle and movement at the 1936
Berlin Olympics.
She married once, in 1944 to army Maj. 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.
Riefenstahl spent three years under allied arrest after the war, some of
the time in a mental hospital. War tribunals ultimately cleared her of any
wrongdoing but suspicion of being a Nazi collaborator stuck. She was
boycotted as a film director and sank into poverty, living with her mother
in a one-room apartment.
She reclaimed her career in the 1960s when she lived with and photographed
the Nuba.
"I've never laughed so much as I did when living with the Nuba. I became
reconciled with myself," she said.
She next turned to underwater photography, diving in the Maldives, the
Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, and off Papua New Guinea. She learned to dive
when she was 72, lying about her age by 20 years to gain admittance to a class.
Around this time, she met Kettner, a fellow photographer half her age who
became her live-in assistant and companion.
At age 100, she released a new film based on her dives, "Impressions Under
Water."
She said she hoped she would be remembered as "an industrious woman who has
worked very hard her whole life and has received much acknowledgment."
A funeral was planned for Friday in Munich.
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