A Portrait of Leni Riefenstahl

by Audrey Salkeld (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1996

  $12.90

  The daughter of a plumber, Leni Riefenstahl showed early talent as a dancer until an accident cut short her career in ballet. She learnt her film craft under Arnold Fanck and was acclaimed for a number of silent mountaineering films, most notably 'The Blue Light'. The film was admired by Hitler, who entrusted her with filming his Vagnerian Nuremberg Rally in 1934, and then the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936 (still rated as one of the ten best documentaries ever made). There have been persistant stories that Hitler and Riefenstahl were lovers, and that the jealous Goebbels did his best to sabotage her endeavours. After the war she was shunned by the film industry. In 1952 a court decided that she had indulged in 'no political activity in support of the Nazi regime which would warrant punishment', but this did not stop the accusations that she remained a Nazi sympathiser. Her frenzied defence always reffered back to an atrocity she witnessed on the Polish Front in 1939 as the moment she severed all connection with the Nazis. Her prodigious energy and undoubted charisma led her into many affairs and abortive grandiose schemes. Her attempts to make films on the 'modern slave trade' in postwar Africa and her plunge into deep sea diving in her seventies speak of a restless spirit which suffered more in 'the wilderness'.

• Used

  Paperback
  1997

  $7.55

  Leni Riefenstahl, who died in 2003, will always be remembered for her film of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. After the war, Riefenstahl was shunned by the film industry both in Europe and America, despite a 1952 court ruling proclaiming her not guilty of supporting the Nazis in a punishable way. Winner of the Boardman Tasker Award, this is a fine and balanced study of a still-controversial figure.