Triumph of the Will, the Nazi film which would
sweep pre-World War II Germany and become
the most famous, and infamous, propaganda film
of all time.
Born to wealthy and supportive parents in Berlin
in 1902, Riefenstahl spent much of her youth learning
the art of dance. By her early 20s, Riefenstahl was a
renowned dancer, touring throughout Germany. A
knee injury halted her career, and she became
involved in film, first as an actor; her aristocratic
beauty made her an immediate sensation in a moun-
taineering film developed especially for her by direc-
tor Arnold Franck. She starred in her first directorial
effort,Das blaue Licht(1932,TheBlueLight), and by
the age of 35, Riefenstahl had become the most
famous and successful woman filmmaker of her
time. In addition toTriumph of the Will,shealso
directed the highly acclaimedOlympia.During this
time, Riefenstahl also cultivated an interest in photo-
graphy, and she took numerous pictures of German
troops and members of the high command, including
Hitler himself. Riefenstahl discontinued her position
as ‘‘unofficial’’ photographer for the Nazi party
when she witnessed German soldiers massacring
unarmed Polish peasants, although she stayed in
touch with Hilter and did not denounce him.
After the war, with her reputation ruined and
with no friends inside or outside of Germany, Rie-
fenstahl found it impossible to get the funding
needed for film projects—her first love—and even-
tually turned solely to photography.
Following the war, Riefenstahl had faced Allied
charges that she was a Nazi or a Nazi sympathizer.
She was imprisoned and escaped to her mother’s
house in Austria, where she was reunited with her
husband and arrested again. Interrogated by the
Seventh American Army, the Americans officially
‘‘denazified’’ Germany’s most notorious film direc-
tor and released her ‘‘without prejudice’’ on June 3,
- Yet Riefenstahl was detained once again by
the French. She and her husband lived under house
arrest in Breisach, Germany and later in Ko ̈nigs-
feld in the Black Forest, and she was interned in an
insane asylum in Freiburg for three months. Re-
leased in August 1947, she was officially denazified
by a French tribunal in July of 1949. Even so, in the
same year, the Baden State Commissariat classified
Riefenstahlin absentiaas a ‘‘fellow traveler.’’
In the late 1960s, she took on small, miscella-
neous assignments, such as a photo essay of rock
musician Mick Jagger and his wife Bianca. But it
was in 1973 that she re-emerged when she created a
book of still photographs from her 1936 documen-
tary,Olympia.The film had been commissioned by
the Nazi government in order to record German
dominance at the Olympic games in Berlin. It was a
huge project, and she oversaw crew of over 170,
including 60 cinematographers, who used three
different types of black-and-white film stock deem-
ed appropriate to the type of imagery being filmed:
Agfa for architectural shots; Kodak for portraits;
and Perutz for fields and shots of grass. Over 1.3
million feet (over 248 miles) of film were exposed.
Despite the film’s origins,Olympiawas a surpris-
ingly balanced documentary. Many athletes were
featured (including the African-American sprinter
Jesse Owens), and the film sought to examine ath-
lete as artist, focusing on the stylistic dimensions of
body movement. Riefenstahl made many innova-
tive breakthroughs filmingOlympia, including uti-
lizing cranes or high towers for panoramic aerial
shots, mounting the camera on electric cars on rails
for tracking shots of races, using slow motion to
reveal the beauty and effort of the athletes, and
underwater diving shots.
Thus, nearly 40 years after a film that took over
two years to make and edit, Riefenstahl’s efforts
yielded further fruit, as she chose certain frames
of the filmOlympiato be included in the book of
photographic stills. Whereas the film had exam-
ined the beauty of bodies in motion, the book
sought to explore the beauty of the body captured
in time and place. Starting with a foggy, dark
image of the Parthenon in Athens that suggests
mythic distance, and continuing with images of
the flame being brought into Berlin, Riefenstahl
succinctly connected the antiquity of the games
with the modern era. The book did not shrink
from the controversial nature of the 1936 games;
photographs of Adolf Hitler and Jesse Owens
bring the politics of the event to the fore; and
the use of photographic juxtaposition makes the
1973 version just as powerful as the original film
version.
A year afterOlympiawas published, Riefenstahl
began to organize a compilation of photographs
taken on several of her earlier visits to the Kordofan
province of Sudan. Since the 1950s, Riefenstahl had
been attempting to make a film about a tribe in this
region of Africa. However, a series of accidents
(including an automobile accident in which she
almost died), delays, and personal tragedies under-
mined this project, and in the mid-70s she gave up
on the film and decided to organize her many
photographs, releasingLast of the Nubain 1974
andPeople of the Kauin 1976 as books. Both of
these collections contain striking photographs of a
culture which, at the time of her visits, had
remained largely true to ancient traditions The
Nuba and their cousins the Kau wore no clothing,RIEFENSTAHL, LENI