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Leni Riefenstahl's film career spans almost fifty years- from 1926 to 1973and in that time she has added her name and her talent, as actress or as director or as both, to thirteen films; today, at seventy-one, she is still making films. Despite the varied nature of her work, Riefenstahl's reputation rests on the two titles which changed the concept and altered the form of the nonfiction film. With the first, triumph des willens (triumph of the will), she became a notoriety; with the second, Olympia, she became a celebrity. Today, still a celebrity-to some, unjustifiably so- she is completing the final editing of what may be her last film and, indeed, an important contribution to cinema and to anthropology: a feature-length color documentary of the Nuba tribe of the Sudan in Africa.
From her earliest years, Riefenstahl dreamed of dancing or acting out her own fantasies on the stage. After a series of leading roles in German mountain films, she fulfilled this dream by playing the role of Junta, the idealistic heroine of das blaue licht (the blue light, 1932). Riefenstahl was critically praised for writing, producing, and directing this film, but her real fulfillment came from playing the role of the young woman who has no contact with the real world and who is, therefore, destroyed by it. This unhappy story expresses Riefenstahl's belief that the artist must, at all costs, remain independent of the material world- In her own life, she has achieved artistic freedom, but at a great cost. Like Junta, she had her own intuitive feelings about nature, and was destroyed by her naïve disregard of the real world around her, the world she set out to avoid.
Part of the Riefenstahl legend is the success of the woman director who succeeded in the male-dominated realm of Nazi Germany. It would be pleasant to interpret her success in terms of the present-day movement for women's rights, but in fact H iIter chose her to make triumph of the will not because she was a woman, but because he was attracted by her romantic and politically naive view of the world in the blue light. Despite Goebbels's opposition to her as a woman and to her work as a filmmaker, Riefenstahl...