Leni Riefenstahl is back with memories of Indonesia

Leni Riefenstahl is back with memories of Indonesia

Kate Connolly, Guardian News Service, Berlin

Leni Riefenstahl, the film-maker whose propaganda documentaries
turned Hitler into an icon, is attempting to rehabilitate herself
after fifty years of vilification with the planned release later
this year of a film to commemorate the centenary of her birth.

The 45-minute documentary Underwater Impressions will make her
the longest-working director in the history of the cinema. "We've
finished editing it ... it should have its premiere in time for
my 100th birthday in August," she said at her lakeside chalet in
Pocking, Bavaria.

The news is likely to delight and enrage her fans and
adversaries in equal measure. Riefenstahl continues to be hailed
as a brilliant film-maker by some, dismissed as an evil Nazi
propagandist by others.

In an interview in Monday's Die Welt she said she felt that
her name was finally about to be cleared. "It has taken decades
for the impressions to change and to get rid of most of the muck.
That's simply because too much mud was slung."

Underwater Impressions is a compilation of footage from more
than 2,000 dives Riefenstahl has made off the coast of Indonesia
in the past 25 years. But according to newspaper reports,
selected critics who have seen it have hailed it an artistic
triumph.

One, Hilmar Hofmann, director of the Goethe Institute, who
interviewed Riefenstahl for Die Welt, said: "It exceeds even the
talents of the veteran French underwater film-maker Jacques-Yves
Cousteau."

Riefenstahl, who is an embarrassment to all politically
correct Germans, and has refused to dissociate herself from her
past, is using the interest generated by the film to give her
version of how the Nazis courted her.

She painted a picture of herself in the interview as a naive
young woman who simply wanted to make films and approached
Hitler, even before he came to power, out of curiosity. "It was
with great naivete that I sent a letter to (him) in Munich and
requested a talk. I wanted to create my own impression of the
difference between power and theater."

Hitler was impressed by her self-confidence and showed
admiration for the woman who had already proved she was capable
of making good films. He commissioned her to make documentaries
for the Nazi party. She made three in four years.

Victory of Power, in 1933, about that year's party conference,
was considered a mediocre affair. But the subsequent Triumph of
the Will, recording the 1934 party rally in Nuremberg and
Olympia, on the 1936 Berlin Olympic games, have been hailed as
among the best films of the century. Her last film, Tiefland, was
released in 1954.

Riefenstahl, who began her working life as a dancer and
actress and was an accomplished skier and mountaineer, says she
was never a member of the Nazi party, and had no idea of the
evils for which the Nazis were responsible.

"After the war I felt paralyzed when I knew what had happened
and saw things with a different viewpoint and everything seemed
terrible," she said. "But we weren't informed beforehand about
Hitler's concentration camps ... up till then we'd only seen his
positive side." Nevertheless, if she lived again, she said, she
would change her political colors. "I would be a social democrat,
believe me."

Her arguments failed to convince many Germans then, as now,
and in the 50s she became a near recluse, taking up still
photography and traveling to Africa, where she encountered the
Nuba people and was taken by their beauty.

She published books of her African photographs. She took up
the Olympia theme again as a photographer at the Munich Olympics
in 1976. It was when she was in her 70s, and seeking therapy for
chronic back ache, that she took up diving, saying that the water
was the only place where she felt free of pain.

On a journey back to Sudan to visit the Nuba people two years
ago, a helicopter crash almost claimed her life and brought her
diving career to an end, although acquaintances say she remains
healthy and lively.

She has admitted being unhappy about a film of her life by the
actress and director Jodie Foster, due out next year, which seeks
to explore the way innocence can inspire evil. It has been
roundly criticized by much of Hollywood as a celebration of
fascism.

Riefenstahl dismisses the claim that her pursuits of the past
half century have been attempts to escape the vilification she
faced in Germany. "Since my childhood I've always been drawn to
beautiful things," she said. "In my memoirs I wrote how as a
child I pursued butterflies, flowers and romantic things ... I've
never wanted to deal with horrible things -- they make me sad."