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."