Trivia

In an interview shortly before her death, she stated that if she had known that Triumph of the Will (1935) would have haunted her career, she would have never made it.

(August 22, 2003) Married for the 2nd time to her boyfriend of 35 years Horst Kettner on her 101st birthday and just 2 weeks before her death.

Ms. Riefenstahl lied about her age in 1973 to be passed an official licence to go deep-diving in the Pacific Ocean. She started collecting images of the underwater beauty then, and she did not stop when a shark showed his appreciation of her by head-butting her 3 times, as documented on a TV documentary in 2002.

In early 2000, the 97 year old Riefenstahl spent several weeks recovering in hospital after suffering broken ribs and lung injuries after being involved in a helicopter crash whilst filming in Sudan.

As Germany's military situation became impossible by early 1945, Riefenstahl left Berlin and was hitchhiking with a group of men, trying to reach her mother, when she was taken into custody by American troops. She walked out of a holding camp, beginning a series of escapes and arrests across the chaotic landscape. At last making it back home on a bicycle, she found that American troops had seized her house. She was surprised by how kindly they treated her.

Robert Dassanowsky considers Lowlands (1954) to be Riefenstahl's cinematic statement on her rejection of Hitler and the Nazi regime.

AAMPAS included Riefenstahl in the "In Memoriam" sequence of the 2004 Oscars, a decision that met with criticism from several quarters. Journalist Manohla Dargis wrote about the decision, "I don't know if they were trying to be controversial or fair-minded or if they're just stupid".

Riefenstahl began a lifelong companionship with her cameraman Horst Kettner, who was 40 years her junior and assisted her with the photographs; they were together from the time she was 60 and he was 20.

The great Jewish-American film critic Pauline Kael called Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia "the two greatest films ever directed by a woman".

In April 2007, The Guardian reported that British screenwriter Rupert Walters was writing a movie based on Riefenstahl's life which would star actress Jodie Foster. The project did not receive Riefenstahl's approval prior to her death, as Riefenstahl asked for a veto on any scenes to which she did not agree. Riefenstahl also wanted Sharon Stone to play her rather than Foster, which ultimately resulted in the cancellation of the project.

Shortly before she died, Riefenstahl voiced her final words on the subject of her connection to Adolf Hitler in a BBC interview: "I was one of millions who thought Hitler had all the answers. We saw only the good things; we didn't know bad things were to come".

Film scholar Mark Cousins states in his book The Story of Film that, "Next to Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, Leni Riefenstahl was the most technically talented Western film maker of her era".

Riefenstahl said that her biggest regret in life was meeting Hitler, declaring, "It was the biggest catastrophe of my life. Until the day I die people will keep saying, 'Leni is a Nazi', and I'll keep saying, 'But what did she do?'" Even though she went on to win up to 50 libel cases, details about her relation to the Nazi party generally remain unclear.

She says she read Ernest Hemingway's "Green Hills of Africa" (1935) in 1955 and prepared immediately to visit the Sudan, which she did the following year, was accepted by and lived with the Nuba people for several months. She wrote three books, mainly photographic essays documenting the vanishing beauty of African people and cultures, from 1972 to 1997. Those are possibly her best refutations of accusations of her racist philosophy as the director of Olympia Part One: Festival of the Nations (1938).

Throughout 1945 to 1948, she was held by various Allied-controlled prison camps across Germany.

When in 2000 Jodie Foster was planning a biographical drama on Riefenstahl, war-crime documentiers warned against a revisionist view that glorified the director. They stated that publicly Riefenstahl seemed "quite infatuated" with Hitler and was in fact the last surviving member of his "inner circle". Others go further, arguing that Riefenstahl's visions were essential to the success of the Holocaust.

In the 1930s, she directed Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia, resulting in worldwide attention and acclaim. Both movies are widely considered two of the most effective, and technically innovative, propaganda films ever made. Her involvement in Triumph des Willens, however, significantly damaged her career and reputation after the war. The exact nature of her relationship with Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler remains a matter of debate. However, Adolf Hitler was in close collaboration with Riefenstahl during the production of at least three important Nazi films, and a closer friendship is claimed to have existed.

Leni Riefenstahl was exposed to reproaches after the war because of her works between 1933 and 1945. However in the denazification procedures she was graded as a "hanger-on" or "not affected".

Film critic Hal Erickson of the New York Times states that the "Jewish Question" is mainly unmentioned in Triumph of the Will (1935): "filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl prefers to concentrate on cheering crowds, precision marching, military bands, and Hitler's climactic speech, all orchestrated, choreographed and illuminated on a scale that makes Griffith and DeMille look like poverty-row directors".

After The Holy Mountain (1926) Leni Riefenstahl became an in-demand actress. She wasn't oversensitive and found her way in the rough scenery of the cold mountains extremely well. She climbed peaks, was skiing and defied the most adverse circumstances. The mountain movie became her great domain.

In 1954, Jean Cocteau, who greatly admired the film, insisted on Lowlands (1954) being shown at the Cannes Film Festival, which he was running that year.

Holds the record for the longest length of time in between projects. After Lowlands (1954), it was 48 years before she directed another film, the documentary Impressionen unter Wasser (2002). She's also the oldest director to helm a documentary. She was 99 when she made the latter film.

She was guest of honour at the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal, Canada.

After the war, Riefenstahl was arrested, but classified as being a "fellow traveler" or "Nazi sympathizer" only and was not associated with war crimes.

In 2011, director Steven Soderbergh revealed that he had also been working on a biopic of Riefenstahl for about six months. He eventually abandoned the project over concerns of its commercial prospects.

In 1978, Riefenstahl published a book of her sub-aquatic photographs called Korallengärten ("Coral Gardens"), followed by the 1990 book Wunder unter Wasser ("Wonder under Water"). In her 90s, Riefenstahl was still photographing marine life and gained the distinction of being one of the world's oldest scuba divers. On 22 August 2002, her 100th birthday, she released the film Impressionen unter Wasser ("Underwater Impressions"), an idealized documentary of life in the oceans and her first film in over 25 years. Riefenstahl was a member of Greenpeace for eight years.

Critic Judith Thurman said in The New Yorker that, "Riefenstahl's genius has rarely been questioned, even by critics who despise the service to which she lent it. Riefenstahl was a consummate stylist obsessed with bodies in motion, particularly those of dancers and athletes. Riefenstahl relies heavily for her transitions on portentous cutaways to clouds, mist, statuary, foliage, and rooftops. Her reaction shots have a tedious sameness: shining, ecstatic faces - nearly all young and Aryan, except for Hitler's".

Gary Morris called Riefenstahl, "An artist of unparalleled gifts, a woman in an industry dominated by men, one of the great formalists of the cinema on a par with Eisenstein or Welles".

The last time Riefenstahl saw Adolf Hitler was when she married Peter Jacob on 21 March 1944. Riefenstahl and Jacob divorced in 1946.

Besides directing, Riefenstahl released an autobiography and wrote several books on the Nuba people.

Riefenstahl claimed she was fascinated by the Nazis, but also politically naive, remaining ignorant about war crimes.

Charles Moore of The Daily Telegraph wrote, "She was perhaps the most talented female cinema director of the 20th century; her celebration of Nazi Germany in film ensured that she was certainly the most infamous".

Riefenstahl was portrayed by Dutch actress Carice van Houten in Race (2016), a sports drama film directed by Stephen Hopkins about Jesse Owens. It was released in North America on February 19, 2016. To make her sympathetic portrayal acceptable to an American audience, the film dramatizes her quarrels with Goebbels over her direction of the film, Olympia, especially about filming the African American star who is proving to be a politically embarrassing refutation of Nazi Germany's claims of Aryan athletic supremacy.

She began her artistic career as a dancer after she defied the opposition of her family. She took ballet lesson at the Russian ballet in Berlin and she studied modern dancing with Mary Wigman.

She directed her first documentary Der Sieg des Glaubens (1933) in 1933. It followed Triumph of the Will (1935) about the Nuremberg party conferences of the NSDAP and finally her masterpiece "Olympia" (36-38), in which she spellbound the audience with impressive pictures and slow-motion shots.

In 1993, Riefenstahl was the subject of the award-winning German documentary film The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993), directed by Ray Müller. Riefenstahl appeared in the film and answered several questions and detailed the production of her films. The biofilm was nominated for seven Emmy Awards, winning in one category. Riefenstahl, who for some time had been working on her memoirs, decided to cooperate in the production of this documentary to tell her life story about the struggles she had gone through in her personal life, her film-making career and what people thought of her. She was also the subject of Müller's documentary film Leni Riefenstahl: Her Dream of Africa (2003), about her return to Sudan to visit the Nuba people.

She was tried four times by postwar authorities for denazification and eventually found to be a "fellow traveler" (Mitläufer) who sympathised with the Nazis.

Novelist and sports writer Budd Schulberg, assigned by the U.S. Navy to the OSS for intelligence work while attached to John Ford's documentary unit, was ordered to arrest Riefenstahl at her chalet in Kitzbühel, ostensibly to have her identify Nazi war criminals in German film footage captured by the Allied troops shortly after the war. Riefenstahl claimed she was not aware of the nature of the internment camps. According to Schulberg, "She gave me the usual song and dance. She said, 'Of course, you know, I'm really so misunderstood. I'm not political'".

In October 1944 the production of Lowlands (1954) moved to Barrandov Studios in Prague for interior filming. Lavish sets made these shots some of the most costly of the film. The film was not edited and released until almost ten years later.

During the filming of Der Sieg des Glaubens (1933), Adolf Hitler had stood side by side with the leader of the Sturmabteilung (SA) Ernst Röhm, a man with whom he clearly had a close working relationship. Rohm was ruthlessly murdered on Hitler's orders a short time later during the purge of the SA referred to as the Night of the Long Knives. It has gone on record that, immediately following the killings, Hitler subsequently ordered all copies of the film to be destroyed, although Riefenstahl disputes that this ever happened.

Riefenstahl had a younger brother, Heinz, who was killed at the age of 39 on the Eastern Front in Nazi Germany's war against the Soviet Union.

It lasted till 1973 when she published several large sized photo volumes about the Nuba tribe in Sudan. Her works as a photographer attracted great attention In the following years she became a very esteemed photographer who besides the subjects in Africa also captured the underwater world with her camera.

For The Blue Light (1932) she directed a movie for the first time, a field where she should go down in history during the time of the National Socialists.

Throughout her life, she denied having known about the Holocaust.

She photographed the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, and rock star Mick Jagger along with his wife Bianca for The Sunday Times. Years later, Riefenstahl photographed Las Vegas entertainers Siegfried & Roy.

Film journalist Sandra Smith from The Independent remarked, "Opinions will be divided between those who see her as a young, talented and ambitious woman caught up in the tide of events which she did not fully understand, and those who believe her to be a cold and opportunist propagandist and a Nazi by association.".

Riefenstahl's books with photographs of the Nuba tribes were published in 1974 and republished in 1976 as Die Nuba (translated as "The Last of the Nuba") and Die Nuba von Kau ("The Nuba People of Kau"). While heralded by many as outstanding colour photographs, they were harshly criticized by Susan Sontag, who claimed in a review that they were further evidence of Riefenstahl's "fascist aesthetics".The Art Director's Club of Germany awarded Riefenstahl a gold medal for the best photographic achievement of 1975. She also sold some of the pictures to German magazines.

Riefenstahl survived a helicopter crash in Sudan in 2000 while trying to learn the fates of her Nuba friends during the Second Sudanese Civil War and was airlifted to a Munich hospital where she received treatment for two broken ribs.

Riefenstahl had been suffering from cancer for some time, and her health rapidly deteriorated during the last weeks of her life. Horst Kettner said in an interview in 2002, "Ms. Riefenstahl is in great pain and she has become very weak and is taking painkillers". Leni Riefenstahl died in her sleep at around 10:00 pm on 8 September 2003 at her home in Pöcking, Germany. After her death, there was a varied response in the obituary pages of leading publications, although most recognized her technical breakthroughs in film making.

She was under house arrest for a period of time.