A great deal of ballyhoo was made over the fact that the release of Yentl, a film produced by, directed by , co-wrote by, edited by, and starring Barbra Streisand, marked the first time a woman had performed all five of these functions in a major Hollywood film. Nevertheless, this feat had been achieved half a century earlier by German producer, director, writer, editor, and actress Leni Riefenstahl in the film The Blue Light. The success of this film, the first product of Riefenstahl’s own production company, attracted the attention of one Adolf Hitler. Riefenstahl’s skillful cinematic abilities and Hitler’s fascist obsession with propaganda would prove a cinematically successful relationship which would haunt Riefenstahl the rest of her life. Riefenstahl would make three documentaries glorifying Hitler’s Nazis, including Triumph of the Will which “helped define Nazi swagger” and is considered a classic, innovative, triumph of documentary filmmaking to this day (Corliss 91). Many cannot divorce Riefenstahl’s filmmaking talent with her connection to these films, but this is absurd as ignoring Walt Disney’s contribution to the cinema because of his anti-Semitic views or Elia Kazan’s work because he named names during the 1950 McCarthy Communist witch-hunt.
Riefenstahl was born in Berlin on August 22, 1902, the daughter of a wealthy plumbing engineer, Alfred, and a mother, Berta, who encouraged her daughter’s initial interest in ballet and modern dance against the wishes of her father. Grudgingly, her father agreed to finance a solo dance recital for his daughter with the understanding she would abandon her dancing aspirations if the recital failed. It did not, and the director Max Reinhardt was so impressed with the talented young beauty that he recruited her for his Deutsches Theater. Riefenstahl’s career as a dancer would be interrupted by a knee injury when she was twenty-three, a time during which...