Leni Riefenstahl
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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 i
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my own contract, my own company, and I arranged the distribution” (Wakeman 954).
One of the biggest problems Riefenstahl had in disassociating herself from the Nazis is the fact that her film was brilliantly made and remains a tour de force of documentary cinema technique. Riefenstahl’s documentary of the Nuremberg Rally has become the symbol of Nazi prowess and ideology. It is a mesmerizing and potent visual experience, with no dialogue or narration necessary to compliment its heroic and sensuous visual style. Together with her director of photography, Sepp Allgier, Riefenstahl employed the use of thirty cameras, including the latest wide-angle and telescopic lenses. Riefenstahl and her crew built numerous rails, dollies, and special camera lifts that were attached to the stadium’s enormous flagpoles. The director had special tracks built around the circumference of the stadium to achieve the unique and powerful rotating shots of Hitler speaking. As one film critic says of the film’s remarkable and innovative use of camera work: “The film shrieks with camera aptitude, integrated design, sense of composition, the flush of light, a feeling for martial resolve, for the shapes of crowds, for the splendor of the lone individu
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Approximate Word count = 1504
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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