Video: Leni Riefenstahl - "Hitler's favorite director" who refused to make films about the war atrocities of the Nazis
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
She was called "Hitler's favorite director", but she refused to make films about the horrors of war. This innovative woman made the genius documentary Olympia, but it was the last of her film career. Having suffered this fiasco, she was reborn in photography. It's about one of the most famous German women of the 20th century. Leni Riefenstahl.
Since childhood, Leni Riefenstahl (Leni Riefenstahl) achieved its goals. At the age of 4, she was fond of theater and dancing, she studied perfectly well. At the age of 19, Leni was enrolled in a ballet school, despite the fact that the standard age for this was 6 years. After 2 years of hard work, the girl was named the best student of the ballet school. Unfortunately, Leni broke her ankle three times and suffered a knee injury, which forced her to forget about her career as a ballerina.
In 1931, Leni Riefenstahl directed her first film, Blue Light, which won numerous awards at film festivals. In 1932, the girl wrote a letter to Hitler, in which she admired his oratorical skills. Then they meet.
When filming the documentary "Triumph of the Will" about the 5th Congress of the NSDAP, Riefenstahl showed herself as an innovative director. For the first time, she put the operators on roller skates, and elevators were built near the stage, which made it possible to conduct panoramic filming. Everyone appreciated this tape as a powerful propaganda film, but Leni herself was not talking about the political component, but about the possibility of realizing her ambitions.
In 1935, Riefenstahl received a party commission for a documentary film about the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Later, her film "Olympia" will be called "a hymn to the perfection of the human body" and will be included in the 10 best documentaries of all time. On the set of Leni Riefenstahl again showed herself as an innovator. In order to show the pole vaulters in the best possible light, she dug holes. Thus, it seemed that the athletes were hovering against the background of the sky. For panoramic shots, Leni used airships. Underwater photography was used for the first time for a better perspective of the divers. After the release of the picture, even Stalin sent his congratulations to the director.
When the war began, Goebbels personally suggested that Leni Riefenstahl make several films about the military power of Germany. But, after the woman personally saw how the Nazis shot the inhabitants of Polish villages, she gave up the idea of becoming a front-line film journalist. After the refusal, funding for all of her projects immediately stopped, and Riefenstahl's brother Heinz was immediately sent to the front.
In the post-war years, Riefenstahl went through trials, interrogations, public humiliation, but this woman remained faithful to only one of her passions - cinema. Between 1950 and 1964, Riefenstahl tried 11 times to make films, but found no support anywhere. The "dark trail" that had been following her since the war was too fresh. Then "Hitler's personal director" decided to go to Africa and take up photography there. A Nubian tribe came into her field of vision, thanks to which she once again became famous, and her pictures were called "the best work in the field of photography."
After the recognition of her talent in the field of photography, Leni Riefenstahl turned her gaze into the depths of the ocean. She was already 71 years old when this woman received her scuba diving certificate. Underwater photography absorbed with renewed vigor. Leni has published the photo albums Miracle Under Water and Coral Paradise, as well as filmed a documentary about the inhabitants of the seabed. Leni Riefenstahl lived a long and controversial life, but all this time she strove to do everything 100 percent and live to the fullest. On September 8, 2003, Leni Riefenstahl died at the age of 101.
In America, reconstructions from the Second World War are created annually. Marisha Camp tried on the image of Leni Riefenstahl and to reconstruct the events of the 40s by the Nazis.
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