Riefenstahl still fighting at age 101

REUTERS, BERLIN
Thursday, Aug 07, 2003, Page 16

Leni Riefenstahl presents her book Five Lives at the Frankfurt book fair in this Oct. 19, 2000 file photo. PHOTO: REUTERS

Leni Riefenstahl, who gained notoriety for the films she made for the Nazis, turns 101 this month still fighting for rehabilitation as an artist and facing an even greater hurdle -- failing health.

Long ostracized yet unrepentant for making films that glorified the Nazi system, Riefenstahl is selling several of her photographs of the 1936 Berlin Olympics and of Sudanese tribespeople at an exhibition in Berlin.

"Frau Riefenstahl has been severely ill for the past weeks and can give no interviews for the time being," said Ulrike Thomann-Japes, her assistant.

She did not give any details on Riefenstahl's condition, though Riefenstahl is known to suffer from spinal pain and takes strong painkillers.

The film maker and photographer celebrates her 101st birthday on Aug. 22.

The photos by the woman who still divides opinions in Germany and worldwide have been selling well, according to Steffi Schulz, office manager at Camera Work, a small gallery in western Berlin which is showing her work.

Among the photos of the Olympics is a close-up of black American athlete Jesse Owens who won four gold medals, to the annoyance of Nazi authorities bent on conveying their belief of Aryan racial superiority. "I have the impression that the artistic work of Frau Riefenstahl is being recognized, and not always just put in context with her past," said Schulz.

Many of the photos on sale depict physically striking men and women from the Nuba tribes of southern Sudan, taken in the 1960s and 1970s. Her focus on the aesthetic human form is the overriding theme in her images on display.

Amid much praise of the photos written into the exhibition's guest book, there is some criticism. "Lots of bodies, but the inside is being neglected," wrote one visitor.

Riefenstahl, who has a house on the Starnberger See lake near Munich, has spent her life protesting she should not be condemned for her Nazi links. Yet she remains a villain to many for failing to repent for her movies of the Third Reich.

Selected by Hitler to be Germany's official film maker, Riefenstahl won awards at the Venice and Paris film festivals in the 1930s for her Triumph of the Will, a documentary highlighting the meticulously choreographed, eerie grandeur of the Nazi Party's 1934 Nuremberg Rally.

"One had forgotten that this film before the war won all the prizes in the world and the whole world considered this film wonderful," Riefenstahl told Reuters in an interview last year.

"But after the war one said what I did was wrong. I didn't make it as a political movie, but more as an artwork. That was my misfortune."

After Triumph of the Will, she was commissioned to make the official film of the 1936 Olympics.

Despite its propaganda, Olympia was notable for the use of then-new techniques such as mounting the camera on electric cars on rails beside the track to follow races, as well as using balloons and rubber rafts to get the angles Riefenstahl wanted.

The joy and agony on athletes' faces was filmed close-up. No other filmmaker had shot an athletic event in that way before.

Riefenstahl always denied political involvement with the Nazi party or any romantic link with Hitler although she admitted admiring him and seeking him out for a meeting in 1932.

"I unreservedly rejected his racist ideas; and therefore I could never have joined the National Socialist Party. However, I welcomed his socialist plans," Riefenstahl wrote in her autobiography A Memoir published in 1987.

After the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945, Riefenstahl was jailed by French occupation authorities for helping the Nazi propaganda machine.

Blacklisted as a filmmaker, she turned to still photography even though West German magazines boycotted her work for years.

She gradually rebuilt her reputation with acclaimed pictures of Nuba tribesmen in southern Sudan, and at the age of 72 she took up diving, gaining renown for her underwater studies.

She brought out her first film in half a century last year, just before her 100th birthday -- Underwater Impressions, a 45-minute compilation of footage from the more than 2,000 scuba dives she made in the Indian Ocean between 1974 and 2000.