Riefenstahl learned the fundamentals of mise-en-scene and the value of aerial shooting, among other film techniques, from Fanck, often finding herself involved in the camera work and collaborating with the directorial crew. She formed her own production company, Leni Riefenstahl Studio Films, in 1931 and made her directing and co-writing (with Hungarian film theorist Bela Belazs) debut, "The Blue Light" (1932), her personal favorite among her films and one that in hindsight seems to prefigure her artistic tragedy. Based on a folk tale about a mysterious blue light in the Italian Dolomites that lured young climbers to their death, it starred the director as Junta, an innocent child of nature thought to be a witch by local villagers for her ability to reach the light and survive. A visiting painter follows her to its source, discovers a grotto of precious crystals and reveals the secret to the villagers, who greedily remove the treasure. Climbing again, but without the crystals to guide her, Junta falls to her death. The director would have preferred to make the picture in the studio, but a shortage of funds obliged her to film on location and persuade the Dolomite peasants to appear as themselves (anticipating the methods of neo-realism by twenty years).
"The Blue Light" brought Riefenstahl critical acclaim and the attention of Adolf Hitler who invited her to shoot a documentary about the Nazi Party's annual rally at Nuremberg in 1933. "Victory of Faith" (1934), withdrawn after Hitler's purge of party leadership that year, never received a public viewing but earned her a return trip to Nuremberg for the next year's revelries, resulting in the extraordinary "Triumph of the Will", arguably the most honest and compelling fruit of the fascist temperament. Riefenstahl has admitted that the carefully-orchestrated spectacle was stage-managed for her cameras, raising concerns that the filming process had actually shaped the rally and given it meaning, but her repeated claims that her effort was purely documentary, a work for hire, rings hollow since the film's mythos blatantly manipulates the viewer. Perhaps she knew only one way to tell the story with her background in the mountain films, but Hitler's arrival by air, through the endless vistas of clouds, evoked a god's descent to earth, setting the idolatrous tone for the entire movie. Her stirring assault on the pagan heartstrings, using all the tricks at her disposal (effective camera angles, moving shots and masterful editing), made it almost impossible to maintain perspective. Whether intended or not, it is the finest example of a propaganda film in the history of the medium.
The sheer relentless certainty of "Triumph of the Will", its utter lack of uncomposed shots, its refusal to risk any threat to visual order condemned Riefenstahl in the eyes of the world as an agent of the demagoguery, but she was hardly a cog in the propaganda machine of Joseph Goebbels, who was bitterly jealous of her success and influence with Hitler. She clearly had her own agenda and artist's integrity when, in defiance of Goebbels' orders to play down the accomplishments of "non-Aryan" athletes during the 1936 Berlin Olympics, she gave special prominence to the dominance of black American track star Jesse Owens in the most ambitious of her films, "Olympia" (1938), a two-part record of the games. Employing a team of 45 cameramen, Riefenstahl mounted cameras on steel towers, lifted them on balloons (prefiguring the blimp shots of today's sporting events), sunk them in trenches, floated them on rafts, and for the famous diving sequences had a cameraman specially trained as a diver to take the underwater shots. After the games were over, she spent a year and a half editing the 200 hours of film down to four hours of some of the most dazzling footage ever brought to the screen. A hymn of praise to physical strength and beauty (and to Hitler and his entourage), it struck many to be just as openly fascistic as "Triumph of the Will", but it remains a masterpiece undimmed by time, unsurpassed as a study of physical motion. A trimmed-down, propaganda-free version appeared in 1948 under the title "Kings of the Olympics".
When WWII began, she served briefly as a war correspondent, following the advancing German Army into Poland with a camera team, a fact that would come back to bite her later. (A damning photograph of Riefenstahl watching a massacre of Polish civilians in 1939 surfaced in the early 50s, published in a German illustrated weekly. During a 1952 inquiry in a West Berlin denazification court, requested by her, witnesses supported her claim that she had come upon the atrocity and tried to stop it at some risk to herself.) Refusing Goebbels' invitation to make propaganda films, she returned to the tradition of "The Blue Light", working on a non-musical version of Eugen d'Albert's opera "Tiefland", which starred the director as a poor girl ensnared by a powerful lowlander but rescued by a highland shepherd. An atmospheric and visually poetic drama, "Tiefland" was an affirmation of faith in simple people living close to nature. If she had finally recognized Nazi criminality and was attempting to recover her innocence through the project, she would discover there was no escaping the pervasive evil. Riefenstahl recruited gypsies from a concentration camp to dance with her in the opening scenes, unaware that their final destination would be Auschwitz. Goebbels stonewalled her on state financing, and there were constant interruptions during filming. She finally finished it in 1944 (apparently at the Barrandov Studios in Prague) but did not complete the editing for nearly a decade, releasing it in 1954.
Though Riefenstahl was never a member of the Nazi Party, her two great documentaries served Nazi ideology exceedingly well, and her technical virtuosity--use of automatic and hand-held cameras, jump-cuts and impressionistic sound effects--influenced later German newsreels and films by the German Army Propaganda Companies, many of whose members had worked as part of her "Olympia" team. For her contributions to the Third Reich, she spent nearly four years in American and French internment camps after the war, but the worst was yet to come. With the exception of "Tiefland" (which was already in the can) and the aborted "Black Cargo", a documentary about the slave trade in Africa, Riefenstahl has never made another film, her inability to raise financing leading her to a career as a still photographer instead. She would win acclaim for her pictures of the Mesakin Nuba tribe of the Sudan, cover the 1972 Munich Olympics for the London Times and was still going strong in her 90s, scuba diving and working on a deep-sea video reflecting her fascination with underwater themes. Indeed, timed to coincide with her 100th birthday was the release of "Underwater Impressions" (2002), a 45-minute film drawn from footage shot while scuba diving between 1974 and 2000.
Riefenstahl's talent was her tragedy. The directors of more politically objectionable films, like Veit Harlan, maker of the notorious "Jew Suss", went back to work in the postwar German film industry, but the genius that had finally won her the support of the traditionally anti-feminist Nazis may have alienated her from the male hierarchy of the modern Germany. There is no question of her political naivete during the Nazi years. The Berlin film critic Lotte Eisner reported how Riefenstahl once invited her to a luncheon with Hitler, despite the fact that the Nazi press had condemned her as a "Jewish Bolshevik", and one should never forget that she shot "Triumph of the Will", revealing her naked admiration for the Fuhrer, a year before the promulgation of the racial laws and four years before the Kristallnacht pogrom. She is fond of quoting a pro-Hitler comment allegedly made by Winston Churchill in the mid-30s, arguing that if Churchill could not foresee the horrors to come, how could she?
The Riefenstahl case addresses the relationship of art and accountability. For her part, she has claimed, "If an artist dedicates himself totally to his work, he cannot think politically," but where does a statement like that leave us? Ray Muller, director of "The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl" (1995) observed, "I believe that she was purposefully blind not to look in the direction that would get her into trouble." She made her Faustian bargain with devils and rode the wave of opportunity, making two masterpieces that will forever be lauded for their artistry and condemned for their content, but when ol' Scratch called in the chits, she paid handsomely, relegated to her own little Hell on earth, separated from her first love, filmmaking.
She was able to reclaim a portion of her career in the 1960s when she lived with and photographed the Nuba, an African tribe she grew to adore, resulting in a critically acclaimed portrait of the tribespeople. She wrote three books, mainly photographic essays documenting the vanishing beauty of African people and cultures, from 1972 to 1997--possibly her best defense of accusations of harboring a racist philosophy--and she also learned to live with her infamous past. "I've never laughed so much as I did when living with the Nuba. I became reconciled with myself," she said. She next turned to underwater photography, diving in the Maldives, the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, and off Papua New Guinea. She learned to dive when she was 72, lying about her age by 20 years to gain admittance to a class. Yet still her past haunted her: as late as 2002, Riefenstahl was investigated for Holocaust denial after she said she did not know that Gypsies taken from concentration camps to be used as extras in one of her wartime films later died in the camps. Authorities eventually dropped the case, saying her comments did not rise to a prosecutable level. Despite the suspicions that hounded her, she was no embittered, defensive old woman, but rather a vigorous, soft-spoken and courteous nonagenarian who at age 1000 assembled a lengthy collection of underwater footage into one last documentary film, "Impressions Under Water" (2002), providing a fitting coda for her remarkable life. Prior to her death in 2003 at age 101, she said she hoped to be remembered simply as "an industrious woman who has worked very hard her whole life and has received much acknowledgment."