Leni Riefenstahl Dead at 101

[Raikus]

Say what you will about her involvement with Germany, but she was a true innovator of cinema.

Riefenstahl died Monday night at her home in the Bavarian lakeside town of Poecking, mayor Rainer Schnitzler said.

Riefenstahl's companion Horst Kettner said she died in her sleep.

"Her heart simply stopped," Kettner told the online version of the German celebrity magazine Bunte.

A tireless innovator of film and photographic techniques, Riefenstahl's career centered on a quest for adventure and portraying physical beauty.

Even as she turned 100 last year, she strapped on scuba gear to photograph sharks in turquoise waters. She had begun to complain recently that injuries sustained in accidents over the years, including a helicopter crash in Sudan in 2000, had taken their toll and caused her constant pain.

Despite critical acclaim for her later photographs of the African Nuba people and of undersea flora and fauna, she spent more than half her life trying to live down the films she made for Hitler and for having admired the tyrant who devastated Europe and all but eliminated its Jews.

Even 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.

Speaking to The Associated Press just before her 100th birthday on Aug. 22, 2002, Riefenstahl dramatically said she has "apologized for ever being born" but that she should not be criticized for her masterful films.

"I don't know what I should apologize for," she said. "I cannot apologize, for example, for having made the film 'Triumph of the Will' — it won the top prize. All my films won prizes."

Biographer Juergen Trimborn, who wrote "Riefenstahl: A German Career," said she could not apologize because the Nazi films were the centerpieces of her career.

"One can't speak about Leni Riefenstahl without looking at her entire career in the Third Reich," Trimborn said. "Her most important films were made during the Third Reich — 'Triumph of the Will,' 'Olympia,' — that's what's she's known for."

Riefenstahl said she had always been guided by the search for beauty, whether it was in her images of the 1934 Nuremberg rallies with thousands of goose-stepping soldiers and enraptured civilians fawning for their Fuehrer, in her dazzling portrayal of the 1936 Olympic athletes in Berlin, or in her still photographs of the sculpted Nuba men.

"I always see more of the good and the beautiful than the ugly and sick," Riefenstahl said. "Through my optimism I naturally prefer and capture the beauty in life."

Born Helene Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl in Berlin on Aug. 22, 1902, she was the first child of Alfred Riefenstahl, the owner of a heating and ventilation firm, and his wife, Bertha Scherlach.

Riefenstahl's artistic career began as a creative dancer until a knee injury led her to switch to movies.

After she saw one of Arnold Fanck's silent films set in the mountains, Riefenstahl presented herself to him as his new star, and he accepted, as much for her blue-eyed, high-cheekboned beauty as her daredevil spirit.

She climbed rocks barefoot for the camera and was buried in an avalanche for the death scene in the 1926 film "Mountain of Destiny." Soon, she was making her own films, fairy tales such as "The Blue Light" celebrating Germany's Alpine mystique, in which she was star, screenwriter and director.

She heard Hitler speak for the first time at a 1932 rally and wrote to him — again offering her talents to a powerful, inspirational man. In her memoirs, Riefenstahl rapturously describes her first impression of Hitler's charisma.

"It seemed as if the earth's surface were spreading out in front of me, like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, spewing out an enormous jet of water, so powerful that it touched the sky and shook the earth. I felt quite paralyzed."

Though she said she knew nothing of Hitler's "Final Solution" and learned of concentration camps only after the war, Riefenstahl said she confronted the Fuehrer about his anti-Semitism, one of many apparent contradictions in her claims of total ignorance of the Nazi mission.

Likewise, she defended "Triumph of the Will" as a documentary that contained "not one single anti-Semitic word," while avoiding any talk about filming Nazi official Julius Streicher haranguing the crowd about "racial purity" laws.

Many suspected Riefenstahl of being Hitler's lover, which she also denied. Nonetheless, as his filmmaker, Riefenstahl was the only woman to help shape the rise of the Third Reich.

She made four films for Hitler, the best known of which were "Triumph of the Will" and "Olympia," a meditation on muscle and movement at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

She married once, in 1944 to army Maj. Peter Jacob, but the couple split three years later. She had no children, and her only sibling, Heinz, was killed on the eastern front during World War II.

Riefenstahl spent three years under allied arrest after the war, some of the time in a mental hospital. War tribunals ultimately cleared her of any wrongdoing but suspicion of being a Nazi collaborator stuck. She was boycotted as a film director and sank into poverty, living with her mother in a one-room apartment.

She reclaimed her career in the 1960s when she lived with and photographed the Nuba.

"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.

Around this time, she met Kettner, or "Horsti," as she called him, a fellow photographer half her age who became her live-in assistant and companion.

At age 100, she released a new film based on her dives, "Impressions Under Water."

She said she hoped she would be remembered as "an industrious woman who has worked very hard her whole life and has received much acknowledgment."

[mutinyco]

If you can separate art from politics she was a genuinely great filmmaker. Her work inspired everybody from Welles to Kubrick to Lucas. I called a short film of mine 2 years ago "Triumph of the Will, Part II" -- not as an homage, but to show the way intentions, no matter how naively positive, can ultimately have negative consequences.

[(kelvin)]

Indeed, her films are astonishing and scary as well.
In what way, do you think, has she influenced Welles and Kubrick?

[Pubrick]

In what way, do you think, has she influenced Welles and Kubrick?

big balls.

[AlguienEstolamiPantalones]

Anachronism weeps today

[AlguienEstolamiPantalones]

In what way, do you think, has she influenced Welles and Kubrick?

big balls.

nah no balls , i know this guy

[Pubrick]

i meant that kubrick and welles had big balls. that was their trademark and greatest talent. Leni also had big balls, probably bigger, considering.

[SoNowThen]

the real question here is: were they hairy?

[AlguienEstolamiPantalones]

i meant that kubrick and welles had big balls. that was their trademark and greatest talent. Leni also had big balls, probably bigger, considering.

::ironic:: oppps my bad

i was talking about mutinyco and the fact that he kinda fruity

[AlguienEstolamiPantalones]

most AINT IT COOL NEWS talk backs are gay but they are having a good one going over hitlers bitch

go over and read it

[Sigur Rós]

Damn nazi biatch! I'am sure she's having sex with Hitler in hell as we speak.

[Sigur Rós]

Anachronism weeps today

Hehehe! Yeah, our nazi-minorty is weeping.

[AlguienEstolamiPantalones]

Anachronism weeps today

Hehehe! Yeah, our nazi-minorty is weeping.

well hitler was a socialist as well so maybe a few others not just Anachronism are weeping

i always said socialisum leads to coruption which leads to dictatership which leads to fucking nazis

i hope she burns in hell

geee maybe bin laden was a great at the  hula hoop should we now forgive him for what he did because we all love hula hoops

[AlguienEstolamiPantalones]

If you can separate art from politics she was a genuinely great filmmaker. .

i never bought that shit about seperate the art from the artist , because if your art is not a extension of yourself then your a hack

mutinyco as somone who makes their living off of asking people like bill paxton " so hows your new  movie"

your are in deed a hack , your the studios bitch pavlovs fucking dog you get paid to push product

so dont try and get all deep on us, shouldnt you be interviewing Fez from that 70's show right now anyway ?????

[Sigur Rós]

What happens if a jew, with a hard on, by accident collides with the Wailing Wall?