Controversial documentary filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl turns 100 on Thursday with a gala birthday party attended by some 200 guests at a historic hotel in a Munich suburb, not far from her home near Starnberger Lake.
Riefenstahl says her birthday party will be celebrated in the Bavarian town of Feldafing with the Bavarian Alps rising majestically in the background.
”It will take place in a lovely little hotel where once the Empress Elizabeth of Austria stayed,” she says. ”About 200 guests will be present, including Siegfried and Roy.”
Joining the vast print media coverage noting her 100th birthday, Riefenstahl’s latest opus, ”Impressionen Unter Wasser” (Impressions Under Water), was aired last week on the French-German cultural channel ARTE’s ”theme evening” devoted to the director, whose brilliant early career following the critical successes of her two major works, the ”Triumph of the Will,” a filming of a Nazi rally at Nuremberg, and ”Olympia,” on the 1936 Berlin Olympics, was overshadowed by postwar charges of being a Nazi sympathizer.
ARTE screened the 45-minute documentary, made 48 years after her last feature film ”Tiefland” (Deep Land), and followed up by showing her 1932 movie ”The Blue Light,” in which she produced, directed, edited, co-wrote and starred. It was this film that caught the attention of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, who engaged her to film his party rally at Nuremberg.
Apparently still seeking a distributor, Riefenstahl said she would like to see her latest opus in cinema release. But the Super 8 film home movie ”would have to be blown up first, and I fear the procedure, which in any case would be very expensive, could damage the colours,” she said.
At the age of 71, Riefenstahl had enrolled in a diving course, to prepare herself for underwater filming. The new documentary shows a series of underwater tableaux shot in colour in the Indian Ocean and off the Maldives from 1974 to 2000. Despite her advanced years, Riefenstahl made more than 2 000 dives operating from her Papua base. Horst Kettner, her photographer and companion of 30 years, accompanied her on her diving expeditions.
”Impressionen” celebrates the beauty of the atolls and coral reefs in the Indian Ocean, which were filmed for the first time ever. Tropical swarms of fish in dazzling colour dance back and forth on the screen and cameraman Kettner focuses light on especially interesting underwater fauna.
After being indicted after the war as a Nazi sympathizer,
Riefenstahl’s reputation as a former Nazi propaganda filmmaker prevented her from reviving her film career. She then obtained recognition as a still photographer for glossy European illustrated magazines, highlighted by her photo expeditions to the Nuba tribe in Africa.
Two years ago, she was severely injured in a helicopter crash during a visit to the Nuba in the Sudan. And in 1980, she injured her spinal column in a skiing accident, resulting in a series of operations. Riefenstahl still suffers from constant pain from her accidents.
Nevertheless, in a recent interview she said ”If I no longer have any more pain, I would like to make another film like I did with the Nuba in Africa.”
Riefenstahl was christened Helene Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl after her birth on August 22, 1902, but used the name Leni for film credits.
A former successful ballet and modern dancer, she entered the world of the German film as the attractive, athletic blonde star of director Arnold Fanck’s ”bergfilm” (mountain film) productions in the mid-1920s. And she learned the fundamentals of film technique when collaborating with Fanck and the series.
Jodie Foster is under contract to begin filming a biographical movie of Riefenstahl at the Babelsberg Studios near Berlin. But the Hollywood actress has denied a report as premature that the shooting on the project would begin next spring. Foster plans to play the leading role herself in the film.
Meanwhile, Riefenstahl has threatened to take legal action if the new film about her life ”is really terrible.” She claims to have won all 50 lawsuits she has filed against people reporting she was too close to Nazi officials.
Riefenstahl has always refuted any closer relationship with Hitler other than professional ties. She denies ever belonging to the artistic circles surrounding Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and had never belonged to the Nazi party.
However, Riefenstahl paid dearly for her link with the Nazis. After World War II, she spent almost four years in various French prisons and detention camps for taking an active part Goebbels’ propaganda machine, largely because of ”Triumph of the Will” and ”Olympia.”
She had just won an appeal for return of her confiscated property when German actor-director Luis Trenker, who had played opposite Riefenstahl in Fanck’s mountain movies, wrote in a fake diary of Hitler mistress Eva Braun that Riefenstahl had danced naked for the Fuehrer, causing French authorities to revoke the order returning her property.
The story persisted in spite of a court order stopping publication of the diary and marked the beginning of her many lawsuits to defend her name. – Sapa-DPA