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Leni Riefenstahl

Leni Riefenstahl

Directing

Biography

Helene Bertha Amalie "Leni" Riefenstahl (22 August 1902 – 8 September 2003) was a German film director, actress and dancer widely noted for her aesthetics and innovations as a filmmaker. Her most famous film was Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), made at the 1934 Nuremberg congress of the Nazi Party. Riefenstahl's prominence in the Third Reich along with her personal friendship with Adolf Hitler thwarted her film career following Germany's defeat in World War II, after which she was arrested but released without any charges. Triumph of the Will gave Riefenstahl instant and lasting international fame, as well as infamy. Although she directed only eight films, just two of which received significant coverage outside of Germany, Riefenstahl was widely known all her life. The propaganda value of her films made during the 1930s repels most modern commentators but many film histories cite the aesthetics as outstanding. The Economist wrote that Triumph of the Will "sealed her reputation as the greatest female filmmaker of the 20th century". In the 1970s Riefenstahl published her still photography of the Nuba tribes in Sudan in several books such as The Last of the Nuba. She was active up until her death and also published marine life stills and released the marine-based film Impressionen unter Wasser in 2002. After her death, the Associated Press described Riefenstahl as an "acclaimed pioneer of film and photographic techniques". Der Tagesspiegel newspaper in Berlin noted, "Leni Riefenstahl conquered new ground in the cinema". The BBC said her documentaries "were hailed as groundbreaking film-making, pioneering techniques involving cranes, tracking rails, and many cameras working at the same time". Description above from the Wikipedia article Leni Riefenstahl, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.

Known For

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8.5

A 30-minute weekly cultural magazine program. The head of aspekte, Wolgang Herles, describes the program as follows: "For 40 years, "aspekte" has repeatedly set out to enrich television with cultural contrasts. "aspekte" understands culture not as the sum of facts and events, but as the taste, the sound, the rhythms of the times. It has proven itself as a journal of true luxury and fashions as well as an instrument of public education and information."

aspekte

1965
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7.0

No description available.

Je später der Abend

1973
Triumph of the Will
6.9

A showcase of German chancellor and Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler at the 1934 Nuremberg Rally.

Triumph of the Will

1935
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N/A

No description available.

Das ist Ihr Leben

1976
Riefenstahl
7.3

Explores Leni Riefenstahl's artistic legacy and her complex ties to the Nazi regime, juxtaposing her self-portrayal with evidence suggesting awareness of the regime's atrocities.

Riefenstahl

2024
Olympia Part Two: Festival of Beauty
6.7

Part two of Leni Riefenstahl's monumental examination of the 1938 Olympic Games, the cameras leave the main stadium and venture into the many halls and fields deployed for such sports as fencing, polo, cycling, and the modern pentathlon, which was won by American Glenn Morris.

Olympia Part Two: Festival of Beauty

1938
Olympia Part One: Festival of the Nations
6.9

Starting with a long and lyrical overture, evoking the origins of the Olympic Games in ancient Greece, Riefenstahl covers twenty-one athletic events in the first half of this two-part love letter to the human body and spirit, culminating with the marathon, where Jesse Owens became the first track and field athlete to win four gold medals in a single Olympics.

Olympia Part One: Festival of the Nations

1938
The Victory of Faith
5.4

Follows the Fifth Nazi Party Rally (Nuremberg, 30 August–3 September 1933) and shows the then close relationship between Adolf Hitler and Ernest Rõhm.

The Victory of Faith

1933
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8.0

A weekly sit-down with Hermann Schreiber and Peter W. Jansen with a figure of German cinema.

Biographies

1978
Hitler's Hollywood
6.5

Film journalist and critic Rüdiger Suchsland examines German cinema from 1933, when the Nazis came into power, until 1945, when the Third Reich collapsed. (A sequel to From Caligari to Hitler, 2015.)

Hitler's Hollywood

2017
Birth of a Nation
7.0

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

Birth of a Nation

1997
The White Hell of Pitz Palu
6.9

Dr. Johannes Krafft climbs a 12,000-foot mountain over and over again to search for his wife, who was lost on their honeymoon. Another couple makes the dangerous climb with him.

The White Hell of Pitz Palu

1929
S.O.S. Iceberg
6.4

An expedition goes in search of a party lost in the Arctic a year earlier.

S.O.S. Iceberg

1933
Day of Freedom
7.0

The armed forces of the Third Reich, particularly the German army, are presented as an efficient system of bodies and machines at the seventh Nazi Party Rally that occurred in Nuremberg in 1935.

Day of Freedom

1935
The Holy Mountain
6.5

In the mountains, Diotima meets Karl and fall in love and have an affair. Karl's friend Vigo mistakenly believes she's in love with him, causing rifts in all relationships.

The Holy Mountain

1926
Leni Riefenstahl - The End of a Myth
7.7

Countless people around the world know the pictures from Leni Riefenstahl's films, even if they have not seen them in their entirety. The work of the German director has burned itself into the collective memory. Even decades after the end of the Nazi era, she showed no remorse and presented herself as an apolitical, naive follower of the Nazi criminal regime. Her artistic service for the cinema was always recognized. But book author Nina Gladitz shows after decades of research that Hitler's favorite filmmaker was not only a follower, but also a perpetrator during the Third Reich, who instrumentalized other filmmakers such as the brilliant cinematographer Willy Zielke in order to gain fame for herself.

Leni Riefenstahl - The End of a Myth

2020
S.O.S. Iceberg
5.3

An expedition goes in search of a party lost in the Arctic a year earlier. (The English-language version of S.O.S. Eisberg.)

S.O.S. Iceberg

1933
The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl
7.2

This documentary recounts the life and work of one of most famous, and yet reviled, German film directors in history, Leni Riefenstahl. The film recounts the rise of her career from a dancer, to a movie actor to the most important film director in Nazi Germany who directed such famous propaganda films as Triumph of the Will and Olympiad. The film also explores her later activities after Nazi Germany's defeat in 1945 and her disgrace for being so associated with it which includes her amazingly active life over the age of 90.

The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl

1993
Games of the XXI Olympiad
5.1

Edited from almost 100 km of film footage shot during the Games, this feature documentary is a breathtaking portrait of the 1976 Montreal Olympics. Much more than a simple record of the Games, the film approaches each event with the intention of revealing the athlete - whether winner or loser - as a unique individual.

Games of the XXI Olympiad

1977
Faszination Bergfilm - Himmelhoch und Abgrundtief
10.0

A fascinating chronology of 100 years of mountain film history in the Alps. This documentary focuses primarily on films shot on the Matterhorn, the Eiger, and the Grandes Jorasses, considered until the 1930s as the "last problems of the Alps," and shows the evolution of mountain filmmaking through numerous excerpts from documentaries and feature films – notably on the Matterhorn in 1901. The genre, appropriated as a means of mass exaltation by "fascist" regimes during the Second World War, was reinvented in the 1950s by Gaston Rebuffat, Marcel Ichac, and Lionel Terray in the Mont Blanc massif, avant-garde figures of French mountain cinema, who reintroduced, beyond performance, the values ​​of the mountains – and in color – poetry, humor, and sharing among people from all walks of life.

Faszination Bergfilm - Himmelhoch und Abgrundtief

2008