[Deathwatch] Leni Riefenstahl, filmmaker, 101

[Deathwatch Central <cdw@slick.org>]

Hitler's Filmmaker Riefenstahl Dies at 101
By Ulf Laessing

POECKING, Germany (Reuters) - Adolf Hitler's filmmaker Leni
Riefenstahl, the last of Germany's famous Nazi-era figures, has died
just weeks after turning 101, her assistant said on Tuesday.

"She died on Monday night," Gisela Jahn told reporters outside
Riefenstahl's house near the Starnberger lake south of Munich, at the
foot of the Alps. "She fell asleep peacefully."

Through a first floor window of her home, a large photo of her as a
young woman could be seen hanging on the wall.

Riefenstahl made powerful films for Hitler and spent the rest of her
long and active life protesting she should not be condemned for work
inspired by art, not politics.

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.

She was then commissioned to make the official film of the 1936 Berlin
Olympics.

"Olympia," which recorded the grandeur of an event that Hitler hijacked
to showcase National Socialism, is still recognized by cinematographers
as a groundbreaking film.

It pioneered techniques such as mounting the camera on electric cars on
rails to follow races.

HAUNTED BY PAST

Since the war, those films have haunted her, and she remained a villain
to many for declining to apologize for them.

The German government reacted to her death with criticism.

"Leni Riefenstahl symbolizes a German artist's fate in the 20th
century," Culture Minister Christina Weiss said in a statement.

"Leni Riefenstahl's artistic work was tainted by her closeness to
National Socialism, especially because after the war, she never dealt
with the problem of how easily her work served an inhuman Nazi
propaganda, and how close she really was to the Hitler Regime."

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.

"Hitler saw me as an artist -- as an artist, not, as some have written,
as a lover or something," she told Reuters in an interview in 2000.

Born in Berlin on August 22, 1902, Riefenstahl's first love was ballet
and she became a professional dancer, but turned to film acting in the
mid-1920s.

After the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945, Riefenstahl was jailed by
French occupation authorities for almost four years.

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

As time passed and many of her critics died off, she worked to redeem
her reputation with photographic studies of Nuba tribesmen in southern
Sudan. At the age of 72 she took up scuba diving, gaining renown for
adventurous underwater studies.

Striking as a young woman, Riefenstahl remained proud of her looks into
her old age, dying her hair blond and wearing heavy make-up. Still
active into her late 90s, she returned in 1999 to Sudan to revisit the
Nuba tribe she first photographed in 1956.

She narrowly escaped death on her return when her helicopter crashed in
Sudan.

"She created images and films that nurtured the Nazi cult and helped it
win supporters," said Elke Froehlich, a Munich historian.

"She refused to acknowledge this. So many people involved with the
Nazis learned their lesson after the war, she never did. (Propaganda
Minister Joseph) Goebbels wrote of her in his diary, 'She's the only
one who understands us."'

"But her work is appreciated by cinema lovers, it won't die with her."