Leni

An exceptional work of historical investigation, "Leni" is the definitive biography of one of the most fascinating and controversial personalities of the 20th century: Leni Riefenstahl, the woman best known as RHitler's filmmaker.

Leni Riefenstahl, the woman known as “Hitler’s filmmaker,” made some of the greatest and most innovative documentaries ever made. They are also insidious glorifications of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Now, Steven Bach reveals the truths and lies behind Riefenstahl’s lifelong self-vindication as an apolitical artist who claimed to know nothing of the Holocaust and denied her complicity with the criminal regime she both used and sanctified. A riveting and illuminating biography of one of the most fascinating and controversial personalities of the twentieth century.

After considerable controversy over the bold appraisal of Riefenstahl in his first two editions, Hinton continues to celebrate the life and films of this brilliant woman in the absence of the repetitious clichés that so often accompany a discussion of such a controversial filmmaker. Provided with access to Leni Riefenstahl's personal archives and film collection, the author explores her career. In addition to examining her most famous wartime works, Triumph of the Will and Olympia, the author also investigates her less recognized Tiefland, her unrealized film projects, and her African and underwater films. David B. Hinton drew on recent interviews with the filmmaker to update this edition. (Previous edition is No. 29 in The Scarecrow Filmmakers Series.) Reviews of the Previous Edition: "Raises significant issues involving the relationship between art and politics." —CHOICE "...a solid piece of research....the author is able to illuminate aspects of the production of Triumph of the Will and Olympia previously unknown."—FILMS IN REVIEW "It's best to read her [Leni Riefenstahl] memoirs, anybody's memoirs in fact, with some independent scholarship at hand, and the best place to start is David B. Hinton's thoroughly researched The Films of Leni Riefenstahl."—THE MAGAZINE

Leni Riefenstahl will always be remembered for her brilliant film of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin - still rated as one of the best documentaries ever made. Before that she was acclaimed for her roles in silent feature films, when German cinema was in its artistic heyday in the 1920s. She pioneered the box office success of such classic mountaineering dramas as The White Hell of Piz Palu and then began to direct her own films. The Blue Light was admired by Hitler and led to her filming the Wagnerian Nuremberg Rally of 1934. After the war she was shunned by the film industry, despite a court in 1952 proclaiming her not guilty of supporting the Nazis in a punishable way. Her undoubted charisma led to many affairs and grandiose schemes - deep sea diving in her seventies and still filming wildlife in her nineties. Audrey Salkeld has sifted the fact from the legend and gives us a moving portrait of the great movie `star' who suffered more in the `wilderness' than her enduring fame suggests.

LENI RIEFENSTAHL's LAST WORDS ABOUT HITLER, GOEBBELS, NAZIS AND THE JEWS This book is based upon Maximillien de Lafayette's book: The Complete Story of the Planned Escape of Hitler: The Nazi-Spain-Argentina Coverup. Published by Times Square Press, New York and Berlin www.timessquarepress.com The true account of what LENI RIEFENSTAHL thought about Hitler, the Nazis, the SS, Goebbels, and the events which surrounded and shaped Nazi Germany. A candid interview with her reveals the true identity of this extraordinary woman, whether you like it or not. Leni spoke about her passion for cinema, Hitler's double, Hitler's escape from Germany, the dreadful Goebbels, and how she was harassed by her military interrogators, her pain, and imprisonment.

Essay from the year 2012 in the subject Biographies, , language: English, abstract: Leni Riefenstahl has been, and still is, a much-discussed person. She has been called many things, and given many labels. She has been called a liar, a man-eater, a Nazi, an extraordinary talent and a genius. She was an actress, director, dancer, filmmaker and photographer. In her career, she has done everything between making Nazi propaganda films, to taking photos of Mick Jagger, to photograph unknown tribes in Africa. Leni had many talents, but her great passion, and what she is best known for is her great filmmaking. She was the brain behind the masterpiece of propaganda films Triumph of the Will [1935], which she made for Hitler and the Nazi Party before World War 2. She was a close friend to Hitler before and during the war, and as described in Bach (2007 p.388) she is probably best known as “Hitler’s Filmmaker”.

Leni Riefenstahl is best known as director of Triumph of the Will, a film of a Nazi Party Rally, and Olympia, the classic account of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. In this memoir, the author finally discusses her motivations, her history, her important friendships, and, most of all, her art. 40 pages of black-and-white photos.

Leni Riefenstahl is larger than life. From the lure of her persona as it enters our homes via television to our pleasure in the recognition of her film images at rock concerts, to her place as part of the history of the Nazi period, Riefenstahl lives on in our imagination and in our cultural productions. Thus, the editors' introduction to this volume examines the manner in which Riefenstahl 'haunts' debates on aesthetics and politics, and how her legacy reverberates in the contemporary cultural scene. The editors view the collection as a three-part framework. The essays in the opening section of the book show that Riefenstahl is still very much alive and well - and controversial - in popular culture. Her films continue to determine the way in which we think about the Nazi period, providing instantly recognizable images and messages that often go unquestioned. We cannot separate these phenomena from Riefenstahl's years of avid self-fashioning. The second section of the book offers treatments of the shifting, mobile relationship between Riefenstahl's stubborn attempts to create and control her personae and her reactions to others' re-appropriations of the meanings of her life and work. Reading the texts and discourses surrounding 'Riefenstahl,' these scholars treat her memoirs - and her repeated assertions about herself - as a springboard into understanding anew how we might approach her films in a productive way. The closing section of the volume comprises essays that go right to the heart of the matter: Riefenstahl's films and photography. The new contexts-theoretical discussions and emerging discourses that animate these essays-include Scarry's treatise on beauty, justice and the global, the problems of history and memory, the place of Riefenstahl's filmmaking technique in contemporary cinema, and her appropriation of German musical traditions. Fueled by the work of a diverse range of scholars, then, Riefenstahl Screened offers an opportunity to rethink the place of Leni Riefenstahl and her work in contemporary culture and in academic discourse. It insists upon a critical self-examination that maps a topography of how scholars and teachers avail themselves of Riefenstahl's corpus.