The Many Names Of Leni Riefenstahl

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”.

Essay from the year 2012 in the subject Biographies, grade: -, -, 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, now aged 101, achieved fame as a dancer, actress photographer, and director, but her entire career is colored by her association with the Nazi party. This overt tension between the political meaning of her work for National Socialism and its essential aesthetic quality forms the basis of the compelling account. Appointed by Hitler, Leni Riefenstahl directed the Nazi propaganda film Triumph des Willens along with her bestknown work Olympia, a documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. By 1939 Riefenstahl was arguably the most famous women film director in the world; yet, after World War II, she was never again accepted as a filmmaker. Rainer Rother's book is a remarkable account of the fascinating life and work of Germany's most controversial photographer and filmmaker.

With access to Leni Riefenstahl's personal archives and film collection, the author explores the contraversial filmmaker's career.

A Boston Globe Best Book of 2015 A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Pick of 2015 Magisterial in scope, this dual biography examines two complex lives that began alike but ended on opposite sides of the century’s greatest conflict. Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl, born less than a year apart, lived so close to each other that Riefenstahl could see into Dietrich’s Berlin apartment. Coming of age at the dawn of the Weimar Republic, both sought fame in Germany’s burgeoning motion picture industry. While Dietrich’s depiction of Lola-Lola in The Blue Angel catapulted her to Hollywood stardom, Riefenstahl—who missed out on the part—insinuated herself into Hitler’s inner circle to direct groundbreaking if infamous Nazi propaganda films, like Triumph of the Will. Dietrich, who toured tirelessly with the USO, could never truly go home again; Riefenstahl could never shake her Nazi past. Acclaimed German historian Karin Wieland examines these lives within the vicious crosscurrents of a turbulent century, evoking piercing insights into "the modern era’s most difficult questions, about illusion and mass intoxication, art and truth, courage and capitulation" (New Yorker).

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, 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.