F I S H I N G

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She was a dancer and an actress, and then she became a movie director.

She  shared everybody’s  admiration for Hitler and she had the artistic sense, the technical preparation and the  endurance to translate the leadership’s most grandiose visions into film.

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A simple secret was in the proportions : immense spaces where a man is just a speck on the ground, less than a speck in the Universe, and seen from up close he is a beautiful and highly agile body. This idea works on people like a drug. It lifts them out of the drag of everyday life.
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Leni was a great photographer. Her films and photos received all the world’s most prestigious awards.
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She was also  pretty and the men that governed the Reich bowed to her beauty. She had no time for them. She worked day and night on her films. At the time a film consisted of thousands of photos that had to be hand-cut and assembled.
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When the war ended, she fled. She ended up in Africa and became again famous as the author of a bestselling photo book about the Nuba and what they look like.

There are not many photos about women. In general, Leni’s interests are zoological rather than cultural.
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Later, as a very old lady she learnt how to scuba-dive and she wrote the story of her life, a great book.  Intellectually she took guidance from pop science with bows  to  Fate, Nature and even Death, which she pictured as a return to some supreme harmony.

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Just like Hitler’s star architect Speer, she had been an outstanding professional, polite, kind, hard-working, and completely devoid of any second thoughts about the new age that had dawned on Germany.

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Unlike Speer, she never tried to fathom the meaning of the past. When her critics said that her greatest documentaries were basically Nazi propaganda, she answered:

“Oh, no! Not at all! They only show the truth!”

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This was her talent: to portray drilling and training as something immense, breath-taking, that might even give a  purpose to life.

On Youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLRLw5Ve3qM

you can see part of her “The Triumph of the Will”. You can watch 100000000  people shouting and praying heil, heil, heil***  and  kids  ready to give their lives for the Führer.

Riefenstahl’s own webpage is at http://leni-riefenstahl.de/both in German and in (somewhat uneven) English.

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