Editorials & Other Articles

- Watch: *DAY OF FREEDOM*: OUR ARMED FORCES, BY L. RIEFENSTAHL, GERMAN WEHRMACHT DOCUMENTARY. 1935.


'A Cinematic Genius and Hitler's Favorite, The Dark Genius Of Leni Riefenstahl,' The Telegraph, 2016.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/race/dark-genius-of-leni-riefenstahl/




.. Leni Riefenstahl, who directed the film of the 1936 Olympics, had an extraordinary life. Starting as a ballet dancer and star of Germany’s popular mountain films, she directed The Victory of Faith and Triumph of the Will at the Nazi Party rallies of 1933 and 1934, along with a short film about the German armed forces at Nuremberg in 1935, Day of Freedom.

Her films were widely hailed as brilliant, technically innovative advances in the art of film-making. She thus became known as Hitler’s chief cinematic propagandist. Artistically she is a genius, and politically she is a nitwit. Liam O’Leary, film historian. Riefenstahl lived to 101, and her restless talent led in many directions – producer, writer, editor, photographer. Yet she spent decades trying to shake off the shadow of her work for the Nazis.

Her fateful link to Hitler began in 1932 at an election rally. She was overwhelmed by his oratory, describing the experience in a memoir: “It seemed as if the Earth's surface were spreading out in front of me, like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, spewing out an enormous jet of water, so powerful that it touched the sky and shook the earth.” She dashed off a letter to the Nazi paper, Völkischer Beobachter, expressing a desire to meet him. The following year a meeting took place and they got on well. She accepted an offer to film the 1933 Nuremberg rally and – reluctantly – its successor, attended by up to a million Germans.

Her relationship with Hitler lasted 12 years, provoking questions about its level of intimacy, and she became close to propaganda minister Josef Goebbels and his wife, Magda. Hitler in Triumph of the Will...