while instructing her camera crew at
Nuremberg, 1934.
Propaganda films Riefenstahl heard
Nazi Party (NSDAP) leader
Adolf Hitler speak at a rally in 1932 and was mesmerized by his talent as a public speaker. Describing the experience in her memoir, Riefenstahl wrote, "I had an almost apocalyptic vision that I was never able to forget. 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." Hitler was immediately captivated by Riefenstahl's work. She is described as fitting in with Hitler's ideal of
Aryan womanhood, a feature he had noted when he saw her starring performance in
Das Blaue Licht. In May 1933, Hitler asked Riefenstahl to make a film about
Horst Wessel, but she declined. Riefenstahl was offered the opportunity to direct
Der Sieg des Glaubens, an hour-long propaganda film about the fifth
Nuremberg Rally in 1933. The opportunity that was offered was a huge surprise to Riefenstahl. Hitler had ordered
Joseph Goebbels's
Propaganda Ministry to give the film commission to Riefenstahl, but the Ministry had never informed her. Riefenstahl agreed to direct the movie even though she was only given a few days before the rally to prepare. Impressed with Riefenstahl's work, Hitler asked her to film
Triumph des Willens ("Triumph of the Will"), a new propaganda film about the 1934 party rally in Nuremberg. More than one million Germans participated in the rally. The film is sometimes considered the greatest propaganda film ever made. Initially, according to Riefenstahl, she resisted and did not want to create further Nazi Party films, instead wanting to direct a feature film based on
Eugen d'Albert's
Tiefland ("Lowlands"), an opera that was extremely popular in Berlin in the 1920s. Riefenstahl received private funding for the production of
Tiefland, but the filming in Spain was derailed and the project was cancelled. (When
Tiefland was eventually shot, between 1940 and 1944, it was done in black and white, and was the third most expensive film produced in
Nazi Germany. During the filming of
Tiefland, Riefenstahl utilized
Romani from internment camps for extras, who were severely mistreated on set, and when the filming completed they were sent to the death camp
Auschwitz. She was one of the first filmmakers to use
tracking shots in a documentary, placing a camera on rails to follow the athletes' movement. The film is also noted for its slow motion shots. Riefenstahl played with the idea of slow motion, underwater diving shots, extremely high and low shooting angles, panoramic aerial shots, and tracking system shots for allowing fast action. Riefenstahl also "reversed the film to make the divers turn backwards, holding them in the air as if to defy the laws of gravity". Many of these shots were relatively unheard of at the time, but Riefenstahl's use and augmentation of them set a standard, and is the reason they are still used to this day. Riefenstahl's work on
Olympia has been cited as a major influence in modern sports photography. Riefenstahl filmed competitors of all races, including African-American
Jesse Owens in what later became famous footage. , 1937
Olympia premiered for Hitler's 49th birthday in 1938. Its international debut led Riefenstahl to embark on an American publicity tour in an attempt to secure commercial release. In February 1937, Riefenstahl enthusiastically told a reporter for the
Detroit News, "To me, Hitler is the greatest man who ever lived. He truly is without fault, so simple and at the same time possessed of masculine strength." On 31 August 1938,
Olympia won the
Mussolini cup at the
Venice Film Festival as "Best foreign film". The flag serves as a symbol of masculinity, equated with national pride and dominance, that supposedly channels men's sexual and masculine energy. Riefenstahl's cinematic framing of the flags encapsulated its iconography. Saunders continues, "The effect is a significant double transformation: the images mechanize human beings and breathe life into flags. Even when the carriers are not mostly submerged under the sea of colored cloth, and when facial features are visible in profile, they attain neither character nor distinctiveness. The men remain ants in a vast enterprise. By contrast and paradoxically, the flags, whether a few or hundreds peopling the frame, assume distinct identities".
World War II , Poland, in which Riefenstahl is crying and is visibly shocked When
Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, Riefenstahl was photographed in Poland wearing a military uniform and a pistol on her belt in the company of German soldiers; she had gone to Poland as a war correspondent. On 12 September, she was in the town of
Końskie when 30 civilians were executed in retaliation for an alleged attack on German soldiers. According to her
memoir, Riefenstahl tried to intervene but a furious German soldier held her at gunpoint and threatened to shoot her on the spot. She said she did not realize the victims were Jews. According to another account given by a German officer, Riefenstahl had asked that the Jews be removed from the market, which was relayed to the soldiers as "Get rid of the Jews", thus leading to the massacre. Photographs of a distraught Riefenstahl survive from that day. Nevertheless, by 5 October 1939, Riefenstahl was back in
occupied Poland filming Hitler's
victory parade in Warsaw. Afterwards, she left Poland and chose not to make any more Nazi-related films. On 14 June 1940, the day Paris was declared an
open city by the French and occupied by German troops, Riefenstahl wrote to Hitler in a
telegram, "With indescribable joy, deeply moved and filled with burning gratitude, we share with you, my Führer, your and Germany's greatest victory, the entry of German troops into Paris. You exceed anything human imagination has the power to conceive, achieving deeds without parallel in the history of mankind. How can we ever thank you?" She later explained, "Everyone thought the war was over, and in that spirit I sent the cable to Hitler". Riefenstahl was friends with Hitler for 12 years. However, her relationship with Hitler severely declined in 1944 after her brother died on the Russian Front. After the Nuremberg rallies trilogy and
Olympia, Riefenstahl began work on the movie she had tried and failed to direct once before, namely
Tiefland. On Hitler's direct order, the
German government paid her in compensation. From 23 September until 13 November 1940, she filmed in
Krün near
Mittenwald. The extras playing Spanish women and farmers were drawn from Romani detained in a camp at
Salzburg-Maxglan who were forced to work with her. Filming at the
Babelsberg Studios near Berlin began 18 months later in April 1942. This time
Sinti and
Roma people from the
Marzahn detention camp near Berlin were compelled to work as extras. Almost to the end of her life, despite overwhelming evidence that the concentration camp occupants that had been forced to work on the movie were later sent to the
Auschwitz death camp, Riefenstahl continued to maintain that all the film extras survived. Riefenstahl sued filmmaker Nina Gladitz, who said Riefenstahl personally chose the extras at their holding camp; Gladitz had found one of the Romani survivors and matched his memory with stills of the movie for a documentary Gladitz was filming. The German court ruled largely in favour of Gladitz, declaring that Riefenstahl had known the extras were from a concentration camp, but they also agreed that Riefenstahl had not been informed the Romani would be sent to
Auschwitz after filming was completed. This issue came up again in 2002, when Riefenstahl was 100 years old and she was taken to court by a Roma group for denying the Nazis had exterminated Romani. Riefenstahl apologized and said, "I regret that
Sinti and Roma [people] had to suffer during the period of National Socialism. It is known today that many of them were murdered in
concentration camps". In October 1944 the production of
Tiefland moved to
Barrandov Studios in
Prague for interior filming. Lavish sets made these shots some of the most costly of the film. The film was not edited and released until almost ten years later. The last time Riefenstahl saw Hitler was when she married Peter Jacob on 21 March 1944. Riefenstahl and Jacob divorced in 1946. As Germany's military situation became impossible by early 1945, Riefenstahl left Berlin and was
hitchhiking with a group of men, trying to reach her mother, when she was taken into custody by American troops. She walked out of a holding camp, beginning a series of escapes and arrests across the chaotic landscape. At last making it back home on a bicycle, she found that American troops had seized her house. She was surprised by how kindly they treated her.
Thwarted film projects Most of Riefenstahl's unfinished projects were lost towards the end of the war. The French government confiscated all of her editing equipment, along with the production reels of
Tiefland. After years of legal wrangling, these were returned to her, but the French government had reportedly damaged some of the film stock while trying to develop and edit it, with a few important scenes being missing (although Riefenstahl was surprised to find the original negatives for
Olympia in the same shipment). During the filming of
Olympia, Riefenstahl was funded by the state to create her own production company in her own name, Riefenstahl-Film GmbH, which was uninvolved with her most influential works. She edited and dubbed the remaining material and
Tiefland premiered on 11 February 1954 in
Stuttgart. However, it was denied entry into the
Cannes Film Festival. Although Riefenstahl lived for almost another half century,
Tiefland was her last feature film. Riefenstahl tried many times to make more films during the 1950s and 1960s, but was met with resistance, public protests and sharp criticism. Many of her filmmaking peers in Hollywood had fled Nazi Germany and were unsympathetic to her. Although both film professionals and investors were willing to support her work, most of the projects she attempted were stopped owing to ever-renewed and highly negative publicity about her past work in Nazi Germany. In 1954,
Jean Cocteau, who greatly admired the film, insisted on
Tiefland being shown at the Cannes Film Festival, which he was running that year. In 1960, Riefenstahl attempted to prevent filmmaker
Erwin Leiser from juxtaposing scenes from
Triumph des Willens with footage from concentration camps in his film
Mein Kampf. Riefenstahl had high hopes for a collaboration with Cocteau called
Friedrich und Voltaire ("Friedrich and Voltaire"), wherein Cocteau was to play two roles. They thought the film might symbolize the love-hate relationship between Germany and France. Cocteau's illness and 1963 death put an end to the project. A musical remake of
Das Blaue Licht ("The Blue Light") with an English production company also fell apart. In the 1960s, Riefenstahl became interested in Africa from
Ernest Hemingway's
Green Hills of Africa and from the photographs of
George Rodger. She visited Kenya for the first time in 1956 and later Sudan, where she photographed
Nuba tribes with whom she sporadically lived, learning about their culture so she could photograph them more easily. Even though her film project about modern slavery entitled
Die Schwarze Fracht ("The Black Cargo") was never completed, Riefenstahl was able to sell the stills from the expedition to magazines in various parts of the world. While scouting shooting locations, she almost died from injuries received in a truck accident. After waking up from a coma in a
Nairobi hospital, she finished writing the script, but was soon thoroughly thwarted by uncooperative locals, the
Suez Canal crisis and bad weather. In the end, the film project was called off. Even so, Riefenstahl was granted
Sudanese citizenship for her services to the country, becoming the first foreigner to receive a Sudanese passport. ==Detention and trials==