Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | C | Cineaste

Triumph of the Will. (Homevideo).

Article Excerpt
Directed by Leni Riefenstahl. DVD, B&W, letterboxed format, 110 minutes. German dialog with English subtitles. Audio commentary by Dr. Anthony R. Santoro. Disc also includes Riefenstahl's Day of Freedom (1935), B&W, 17 mins. Produced and distributed by Synapse Films, P.O. Box 1860, Bloomington, IL 61702, phone (309) 661-9201.

The grim reaper took his (or her) summer vacation far away from a lakeside bungalow near Munich this year, so Leni Riefenstahl was able to attend the August premiere of her new forty-five minute film, Impressions tinder Water, a distillation of the many hours of deep-sea diving footage she has shot over the last quarter century. Yes, she is still alive! It was, in fact, on August 22 one hundred years ago that Berta Helene Amalie Riefenstahl was born in Berlin, and she has been directing, editing, or acting in films for three quarters of a century, longer even than the redoubtable Portugese nonagenarian director Manuel de Olivera, and probably longer than anyone else in the history of cinema. Her extraordinary film career has hardly been continuous, of course, but has been as tumultuous as the times in which she lived and as treacherous as the fast political company she kept. Anyone who knows anything about movies is aware that her rapid rise as Hitler's favorite filmmaker led to her nearly total eclipse when the murderous 'thousand year' Nazi regime crashed after a mere twelve years.

The last half century of her life, in truth, has often been hard for this woman of outsized ambitions. It has been marked by failed film projects and unwelcome bouts of public attention to her past. But as Riefenstahl entered her eighth decade, she gradually shed her pariah status while transforming herself into a still photographer and memoirist of note. Meanwhile, cinematic connoisseurs had already begun to rehabilitate the standing of this self-proclaimed esthete devoted only to the cult of beauty in the 1960s. By the 1970s, they were joined by the group of emerging feminist film critics who looked back wistfully at the work and fate of a female director whose genuine talents and achievements have arguably never been equaled by any woman since. Even Mick Jagger sought her out to take his picture. No wonder that in Germany today the...