Probably the best-known and most controversial German cinema director is Leni Riefenstahl. From December 2002, the Museum of Contemporary History presents a temporary exhibition surveying the many facets of her life and work.
After a brief career as a performer in dance programmes, Riefenstahl switches to the cinema: In 1926 she has her acting debut in "Der heilige Berg" ("The Holy Mountain") by Arnold Fanck, the pioneer of mountain-setting movies. She plays the female lead in five more Fanck-directed films and becomes a star. The first movie she herself makes is "Das blaue Licht" ("The Blue Light") in 1932, a mythic-romantic portrayal of the conflict between the glorification and exploitation of nature.
But it is the films Riefenstahl made in the Third Reich that to this day continue to attract the notice of the critics and an aesthetically and historically interested audience: "Triumph of the Will", a study of the Nazi party meeting at Nuremberg in 1934, and the two-part film "Festival of the Nations" and "Festival of Beauty", portraying the 1936 Olympic Games. Critical opinion on these films is widely divergent. On the one hand, they are considered masterworks owing to their innovative techniques and photomontage; on the other, they are castigated because of their political content. The director herself continues to be the subject of heated controversy because of her personal proximity to the high and mighty of the Third Reich.
Leni Riefenstahl is taken into detention for a time after the end of the war, and in 1949 is classified a "fellow traveller". In numerous court trials, some of them spectacular, she defends herself against alleged libel and criticism of her role in the Nazi era. To this day, she continues to try to represent herself as an apolitical film-maker totally dedicated to her artistic ideals. In the sixties, she stages a successful comeback with photographs of the Nuba, a black African tribe which at the time was largely untouched by civilization. In the seventies, she discovers underwater photography as a new field of activity. Her most recent film, "Impressions Under Water" was completed in 2002 shortly before her 100th birthday.
The exhibition illuminates the major events in the life of Leni Riefenstahl as well as the political context, the contemporary conditions and circumstances surrounding her work, its origins and its impact. The visitor gets an inside look at her innovations in film technique and composition, and also at the central motifs of her work. Examples taken from photography and advertising graphically illustrate that the "Riefenstahl aesthetic" still inspires pictorial language in the art and mass media of today.
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