In her famous 1974 essay " Fascinating Fascism ", Susan Sontag lamented that " The purification of Leni Riefenstahl's reputation of its Nazi dross has been gathering momentum for some time, but it has reached some kind of climax this year, with Riefenstahl the guest of honor at a new cinéphile-controlled film festival held in the summer in Colorado ….

Riefenstahl was born on August 22, 1902.

Riefenstahl went on to star in many of Fanck ’ s mountain films as an athletic and adventurous young woman with a suggestive appeal ; she became an accomplished mountaineer during the winters of filming on mountains and learned filmmaking techniques.

Riefenstahl went on to have a prolific career as an actress in silent films.

At first, according to Riefenstahl ’ s memoir, she resisted and did not want to create further Nazi films ; instead, she wanted to direct a feature film based on Hitler ’ s favourite opera, Eugen d ' Albert's Tiefland.

Riefenstahl ’ s work on Olympia has been cited as a major influence in modern sports photography.

Olympia was very successful in Germany after it premiered for Hitler ’ s 49th birthday in 1938, and its international debut led Riefenstahl to embark on an American publicity tour in an attempt to secure commercial release.

Avery Brundage stated that it was " The greatest Olympic film ever made " and Riefenstahl left for Hollywood, where she was received by the German Consul Georg Gyssling, on 24 November.

However, Riefenstahl maintained that Goebbels was upset that she had rejected his advances and was jealous of her influence on Hitler, seeing her as an internal threat ; therefore, his diaries could not be trusted.

By later accounts, Goebbels thought highly of Riefenstahl ’ s filmmaking but was angered with what he saw as her overspending on the Nazi-provided filmmaking budgets.

During the Invasion of Poland, 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 the site of the battle as a war correspondent.

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.

According to Ernst Hanfstaengl, who was a close friend of Hitler throughout the later 1920s and early 1930s, Riefenstahl tried to begin a relationship with Hitler early on but was turned down by him.

After the Nuremberg rallies trilogy and Olympia, Riefenstahl began work on the movie she had tried and failed to direct once before, Tiefland.

To the end of her life, despite overwhelming evidence that concentration camp occupants had been forced to work on the movie unpaid, Riefenstahl continued to maintain all the film extras survived and that she had met them after the war.

The German court found in favour of Gladitz, agreeing that Riefenstahl had known the extras were from a concentration camp, and they agreed with Riefenstahl on only one count ( finding that Riefenstahl had not informed the Gypsies that they would be sent to the Auschwitz camp after filming was completed ).

The last time Riefenstahl saw Hitler was when she married Peter Jacob on March 21, 1944, shortly after she had introduced Jacob to Hitler in Kitzbühel, Austria.

Riefenstahl celebrated her 101st birthday on August 22, 2003 and married Horst Kettner.

Leni Riefenstahl died in her sleep on the late evening of September 8, 2003 at her home in Pöcking, Germany.

* Article on the relationship between Riefenstahl and Balazs

Riefenstahl went on to make Nazi propaganda films and, post-war, subsequently lived in Africa where she continued film-making, but now of life in the African bush.

Since 1993, he has been Professor of German and Film Studies at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and has become particularly known for his influential scholarly work on Austrian author Alexander Lernet-Holenia, German filmmaker and photographer Leni Riefenstahl, and on Austrian and Central European film.

Riefenstahl took dancing lessons and attended dance academies from an early age and began her career as a self-styled and well-known interpretive dancer, traveling around Europe and working with director Max Reinhardt in a show funded by Jewish producer Harry Sokal.

Riefenstahl ’ s prominence in the Third Reich, along with her personal association with Adolf Hitler, destroyed her film career following Germany's defeat in World War II, after which she was arrested but released without any charges.

Although she directed only eight films, just two of which received significant coverage outside of Germany, Riefenstahl was widely known all her life.

Riefenstahl accompanied Fanck to the 1928 Olympic Games in St. Moritz, where she became interested in athletic photography and filming.

Breaking from Fanck's style of setting realistic stories in fairytale mountain settings, Riefenstahl — working with leftist screen writers Béla Balázs and Carl Mayer — filmed Das Blaue Licht as a romantic, wholly mystical tale which she thought of as more fitting to the terrain.

Riefenstahl received invitations to travel to Hollywood to create films, but she refused the offers in order to stay in Germany with a boyfriend.

In interviews for the 1993 film The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, Riefenstahl adamantly denied any deliberate attempt to create pro-Nazi propaganda and said she was disgusted that Triumph of the Will was used in such a way.

Riefenstahl was friends with Hitler for 12 years, and reports vary as to whether she ever had an intimate relationship with him.

This issue came up again in 2002, when Riefenstahl was one hundred years old and she was taken to court by a Roma group for denying the Nazis had exterminated gypsies.

As Germany ’ s military collapsed in the spring of 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.

Riefenstahl claimed she was not aware of the nature of the internment camps.

I'm not political .’” However, when Riefenstahl later claimed she had been forced to follow Goebbels ’ orders under threat of being sent to a concentration camp, Schulberg asked her why she should have been afraid if she did not know concentration camps existed.

On June 14, 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.

Instead, Riefenstahl met Luis Trenker who had starred in Fanck's films, who wrote to the director about her.

Despite vowing not to make any more films about the Nazi Party, in 1935, Riefenstahl made the 18-minute Day of Freedom: Armed Forces about the German army.

From 1945 through 1948 she was held in sundry American and French-run detention camps and prisons along with house arrest but although Riefenstahl was tried four times by various postwar authorities, she was never convicted through denazification trials either for her alleged role as a propagandist or for the use of concentration camp inmates in her films.

Most of the negatives for Riefenstahl ’ s finished films and other production materials relating to her unfinished projects were lost towards the end of the war.

Riefenstahl tried many times ( 15 by her count ) to make films during the 1950s and 1960s but was met with resistance, public protests and sharp criticism.

Another of Riefenstahl ’ s films, 1938 ’ s Olympia, was meant to prove that the Reichstag was a democratic and open society under Nazi rule.

A notable element in the Pathescope catalogue was pre-war German mountain films by such directors as G. W. Pabst and Leni Riefenstahl.

Examples of this exist not only in posters but also in the films of Leni Riefenstahl and Sergei Eisenstein.

The most famous films were made by Leni Riefenstahl for the rallies between 1933 and 1935.

She closely examines staging, cinematography, acting, scenarios, and other cinematic elements in films by Pabst, Lubitsch, Lang ( her obvious favorite ), Riefenstahl, Harbou, and Murnau.