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

Riefenstahl received private funding for the production of Tiefland, but the filming in Spain was derailed.

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.

Charlotte Riefenstahl, who received her doctorate in physics at the University of Göttingen in 1927, the same year as Houtermans and Robert Oppenheimer, was courted by both men.

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.

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 gained a reputation on Berlin's dance circuit and she quickly moved into films.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Rodger, who had taken the first photographs of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, refused to help Riefenstahl meet Africans, citing their respective backgrounds.

Several generals in the Wehrmacht protested over the minimal army presence in the film: Hitler apparently proposed modifying the film to placate the generals, but Riefenstahl refused his suggestion.

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.

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

During this time Leni Riefenstahl, a filmmaker working in Nazi Germany, created one of the best-known propaganda movies, Triumph of the Will, a film commissioned by Hitler to chronicle the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg.

Riefenstahl ’ s cinematic masterpiece, though temporarily effective propaganda, was unable to mitigate the growing awareness of the political realities in Nazi Germany.

Riefenstahl won several awards, not only in Germany but also in the United States, France, Sweden, and other countries.

* 1938 Olympia 1. Teil – Fest der Völker by Leni Riefenstahl ( Germany )

The event was filmed by Hitler's favorite director, Leni Riefenstahl, and branded with the giants of German industry: the lighting-mirrors were made by the Zeiss corporation, and the torches themselves, fueled with magnesium to prevent them from going out in bad weather, were constructed by Krupp, the huge steel and munitions conglomerate that armed Germany for both world wars.

Its lyrics often concern historical or biographical subjects, such as Weimar-era Germany, Peter Lorre, Jeffrey Lee Pierce of The Gun Club, Paul Robeson, Leni Riefenstahl, Dante Alighieri, Philip K. Dick, and Jonathan Fire * Eater.