Helene Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl (born on 22 August 1902 in Berlin, Germany), also known as Leni Riefenstahl, is a German film director and actress. After only four movies she had directed, she became one of the most famous film makers of Germany, receiving an overwhelming support due to her epic and highly aesthetic works.
Biography[]
Riefenstahl was born in the working class neighbourhood of Wedding in Berlin. She began her career as a self-styled and well-known interpretive dancer. After injuring her knee while performing in Prague, she saw a nature film about mountains and became fascinated with the possibilities of film. She went to the Alps to meet the film's director Arnold Fanck, hoping to secure the lead in his next project. Instead Riefenstahl found an actor 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. Riefenstahl had a prolific career as an actor in silent films. She was popular with the German public and highly regarded by directors. Her last acting role before becoming a director was in the 1933 film SOS Eisberg.
When presented with the opportunity to direct Das Blaue Licht in 1932 she took it. Breaking from her mentor's style of setting realistic stories in fairytale mountain settings, Riefenstahl filmed Das Blaue Licht as a romantic, wholly mystical tale which she thought of as more fitting to the terrain. The movie helped Riefenstahl to be noticed in German cinematographic landscape, who had been totally changed by Friedrich Murnau's works.
Works as film director[]
- Das blaue Licht ("The Blue Light", 1932) - Romance inspired by an old Austrian tale from the Dolomites
- SOS Eisberg (1933) - Drama that follows the account of the real-life Alfred Lothar Wegener polar expedition of 1929-30.
- Metropolis (scheduled for 1936) - A futuristic city attacked by horrible barbarians. Starring Marlene Dietrich.