Helene Bertha Amalie "Leni" Riefenstahl (August 22, 1902 – September 8, 2003) was a German film director, dancer and actress widely noted for her aesthetics and innovations as a filmmaker. Her most famous film was Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), a propaganda film made at the 1934 Nuremberg congress of the Nazi Party. Riefenstahl's prominence in the Third Reich along with her personal friendships with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels thwarted her film career following Germany's defeat in World War II, after which she was arrested but never convicted of war crimes.
The propaganda value of her films made during the 1930s repels most commentators but many film histories cite theaesthetics as outstanding. After her death the Associated Press described Riefenstahl as an "acclaimed pioneer of film and photographic techniques." Der Tagesspiegel newspaper in Berlin noted, "Leni Riefenstahl conquered new ground in the cinema." The BBC said her documentaries "were hailed as groundbreaking film-making, pioneering techniques involving cranes, tracking rails, and many cameras working at the same time." Reviewer Gary Morris called Riefenstahl "an artist of unparalleled gifts, a woman in an industry dominated by men, one of the great formalists of the cinema on a par with Eisenstein or Welles." Riefenstahl later published her still photography of the Nuba tribes in Africa and made films of marine life.
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