Old underwater photographer! Was: Oldest Known Diver
Ron Fuller
information later that week in my local newspaper.....
>>>Ron Fuller queried:
>>>Anyone know if Leni Riefenstahl is still alive and diving?
>
>>And Strike followed up with:
>>I haven't heard mention of her in recent times - in fact it may well
>>have been as long ago as '93 that I saw a lengthy TV interview in
>>which she down-played her relationship with Hitler. As I recall she
>>had learned to dive in order to make an underwater documentary that
>>would put her name back up in lights. She was certainly on the
>>unconventional side, though! ... snip
>
>Well what do you know ... I open our local newspaper (West Australian) and
>see this heading - Director defends her nazi films. (This is word for word
>what some unnamed author wrote about Leni).
>Leni Riefenstahl, Adolf Hitler's favourite filmmaker & one of the 3rd
>Reich's last surviving personalities, is at 96 still fending off criticism
>that she was among the most powerfulof nazi propagandists.
>She was in Potsdamn near Berlin at the w/e to view an exhibition of her
>work at the city's film museum, & gave a rare news conference afterwards.
>"I cannot see these films as propaganda," she said. "It was possible to use
>them as such but they were not made as propaganda. It was a completely
>different time. There wasn't information about the horrible things that we
>learned about after the war. It wasn't imaginable."
>Riefenstahl has attained pariah status in Germany because of her refusal to
>apologise for work she did during Hitler's rule & the role her films might
>have played in promoting him.
>Her film, Triumph of the Will, documented the 1934 Nuremberg Rally &
>depicted Hitler addressing cheering crowds. She described the event as
boring.
>"Making a documentary film was like a punishment for me," she said. "I was
>a passionate actress & wanted to get better roles. But then I saw that I
>had the talent of making interesting documentaries out of minimal content."
>Riefenstahl said she was thrilled with the Film Museum Potsdam exhibition,
>the first comprehensive show of her work in Germany.
>The exhibition brings together material from a documentary she made of the
>1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, photographs of the Nuba tribes in southern
>Sudan & pictures taken under water. Riefenstahl started diving when she was
>72 & is trying to complete an UW film by the end of the year.
>A smaller show 2 years ago in a Hamburg gallery sparked outrage among some
>Holocaust survivors & protests by local leftists, who called it a tribute
>to fascism.
>Riefenstahl said she was bitter that her work had never been judged purely
>on its artistic merits in Germany but always in the shadow of the nazi
legacy.
>"Abroad, no one was interested in these 7 months that I worked for Hitler,"
>she said. "People were only interested in my films, my work, how I did it
>as a woman, the techniques I developed that some cameraman are still
>learning from. Not 'did she have an affair with Hitler?' - that was all
>nonsense.
>Riefenstahl has consistently denied speculation that she was romantically
>linked with Hitler or his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels.
>She said she had not made Olympia just for the nazi party, adding that it
>was completed with the encouragement of the International Olympic Committee
>& only with Hitler's begrudging support.
>"Hitler had nothing to do with that film," Riefenstahl said "I always heard
>that he was bitterly disappointed that I made it." END
>
Best Regards
Ron in San Diego
Diving in San Diego
http://www.diegoweb.com/diving
r...@diegoweb.com