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Leni Riefenstahl autograph: Hand-signed poromotion card for her books on Nuba.
The autograph comes with a Certificate of Authenticity.
Size: 4 x 6, fine condition. Leni Riefenstahl began her performing career as a dancer in 1920.
Her breakthrough came with Riefenstahl's project Olympia (1936), a filmed record of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Though attacked by latter-day critics as being "fascistic" in its celebration of the muscular male physique, Olympia is virtually bereft of proselytizing. To be sure, there are plenty of shots of Hitler and his minions.
Many of Riefenstahl's innovations and techniques in Olympia have been utilized by sports documentaries and broadcasts ever since. Olympia would be the last of Riefenstahl's 1930s films; she turned down as many assignments as she received from the Nazis, and attempted unsuccessfully to launch two large-scale historical epics. And she never made another film in Germany, even though several of the more rabidly pro-Nazi directors -- notably Veit Harlan, who'd helmed the viciously anti-Semitic Jud Suss -- continued making movies without any difficulty.
In 1956, Riefenstahl traveled to Africa to begin work on Black Cargo, a documentary on the modern slave trade made on behalf of the London Anti-Slave Society; this project came to an end when she was seriously injured in a car accident in Kenya. She returned to Africa in 1961 to photograph the fascinating rituals of the Mesakin Nuba tribe.
In later interviews, Riefenstahl allowed that the end result of Nazism was horrendous, but she refuses to apologize for her work.
In her nineties, Riefenstahl became an enthusiastic scuba diver, hoping to assemble the underwater films that she lensed into one last documentary feature. She was 101 when she passed away.
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