Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl

Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl
- Autographed book by author
The definitive biography of Leni Riefenstahl, the woman best known as â€œHitlerâ€™s filmmaker,â€ one of the most fascinating and controversial personalities of the twentieth century. It is the story of huge talent and huger ambition, one that probes the sometimes blurred borders dividing art and beauty from truth and humanity.

Two of Riefenstahlâ€™s films, Olympia and Triumph of the Will, are universally regarded as the greatest and most innovative documentaries ever made, but they are also insidious glorifications of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Now, in this masterful new biography, Steven Bach reveals the truths and lies behind this gifted womanâ€™s lifelong self-vindication as an apolitical artist who claimed she knew nothing of the Holocaust and denied her complicity with the criminal regime she both used and sanctified.

The facts and her actions, many unknown until now, bear chilling witness: her passionate enthusiasm for Hitler from her first reading of Mein Kampf; her involvements with Nazi leaders Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann, Albert Speer, and Julius Streicher, who advanced her career, and with Hitler, who personally helped finance it; her role as silent eyewitness to wartime atrocities against Jews; and her use of slave labor in the form of concentration camp Gypsies destined for Auschwitz. We see her after the war trying to sell footage to Hollywood under an alias, manipulating a sham â€œdiscoveryâ€ of the Nuba tribes of Sudan into a career comeback, fighting to disinherit her closest living relatives, andâ€”to the endâ€”unable to express remorse for the millions murdered by the Nazi regime made mythic by her work.

Relying on new sourcesâ€”including interviews with her colleagues and intimate friends, as well as on previously unknown recordings of Riefenstahl herselfâ€”Bach gives us an exceptional work of historical investigation that untangles the past and is also an objective but unsparing appraisal of a woman of spectacular gifts corrupted by ruthless personal ambition.
Country USA
Manufacturer Knopf
Binding Hardcover
ItemPartNumber 0375404007_gdd_341
ReleaseDate 2007-03-13
UnitCount 1
Format Deckle Edge
EANs 9780375404009

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Knopf
Binding	Hardcover
ItemPartNumber	0375404007_gdd_341
ReleaseDate	2007-03-13
UnitCount	1
Format	Deckle Edge
EANs	9780375404009

Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl

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