German Filmmaker Turns 100 Years Old
JONATHAN MANN, CNN ANCHOR (voice over): Black and white and shades of gray. On the hundredth birthday of German filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, lingering unease and anger about</s>MANN: (on camera): Hello and welcome. In Germany today, one of the country's greatest filmmakers is marking her 100th birthday, in two ways. She's having an enormous party to celebrate her remarkable life and work, and she's being reminded of enormous questions about the very same subjects. Leni Riefenstahl's importance to moviemaking is hard to overstate. She's regarded as a genius. Movies she made more than half a century ago are still being studied in film schools and shown in cinemas around the world. But and it's a big but, they are films made to glorify Hitler and Nazi Germany. In a moment, a feature interview that CNN's Walter Rodgers did with the filmmaker some years back that we, still, think is fascinating, today. On our program today, what Riefenstahl regrets. First though, we take a look at some other stories in the headlines this hour. Facing billions of dollars in flood damage, the Germany government plans to raise corporate taxes for one year to help pay clean-up costs. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder says the tax will go to 26.5 percent from the current 25 percent. While the clean-up has started in some places, other cities in northern Germany are bracing for floodwaters. Volunteers have reinforced dikes along the Elbe River and sandbagged their homes and businesses trying to avoid a deluge. Authorities have ordered the evacuation of a hospital and home for the elderly in the town of Dannenburg. The battle against nature is intensifying in China and its southern Hunan Province. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians, there, are rushing to shore up the banks of a giant lake. A flood surge from the cresting Yangtze River is expected to flow into the Dongting Lake by Sunday. Embankments are being closely watched. Millions of people could be affected if the lake overflows or bursts through the embankments. A state of emergency has been in effect since Wednesday. The heads of two Jehovah's Witnesses, kidnapped in the Philippines have been found, dumped at different spots in a public market. The heads were left on the remote island of Holo with notes denouncing the victims as infidels. Four other members of the Christian group remain captive. The military and local police had blamed Abu Sayyaf for the abductions, but, now they say, the abductions may have been carried out by bandits with connections to Abu Sayyaf. Bad weather is being blamed for a number of disasters in Nepal. Among them, landslides triggered by monsoon rains have claimed, at least, 65 lives in the eastern part of the kingdom. Emergency officials fear the death toll could be much higher. Nepalese officials say 16 people were killed when a plane slammed into a mountain while trying to land in bad weather. Most of those on board were German tourists. The Shangri-la Air flight was en route from Jomsom in northern Nepal to Pokhara, when it went down. Just hours after the plane crash, a bus plunged into a river. All 45 people who were in the bus are dead or missing.</s>MANN: Leni Riefenstahl was Adolf Hitler's favorite filmmaker. A young dancer who became an actress. An actress who then became a director. A director who became poet laureate and propagandist for the Nazi regime. She's been answering for that ever since and, now, she's being reminded of it, once again.</s>LENI RIEFENSTAHL, GERMAN FILMMAKER: Before the war, 90 percent were for Hitler. After the war, 90 percent don't want it</s>MANN: But there is more to it than that. Riefenstahl used gypsies from concentration camps as extras in one of her films. She's been quoted as saying all of them survived the war, but has since issued a statement saying her comments had been misunderstood. Thursday, prosecutors in Frankfurt opened a judicial inquiry into a complaint that she is committing a crime by denying the Holocaust so many years later.</s>MANN (on camera): The concern about the extras in Tiefland, the low lands, are not new. They're part of why Riefenstahl's work is both honored and abhorred. In 1994, CNN's Walter Rodgers went to her home and found a woman who insists that she has been misunderstood, as have her films.</s>RIEFENSTAHL: These are my children, really. That is the best that you can tell me because it may be the reason that I don't want to have children because all what I think, what I feel, if I started with five years. I've made</s>WALTER RODGERS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Your film, "Olympia," has been called one of the 10 finest movies ever made. When you look at it now, what do you think?</s>RIEFENSTAHL: Oh, it's very interesting. Some part of the film, if I see today, I am, I am Leni, you have made this? It's beautiful, I think so. Other parts, not so much, but by some things, I am, myself, surprised that I have done it. I think I have always</s>RODGERS: You always said that you were politically naive, that you were a non-political person. Yet, your most controversial work was "Triumph of Will," a film about the Nazi party meeting in Nuremberg in 1934. Why did you make that film?</s>RIEFENSTAHL: Yes, maybe you know that Hitler wanted me to do it, even I was not a member of the party, even I don't know what happened there. I was not a little bit interested in this. I know that I want to make documentary films. I have had never in my mind</s>RODGERS: You paid a great price for that film. You were persecuted. Do you regret you made "Triumph of Will?"</s>RIEFENSTAHL: Yes and no. One way, it's -- all people see is the</s>RODGERS: In the 1930's, millions of Germans were avid followers of Adolf Hitler and, yet, when we look at him today, it's difficult to understand why. How do you explain this hypnotic power he had over a whole nation?</s>RIEFENSTAHL: I think the first was that people have no idea the time was in the past so different today. We have had more than six million people without work. People are hungry and so it was a</s>RODGERS: But you didn't know it?</s>RIEFENSTAHL: Natural, no. That is the problem. That is the problem</s>RODGERS: You were close to Hitler during his regime. In describing one evening, when he came to tea, you said that, for a moment, you thought he desired you as a woman. Some people have said you were lovers. What's the truth?</s>RIEFENSTAHL: Maybe I was -- he admired me as an artist and maybe, he was a man and maybe, sometimes, he have had a beautiful woman, maybe, but it was not, really, that he, really, desired me. I have had the feeling that he wouldn't be sorry if I would give him a kiss or so, but I've never give him a kiss. It never happened, and that was -- other women, I don't think, never. He was only living for his idea.</s>RODGERS: At first, you were a fan of Hitler's. What made you, later, change your mind about him?</s>RIEFENSTAHL: Oh, I -- it started to</s>RODGERS: Why do you think the German people were so cruel to you, after the war?</s>RIEFENSTAHL: Do you not know this? Do you not think the why? I will tell you why. Before the war, 90 percent were for Hitler. After the war, 90 percent don't want it</s>RODGERS: Let's talk about your travel. Why did you go to Africa after the war?</s>RIEFENSTAHL: I want to see new things what I don't know. And I was fascinated for nature things. I told you, I love the nature. I was coming in a new world. Sunshine, warm, the people are kind. They don't ask me. Nobody ask me, what do you say about Hitler? Nobody ask me how was Hitler?, why you have make the "Triumph of the Will?" I was a newborn. I was newborn. Maybe that I want to stay, always, there, but political things in Sudan changed it.</s>RODGERS: You took up scuba diving at age 72. Why?</s>RIEFENSTAHL: The most beautiful, in my life now, is the time I am diving. I go underwater because it's a fantastic world, underwater. And if I am there, natural, I see everything</s>RODGERS: What was the source of your great strength? How have you had the strength to fight 50 lawsuits, imprisonment after the war? Where does your strength come from?</s>RIEFENSTAHL: If I tell you, I think I died 10 times after the war. And I don't understand how it was possible that I</s>RODGERS: You say yes to life.</s>RIEFENSTAHL: I say, yes, hundred percent, yes.</s>MANN: Leni Riefenstahl speaking to CNN's Walter Rodgers back in 1994. That's how Riefenstahl remembers what happened. How will history remember it? A conversation, when we come back. Stay with us.</s>MANN (voice-over): Leni Riefenstahl is not a household name, but Jodi Foster may make her one. For years, the American actress has been planning a film biography. It's a controversial project, and Foster doesn't say much about it, but by all accounts, it is, still, slowly on its way.</s>BRIAN WINSTON, UNIVERSITY OF WESTMINSTER: I think we have to criticize her, and I thought the interview you just showed illustrates why. She has the most plausible tale to tell. And it is just shot through with mendacities, lies. She's unrepentant about that period, and she is a focus for all sorts of neo-Nazi activities, which she never, really, distances herself from. So I think, despite the hundred years, we still have to accuse, rather than praise.</s>MANN: Now, those are very serious accusations. Let's start with the first of them, that she lies about what happened. What do you mean?</s>WINSTON: Well, let me -- let's take just one example. I was never a member of the party. This is true. The point is no artist, no journalist, no filmmaker, no opinion former of any kind was a member of the party. Goebbels was really smart. Goebbels was Hitler's propaganda chief. He was really smart, and he knew that party sympathizers were far more useful, if they weren't members, than if they were. And that's very typical of her approach to history, the rewriting of history. She's relying on our collective ignorance of what, actually, went on. She's relying on the fact we don't remember that she was close to the party leadership years, years before Hitler was elected chancellor. She's relying on the fact that she used people to persecute folks that she didn't like in the film industry. She's relying on the fact that we don't know about these poor gypsies, these Romani that she used in the film she made during the war, called "Lowlands." So it's a question of being highly selective with the truth, which after all, is exactly what the Nazi regime was all about in the first place.</s>MANN: Tell us about the Roma. Tell us about the gypsies in "Lowlands."</s>WINSTON: Well, she took about a hundred extras from a holding camp in Austria, and she used them in the film, and they were returned to the camp system. And many of them perished in Auschwitz. One of the cases that she brought against a filmmaker, who made a film with them, with their evidence, their testimony, was that she didn't know they were going to their deaths. But the fact of the matter is whether she knew or not, and I think one can be permitted a question mark over how naive she, actually, was about the entire Nazi activity. Whether that's the case or not, the fact is that most of them died. And that only a few of the children survived. Her argument is that she didn't know what was going on. If you look at "Triumph of the Will," you can see -- by the way, I don't think it's a masterpiece. I think it's a turgid, endless film about people marching about. But if you look at the speeches in it, you can see how accurately they reflect the particular issues that were facing the Nazis, at the time it was made. Her claim to have been naive, her claim not to have known is utterly flawed, and easily, I think, dismissed.</s>MANN: Well, let me interrupt you to ask you about this because one of the other things she says about the making of "Triumph of the Will," and we heard it again in her conversation with Walt Rodgers, is that she was ordered to make it. Should we believe that?</s>WINSTON: No. I don't think we should. The fact of the matter is that the film was, originally, commissioned from, strangely enough, an avant-garde left-wing filmmaker, and he was taken off it. And the opening credit of the film is by order of the furor, and she has always been embarrassed by that, in one sense. So her argument is, yes, it was a direct order. The fact of the matter was she was the closest person to the party in the German film industry, at the time, and she was perfectly able to commandeer the sorts of resources with the help of Hitler that allowed her to film the rally. The fact -- the notion that she was ordered, I think, is really neither here nor there. In one sense, everybody was ordered by Hitler to do anything, right? But in another sense, she was perfectly placed to receive that order. It was no accident.</s>MANN: But after all this time, she is alive; she's still very much kicking; she is celebrating, probably still at this hour, at a party in her honor that's being attended by pretty well- known German celebrities. Has Germany forgiven her?</s>WINSTON: I think people, generally, have forgiven her for the rather interesting questioned reason of her reputation. You said, quite rightly, you know, she's acknowledged as a film genius. Well, she's not acknowledged as a film genius by everybody. Tiefland, I think, this film, Lowlands, is widely-seen as being a bleak disaster area. The Olympic films, yes, they were the first games films, and she has that credit. But "Triumph of the Will" is an unbearable piece of work. It's 117 minutes of people marching about. Now, I don't know; maybe, you like sitting in a darkened cinema, watching people marching about a lot. I find that rather boring. You get 17 minutes of people marching around outside followed by 11 minutes of people marching around inside, followed by a group of people in peasant German costumes walking past, in a sort of marching way. And this is supposed to be a masterpiece. And then, you get the position that it's a propaganda masterpiece. Well, who was ever convinced by this film? Goebbels, certainly, didn't want it shown because it referred, too closely, to the difficulties of the party in 1934 and thereafter, it's always been used as a source for the images that we see most often about how awful, how dehumanizing, how outrageous the Nazi experiment was. So I think that the reputation...</s>MANN: Brian, I'm afraid we're going to have to cut you off, there. It's clear you won't be...</s>WINSTON: ... OK.</s>MANN: ... renting it, this weekend. But we're very grateful for your time. Thanks so much.</s>WINSTON: OK, sorry, bye.</s>MANN: That's INSIGHT for this day. I'm Jonathan Mann. The news continues. END TO ORDER VIDEOTAPES AND TRANSCRIPTS OF CNN INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMMING, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE THE SECURE ONLINE ORDER FROM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com