Quotes of the Day

Look at the world through Leni Riefenstahl's lens, and a high diver doesn't just dive. She flies. In one of the iconic images from her award-winning 1938 film Olympia, you see nothing but a glistening airborne figure silhouetted against sky. All else — diving board, ground, pool — disappears. It's classic Riefenstahl, a brilliant piece of editing, a fine example of a talent she has applied throughout her life and work.

Riefenstahl turns 100 this week, having survived career changes, war and its aftermath, decades of political criticism and ill health. Friends will fête her at a birthday bash in Munich. The rest of us get some party favors too, with the release of Impressions Under Water, her first film since 1954, and the publication of Africa (Taschen; 564 pages), a book of photos taken over the past four decades. Her new work looks at sea life and Sudanese tribesmen, not ruddy-cheeked Nazi youth or Olympic sprinters, but it's still of a piece with the old: stunning images of natural power, physical beauty and fluid movement. When asked what characterizes the work, she tells Time simply, "The aesthetics."

Her pursuit of all things beautiful began in dance. As a teen, Riefenstahl started taking lessons without the permission of her father, a Berlin plumber. In 1924, hobbled by a knee injury, she went to see Arnold Fanck's Mountain of Destiny, part of the Bergfilm (mountain film) genre that set its scenes improbably high in the mountains. Enthralled, she saw the movie repeatedly and eventually met Fanck. He cast Riefenstahl in his next film, The Holy Mountain, and for the next several years, she acted, did her own stunts (one critic dubbed her Ölige Ziege — Oily Goat — for the way she clambered up and down mountains) and enjoyed an extended masterclass with Fanck. In 1932, Riefenstahl co-wrote, co-directed, co-produced and starred in The Blue Light. She had no idea, of course, that by turning the camera on herself, she'd catch the eye of Adolf Hitler.

The Führer gave her the two great commissions of her career: Triumph of the Will, the celebrated and reviled documentary of the 1934 Nuremberg Nazi Party Congress, and Olympia, on the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Triumph of the Will, Riefenstahl's artistic peak and her moral nadir, is the film version of "the Nazi gospel," says Paul Verhoeven, who borrowed heavily from it for newsreel sequences in his 1997 film Starship Troopers . "The way she shoots Hitler in the car with the light, the aura around his head, his hands — she is expressing exactly what Hitler thought of himself."

Olympia, a paean to the body beautiful, landed her top honors at the 1938 Venice Film Festival. It also revealed an independent streak; Riefenstahl was captivated by the black American sprinter Jesse Owens, hardly Hitler's picture of the Aryan ideal. But, like Triumph of the Will, Olympia was slammed as Nazi propaganda. And though postwar tribunals ruled that she had participated in "no political activity ... which would warrant punishment," Riefenstahl's reputation was indelibly tainted by those two films and her Nazi ties.

Artistically, though, her distinction as a trailblazer remained intact, and her influence has gone multimedia. Think of the big events — rallies, U.S. presidential inaugurations, even sporting events — that are essentially huge photo-ops. "There you have her genius, but also that of Hitler," says Thomas Elsaesser, professor of film studies at the University of Amsterdam. "They thought up the idea of an event that exists only to be recorded by the camera, shot and edited so as to give the mass spectator the illusion of being the disembodied, ubiquitous eye of God." Open a magazine and look at the muscly ads, like those for Calvin Klein fragrances. "The aesthetics of this heroic vibe were taken from her movies," says Polish artist Maciej Toporowicz, whose video Obsession juxtaposes Riefenstahl clips with other Nazi-era footage and samples of modern advertising that use what he calls "fascist iconography."

Few movie fans realize how many of Riefenstahl's ideas and images have slipped into recent film. In addition to Verhoeven, George Lucas echoed her in this year's Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones; snippets of Triumph of the Will appeared in Oliver Stone's The Doors; and James Cameron's Titanic took many details from her little-seen 1954 film Tiefland , about a woman who falls under a tyrant's control but eventually finds freedom. "I was sitting in the theater thinking, 'I've seen these scenes somewhere before,'" says film scholar Robert von Dassanowsky. "Isn't that the hallmark of a truly influential artist, that her work survives and influences, even detached from her name?"

After Tiefland came out, Riefenstahl switched to still photography. "What I can film, I can also photograph," she says. "I do not see a difference." (Except that she could no longer get financing for the more expensive medium.) With her Leicas, she found some respect and recognition, but she had to go to Africa to get it. Ernest Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa first tempted her to the continent. George Rodger's photos of the Nuba told her exactly where she wanted to go. In 1962, she made it to the Sudan, tracked the tribe down and built relationships that allowed rare access to their society. She found in the lithe figures the same raw beauty that had enchanted her at the Berlin Games — with none of the politics. "The time I spent with the Nuba was among the happiest of my life," she says in Africa. She returned to the Nuba several times during the 1960s and '70s; for one trip, she hired an assistant, Horst Kettner, who became her partner, though 42 years her junior.

Together, the pair discovered a new world — underwater. At 71, Riefenstahl got scuba certification, lying about her birthdate because the age limit for divers was 50. Riefenstahl has made more than 2,000 dives, shooting thousands of meters of film, which have been painstakingly edited into the 45-minute-long Impressions Under Water.

But her new work and the passage of time haven't quieted her critics. When Potsdam's Filmmuseum staged a retrospective in 1998 — the first in Germany — protests came from all sides, says museum director Bärbel Dalichow. "There were elderly people who saw her films in their youth and thought that her genius as an artist was absolutely misunderstood. But there were also left-wing intellectuals who thought that one should never give such people a forum."

Only Riefenstahl knows the extent of her dealings with the Nazis, or how much remorse she feels for her role during that era. But she clearly regrets the trouble her associations have brought her since. During the filming of the documentary The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, she said that "death will be a blessed relief." Today, she elaborates: "If one has a destiny that sometimes seems to be too hard, death appears as a solution."

How about immortality through film instead? Intrigued by the ethical dilemmas and historical richness of Riefenstahl's life, both Verhoeven and Jodie Foster have sought to bring her story to the big screen. The biopic proposals have stirred controversy, with other directors, including Steven Spielberg and Rob Reiner, reportedly raising questions about the moral minefields such a film entailed.

Foster's project, which has neither Riefenstahl's full cooperation nor her control, is "still in development," says the director's publicist. "But nothing's final." Word is that the current script, by Ron Nyswaner ( Philadelphia), is written as a morality tale about someone who sells her soul to the devil.

Verhoeven's film, a collaboration with German producer Paul Schuhly, who owns the film rights to Riefenstahl's memoirs, stalled over budget concerns. But the director gained some insight into Riefenstahl's sense of self. Concerned about casting, she said, "Jodie's not beautiful enough to play me." Instead, she suggested Sharon Stone, who had worked with Verhoeven on Basic Instinct."That," says Verhoeven, "was Leni's ultimate idea of herself — Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct." What's life at 100 without a little dose of unreality? You've got to live for something. "My motto," says Riefenstahl, "is never give up."

• JEFF CHU
• Leni Riefenstahl marks her 100th birthday