Leni Riefenstahl

Another post inspired by The Story of Film.

This is a clip from Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl's stunning document of the 1936 Berlin Olympic games.  Many of the groundbreaking techniques she used to record the athletes have since become standard, eg: putting the camera on tracks and having it travel down the running track with the sprinters.  Some of the sequences were sublimely edited such as this one of the divers, using interesting camera angles, repeated footage and retimes to heighten the poetic motion.

 Olympia Diving Sequence

Riefenstahl struggled to make any films after WWII due to her association with Hitler and the Third Reich.  She lost most of the negatives from her finished films and all production materials relating to her unfinished projects during the war and had her editing equipment confiscated by the French government.