KEY POINTS:
Oscar-winning actress Jodie Foster is finally going ahead with a Hollywood film about the life of the controversial Nazi-era film-maker and actress Leni Riefenstahl.
Foster will play the leading role in a work that is bound to generate immense argument, as it examines the beautiful woman who became Adolf Hitler's favourite director and whose slick propaganda helped the Nazi war machine.
The on-again, off-again project has been in the pipelines for at least seven years, but now a script is being written - by British writer Rupert Walters - and a director is being negotiated.
People involved in the movie say the director should be announced within two or three months and shooting should start by the end of next year at the latest.
"I am hoping to be shooting before then," said Gabriele Bacher, a producer at Primary Pictures, which will make the film with Foster's own company.
Foster has not shied away from controversial roles, including her award-winning portrayals of a rape victim in The Accused and a child prostitute in Taxi Driver.
But few parts in modern Hollywood history will generate as much debate as Riefenstahl. It will open Foster to charges of lionising an anti-Semite who played a key role in the Third Reich.
Riefenstahl, born in Berlin in 1902, became a dancer and star of silent cinema before moving into directing. At a 1932 Nazi rally she saw Hitler speak for the first time. It was a mesmerising experience, and Hitler in turn saw the young film-maker as someone who could bring Nazi ideals of physical purity to life through the medium of film.
It was a task she accomplished with terrifying skill. She first filmed a Nuremberg rally in 1933. A year later came her masterpiece, Triumph of the Will, a documentary that glorified Hitler and the Nuremberg rallies. Though banned in some places in America, it was a huge success in Europe and is often seen as one of the most brilliant pieces of propaganda ever made.
It made use of ground-breaking photographic techniques and innovative editing to imbue the Nazis with a mythic quality that was deeply effective.
She also brought her talent to bear on filming the 1936 Berlin Olympics, in which she pioneered many camera techniques still used in sports broadcasting today.
Riefenstahl's Nazi film-making continued in the late 1930s and into World War II. On at least one project, she was accused of using slave labour from a concentration camp. She also documented the German invasion of Poland and was present in the town of Konskie when 30 civilians were executed. She later claimed she had tried to stop the killings, but she still went on to film the German victory parade in Warsaw.
After Hitler invaded France she sent him a message: "Your deeds exceed the power of human imagination. They are without equal in the history of mankind. How can we ever thank you?"
After the war, she spent several years in a French detention centre before being released without charge. She attempted to restart her career but was largely shunned by a world that despised her Nazi past.
Riefenstahl always maintained she had been naive about Hitler and largely ignorant of Nazi crimes. That convinced few of her many critics. Nor did it lessen the role her work played in keeping the Nazis in power.
"She created beautiful surface images for Nazism. With the medium of film, she orchestrated that very persuasive image for many Germans. She had a big impact," said Professor Gavriel Rosenfeld, an expert on the Third Reich at Fairfield University, Connecticut.
Yet Riefenstahl did manage, eventually, to flourish again. She travelled frequently to Africa and achieved huge success with her still pictures of the Nuba tribe in Sudan. Ironically, her images of the Nuba exalted their physical perfection in an African echo of her previous worship of the Aryan physical form.
She also took up scuba diving and pursued underwater photography. She even released a documentary, Underwater Impressions, on her 100th birthday. She died, aged 101, in 2003.
Whatever the morality of her Nazi past, she led a remarkable life. But it is that 1930s and 1940s that has guaranteed any film about her will generate headlines. It is also what fascinates many people.
Riefenstahl has come to symbolise a marriage of artistic genius and political evil. She herself refused to sign a contract for Foster's project while she was still alive, mainly because Foster would not give her the right to reject any of the film that she felt was wrong. She was also thought to prefer Sharon Stone over Foster as an actress better suited to play her.
Bacher insisted that the Foster film would not whitewash any aspect of Riefenstahl's past or show her as some sort of heroine. "We are not going to downplay her politics," she said.
But Bacher added that Riefenstahl's story was worth telling because she was such a complex figure, who was so talented and yet ended up using her genius in an evil cause. "This is what is fascinating. The strongest way to understand her is to go on this ride with her," Bacher said.
The movie is part of a trend of seeing individual figures from the Third Reich in a more morally complex light. It perhaps began with Schindler's List, whose hero, Oskar Schindler, was a Nazi profiteer who ended up saving hundreds of Jewish lives.
It has also been represented by recent, morally complex, German films such as Downfall, which showed the last days in Hitler's bunker, and Mein Fuhrer, the first German comedy about Hitler.
"If any film about Riefenstahl condemns her outright, then it will end up being a very black and white morality tale," said Rosenfeld. "If you have shades of grey it might make a better film. In some ways there is a desire on behalf of the audience to see 'good' Nazis."
- OBSERVER
