How Leni Riefenstahl shaped the modern Olympics

It’s an uncomfortable truth, but the Olympic Games in their modern form were pretty much invented by the Nazis. They came up with the idea of the torch relay, for example, the one that begins in Olympia and ends with the lighting of the cauldron at the opening ceremony. But it wasn’t the events at the 1936 Olympics that were new, so much as the way they were presented and filmed.

Even today, the style of coverage owes much to Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s favourite filmmaker and arguably the most gifted and influential female director of the 20th century. Her ground-breaking techniques, as seen in her cinematic masterpiece Olympia, included low camera angles, smash cuts, extreme close-ups and tracking shots in a trench she had arranged to be dug alongside the long-jump pit. She also attached automatic cameras to balloons to get aerial shots for the first time.

Her greatest innovation was the use of waterproof cameras that worked in the swimming pool. They followed divers through the air and, as soon as they hit the water, the cameraman dived down with them, all the while changing aperture and focus. Riefenstahl, who had been a film star before turning to directing, was more interested in artistic expression than sporting competition and this culminated in her hypnotic high-diving montage. So subtle and abstract was Olympia in this section that cinema audiences didn’t realise they were at one point watching a diver emerging from the water, flying backwards through the air and returning to the board.

To say that Riefenstahl was a controversial figure is to understate. By the time she was commissioned to make her film about the Berlin Olympics, she had already made her name as the director of Triumph of the Will, the award-winning film of the 1934 Nuremberg rally. Although she was never a member of the Nazi party — an investigation by the Allies at the end of the war concluded that she was a ‘fellow traveller’ only — her earlier film had nevertheless proved a powerful propaganda tool for Hitler.