Impressions of the Deep

Leni Riefenstahl – 2003 – Germany

Shot when she was a hundred years old and released posthumously, Leni Riefenstahl’s last film was her first since 1954's Tiefland.  In the interim, she had been famously blacklisted the world over for having made films sponsored by the Third Reich – the two epic documentaries Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938) – and had worked primarily as an ethnographic photographer.  In her 70s, Riefenstahl discovered scuba diving and, aside from finding it richly rewarding, found that it profoundly eased her severe back pain.  Impressions of the Deep (also known as Underwater Impressions) is a 45-minute film comprised of some of the most striking images she captured during these last years of her life.  Her intentions for the final product were a little vague and the editors wisely did not attempt to force the footage into context, but merely let it play out, without narration or other explanation.  Riefenstahl was such a formalist and so concerned with editing that it’s hard to associate these loose sequences with her known style, but so much time had passed, and it’s tragic that she was unable to assemble the film herself and demonstrate the ways in which her potent cinematic mind had evolved over half a century.