'Hitler's film-maker' turns a defiant 100

Leni Riefenstahl, who has spent more than 50 years trying to live down her notoriety as "Hitler's film-maker", celebrated her 100th birthday yesterday, and vowed that her film-making years were far from over.

Still sprightly and argumentative, Ms Riefenstahl had been fêted, only half-critically, by the German media as her century approached, with pages of newsprint and hours of television coverage devoted to her life and her films.

She celebrated at a hotel near Munich, with a cast of celebrities, including the tennis player, Boris Becker.

As Ms Riefenstahl has notched up her anniversaries, she has increasingly behaved as though her age has redeemed her. "For half a century," she said in a recent interview, "I was boycotted; it was so unfair not to be able to make a film for that amount of time."

No one can accuse her of not making the most of her long life. Shunned in Germany after the war, she sought new experiences in foreign countries. In 1956, she "discovered" the Nubians of Sudan and made their cause her own. She visited them again three years ago, only to suffer injuries in a helicopter accident as she was leaving. She still hopes to go back.

At 72, she learned scuba diving in order to film underwater and produced beautiful sequences of marine life. Her latest film, Ocean Impressions – her first since 1945 and shot mostly under water – was shown on a German television cable channel a week ago to much acclaim.

Her gifts as an artist and film-maker are undoubted. The uses to which she put those gifts, however, still arouse enormous controversy. She still insists that when she made the infamous Triumph of the Will about the 1934 Nazi rally in Nuremberg, it was simply a film.

She acknowledges her work may have been a propaganda tour de force, but she says that is not how it was conceived. She treats it as a profound injustice and personal tragedy that her films came to be regarded as classics of the black art of propaganda, rather than innovative and original film-making.

She and her admirers point out that her films gained recognition at the time for their artistic and technical qualities not just in Germany, but abroad, winning awards in Paris and Venice. They also assert that she did not solicit Hitler's favour; it was he who identified her vision and style as assets that could serve his cause. She has told interviewers, however, that she admired the Nazi leader and sought a meeting with him in 1932.

"Hitler had such a charisma that everyone wanted to see him," she said in a recent interview. "Saying this after the war, this was naturally my misfortune." She was twice acquitted by the "denazification courts" set up by the Allies after the war and won lawsuits she brought to reject media allegations about her past. In particular, Ms Riefenstahl denies that she was Hitler's mistress. Film that shows her enjoying herself in the company of Hitler and senior Nazis, however, is evidence that she was at very least admitted to his inner circle – and had no qualms about her involvement.

Her refusal, after the war, to apologise for the impact, if not the genesis, of her work is a primary reason why she remains such a contentious figure.

The renewed curiosity about her life and work has had its critics, among Germans as well as non-Germans. But it is indisputable that the media interest surrounding her birthday reflects an interest in the fine print of the Third Reich as a chapter in Germany history that has grown since Reunification 12 years ago.

It also reflects the reality that many post-war taboos are being broken as a new generation, thrice removed from the war and its prelude, takes another look at Germany's past.