‘Riefenstahl’ Review 5

1724948332 5 Riefenstahl filming Olympia next to Goebbels and Goering 1936 c Vincent Productions

No matter how much we might want to purge the ideology reflected by and reinforced in Leni Riefenstahl‘s films from our cultural lives, her aesthetic influence is impossible to escape. Every Olympics, NBC’s innovations evolve from common visual goals: Allowing the camera to track races more fluidly, slowing down the action to showcase bodies in …

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Leni Riefenstahl Documentary on Hitler’s Favorite Director 5

2 Riefenstahl 600 pix max widths use online Riefenstahl Hitler Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Bildarchiv

Leni Riefenstahl, who died in 2003, aged 101, remains forever google-able as “Hitler’s favorite director” for her daringly innovative documentaries The Triumph of the Will, about the Nazi rally in Nuremberg in 1934, and Olympia, about the Berlin Olympics of 1936. Acclaimed and infamous in equal measures —was she a pioneering genius, a Nazi propagandist, …

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