Leni Riefenstahl

Leni Riefenstahl made the films through which the Nazi state presented itself and spent fifty-eight years afterwards denying she had understood what she was doing. She began as a dancer, then as an actress in the mountain films of the 1920s, and directed her own by 1932. Hitler admired that film and commissioned her. Triumph of the Will records the Nuremberg rally of 1934 with thirty cameras, tracking rails built into the stadium, and a rally partly staged for the filming, and it is studied because it works: the aerial opening, the columns seen from above as pattern rather than people, the cutting of crowd to speaker. Olympia, made around the 1936 Berlin games, invented much of the visual language of sports broadcasting, including pits dug beside the track and cameras on rails. Her defence after 1945 was that she was an artist who had made documentaries and knew nothing of the camps. She was cleared by denazification tribunals as a sympathiser rather than a perpetrator, and the record complicates her account: Roma and Sinti from an internment camp were used as extras on her film Tiefland, and most of them were later deported to Auschwitz. She sued more than fifty times over descriptions of her work. She photographed the Nuba of Sudan in the 1960s and took up underwater filming in her seventies. She died at 101. She always insisted the distinction between propaganda and documentary was one she had honoured, and the films are the argument against her. Triumph of the Will is not a record of a rally so much as a rally built to be recorded, with Speer designing the setting for the camera. Historians of film and of the period have generally concluded that the technical brilliance is what makes the moral question unavoidable rather than what excuses it.

• Lived: 1902 CE – 2003 CE
• Nationality: German
• Roles: artist