Triumph of the Will
(1935)THE CONTROVERSY Like The Birth of a Nation, Leni Riefenstahl's documentary about a 1934 Nazi rally, in which Hitler appears as a god descending from the heavens to lead the masses, is praised to this day for its technical innovations and reviled for its propagandizing for an evil cause.
THE FIRESTORM Riefenstahl, who made another brilliant but troubling documentary for Hitler, 1938's Olympia, spent three years under Allied arrest after World War II; tribunals ultimately cleared her of collaboration charges.
THE AFTERMATH The taint of her work on Hitler's behalf all but ended Riefenstahl's career as a filmmaker. Still, until her death in 2003, she denied being a Nazi sympathizer, insisting that she'd been a naive artist working in a moral vacuum.
