Word: riefenstahl
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This is a hard line for Muller to swallow, and he presses Riefenstahl to defend her opinions against critics who say that "Triumph of the Will" was a glorification of the Nazis...
...Riefenstahl defends herself adamantly, saying that critics are blaming her now because of the atrocities committed by the Nazis during the war, whereas before the war "Triumph of the Will" won critical acclaim and several international awards...
...Riefenstahl's contention that she is being treated unfairly does have some force. After all, no one condemns the great Sergei Eisenstein for making nationalist films in Soviet Russia, where the government killed even more people than did the Nazis...
...However, Riefenstahl's conviction that an artist has no political responsibility for his or her art will strike most viewers as naive at best, and disingenuous at worst. And the idea that "Triumph of the Will" is not propaganda is just plain impossible to take seriously. Riefenstahl defends herself by saying she was hired by Hitler as an artist to make an artistic film, not a political...
...Riefenstahl is also remembered for the critically acclaimed "Olympia," an exhaustive record of the 1936 Summer Olympics, which was revolutionary in its treatment of sports. Many of her innovations are still used today. It is fascinating to watch Riefenstahl describe some of her experiments, like underwater photography of diving events, and setting cameras aloft in balloons (Goodyear blimp, anyone...