Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi Neoclassicism

Abstract Leni Riefenstahl is easily the most successful female director of the earlier twentieth century, as gauged by the size of her audience and the scope of her influence. Despite her lifelong claims of innocence, she has largely been remembered for her culpability as one of Adolf Hitler’s premier image-makers, in films including Triumph of the Will (1935). In this essay, I focus on Olympia, her two-part film of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Drawing heavily on neoclassical imagery mixed with overtly modernist camerawork, Olympia masquerades as an apolitical celebration of human beauty and fortitude that claims the Olympic idea for the Youth of the World. Yet the film simultaneously conveys other messages that served the regime; it glorifies Hitler and the Nazi state, which it positions as the true inheritor of the classical ideal. In Olympia, Riefenstahl created a film that accomplished exactly what the state attempted with the Olympic games themselves: to project an image of an international, modern Germany while still symbolically conveying Nazi Germany’s power.