About the Author

Jürgen Trimborn, born in 1971, is a professor of film, theater, and art history at the University of Cologne and serves as a consultant on films of the Third Reich for the German and American film industry. He lives and writes in Cologne and east Belgium.

Reviews

"Attacked by Susan Sontag but extolled by Andy Warhol, the world's most controversial filmmaker continues to be the subject of critical analysis." --David Luhrssen, Shepherd Express

"Attacked by Susan Sontag but extolled by Andy Warhol, the world's most controversial filmmaker continues to be the subject of critical analysis." --David Luhrssen, Shepherd Express

Nothing tests Keats's adage that beauty is truth more severely than the work of the Third Reich's leading filmmaker, whose notorious documentaries Triumph of the Will and Olympia cloaked the hideousness of Nazi Germany in grand, gorgeous, emotionally overpowering imagery. In this soberly critical biography, film historian Trimborn analyzes the brilliant techniques with which Riefenstahl "replace[d] politics with aesthetics" and made Hitler "an almost erotic object" to the adoring German masses. (Her mystically monumental style, he notes, lived on to influence Hollywood blockbusters like Star Wars and The Lion King, as well as Mick Jagger's stage shows.) He also dissects the lesser falsehoods Riefenstahl propagated to downplay her close relationship with Hitler and complicity with the Nazis. He reprints examples of her fawning praise of the fuehrer and reconstructs her erasure of a Jewish collaborator from the credits of one of her films, her use of Gypsies interned in a forced labor camp as extras (many of whom were later sent to Auschwitz) and her witnessing of a massacre of Jews in Poland, which she protested but which didn't dilute her enthusiasm for Hitler. Trimborn's brisk, lucid account gives the director her artistic due while sternly correcting her evasive mythology, and makes for an illuminating look at a fascinating, troubling figure. Photos. (Jan.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.