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“... a brain surgeon as well, or have I pinched that from later jokes? By page six of The Sieve of Time Leni Riefenstahl is a competitive swimmer and gymnast, aged 12. On page ten she is designing passenger aircraft for when peace should come (the year is 1918), and drawing up detailed timetables for services to link important German cities. ‘I estimated the ...”

“... like overgrown zeppelins; uniforms and marching that recall the Russian empire or the films of Leni Riefenstahl; battles composed of men crashing into each other, as in the Middle Ages or Chimes at Midnight.Villeneuve’s film, for which he wrote the screenplay with Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth, only takes us a little more than halfway into the narrative ...”

“... serve as a war memorial in its spare time. Fascism in this world is all about size and space, a Leni Riefenstahl movie in another country, its people dwarfed by architecture. There was much talk of the movie’s high style when it first appeared, and it still seems very stylish. Except that now it seems to be all about style: decor, dresses, the ...”

“... reviewed in the LRB by John Bayley (23 July 1992), was handsome; on its front cover is a photo by Leni Riefenstahl of a diver holding a swallow pose, her head about to plunge through the surface of the water. The pictures inside include one by Lartigue of a swimmer sitting on the sand at Houlgate beach: she’s propping herself up with her hands and ...”

“... Adorno and Horkheimer would call the culture industry. This wasn’t Disney’s only sin. When Leni Riefenstahl visited Hollywood in late 1938, Disney was among the few movie industry dignitaries to receive her, treating his guest to a three-hour tour of his studio. Disney and Riefenstahl had recently met at the ...”

“... Tokyo Olympiad) always reveal the athlete’s strain and stress. (Indeed, the extent to which Leni Riefenstahl, in her famous film on the 1936 Olympic Games, chose not to show the athletes in this light is one of the indices that her film is really about politics – the aestheticising of politics in totally ordered mass spectacle and in ...”

“... rampaging across open plains were immensely cinematic and all that, but Griffith wasn’t like Leni Riefenstahl, a recurrent conundrum in our adolescent Life v. Art debates. He hadn’t merely been sucked in by the visuals, which seemed to be the tale with Leni. Griffith had a genuine feeling for what those uniforms ...”

“... announced Confessions of a Nazi Spy, based on a sensational espionage case, in the same month that Leni Riefenstahl visited Hollywood – it was also the month Kristallnacht took place. Gyssling protested to Breen; Breen dutifully passed on his letter to Jack Warner with a rote warning that the film’s certain censorship by foreign governments would harm ...”

“... perfected by the diminutive American Desjardins, and immortalised in the Olympic film sequence of Leni Riefenstahl. I am delighted to find that Esther Williams, the swimming star of Forties and Fifties films, always scornfully refused to wear a bikini: those huge elaborate film displays with grottos, waterfalls and diving platforms featured costumes far ...”

“... Harlan ‘researched’ Jud Süß in the Lublin ghetto; and, although she denied it for decades, Leni Riefenstahl used Roma and Sinti concentration camp inmates as ‘extras’ in an exotic feature evoking the wild freedoms of Gypsy life. Third Reich documentaries used footage of the mentally retarded to urge their sterilisation and euthanasia. And in ...”

“... modern era with cultural adventurism. Onto the marching cadres at a Nuremberg rally as filmed by Leni Riefenstahl one can readily superimpose a Mondrian pictorial grid or a Bauhaus architectural design. The ties between Marinetti’s Futurism and Mussolini’s Fascism have never been questioned. Yet whether it is Goebbels’s appreciation of van ...”

“... F.W. Murnau shot Nosferatu there – the place became a favourite film location – and young Leni Riefenstahl arrived to act in Arnold Fanck’s Holy Mountain. In 1928, Hitler came on a pilgrimage to see this potential bastion against England, accompanied by Goebbels and his doomed niece Geli Raubal. Meanwhile, money poured into the island, and rich ...”

“... that he unerringly places his camera and edits his footage. But the same could be said for Leni Riefenstahl. The glorification of Ford’s simplicity as an artist should not conceal the fact that his message is trite, callous and evasive. Thomson doesn’t like Ford’s ‘message’; he is not persuaded that his movies tell a story against ...”

“... was of Doric buildings and Spartan bodies, whose forms he expected Germans would soon approximate. Leni Riefenstahl, when she discovered that the first runner in the torch relay at the 1936 Berlin Olympics was the olive-skinned Konstantinos Kondylis, replaced him with a more suitable Nordic specimen in Olympia. (In an attempt to lend the Games ancient ...”

“... Ideals. The writer Bud Schulberg helped liberate the death camps and captured the Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Next to J. Edgar Hoover, [Harry] Cohn has the finest surveillance system in the USA. The director Edward Dmytrk probably got it right when he refused to give names and honourably served his prison time and then – surprise! – became ...”