Leni Riefenstahl
German filmmaker and photographerWikipedia
46
MENTIONS
26
EPISODES
26
PODCASTS
Search complete. 46 mentions across 26 episodes found for "Leni Riefenstahl".
Nov 5, 2026
Paul PfeifferGUEST
Hello, Madeline.
Madeleine BrandHOST
The title of your show, Olympia, is also the title of a famous Olympics chronicler back in the 1930s named Leni Riefenstahl, who worked for the Nazis.
Madeleine BrandHOST
So why did you want to use that same title?
Paul PfeifferGUEST
Yeah, it was less about the movie and its association with the Nazis per se, and more about the nature of Leni Riefenstahl after the fact.
Paul PfeifferGUEST
For the rest of her life after World War II, she claimed a kind of pass for her association and with her creative work for Hitler, saying that ultimately she was only concerned with the aesthetics of of representing subjects like the Olympics, and that therefore her work as an artist was apolitical.
Paul PfeifferGUEST
So in a way, my interest in invoking her through the title was to revisit that debatable argument in our current moment, where the relationship of image-making to politics seems both so potent and yet so slippery.
Chris PlanteHOST
Triumph is the headline at Mediaite.
Chris PlanteHOST
It's the triumph of the will, like Adolf Hitler's filmmaker, Lenny Riefenstahl, made.
Chris PlanteHOST
And now they're going to drive the Jews out of Philadelphia just for openers.
Chris PlanteHOST
And I'm going to share this with you coming up, but it's also a mailbag day.
AshHOST
Oh, it's third for me
JulianHOST
because I covered a finger of God with Lenny and Lucien on Worldwide Panic recently.
JulianHOST
I have to share that in the feed.
JulianHOST
But that was very much like this movie, like Furious Love, but without the added premise of Furious Love.
AshHOST
Yeah.
AshHOST
He is like...
AshHOST
He really is like the Lenny Riefenstahl of like Christian filmmaking.
AshHOST
He's going to
Steve AbramowiczHOST
When Speer designed the Colossal Tribune at Nuremberg's Zeppelin Field, the stage for Hitler's most famous rallies, the fingerprint of Pergamon is unmistakable.
Steve AbramowiczHOST
And when Lenny Riefenstahl films Triumph of the Will in 1935, the propaganda film that defined the Nazis' image, the camera lingers on staircases and platforms built on the altar's blueprint.
Steve AbramowiczHOST
The altar survives the war, barely.
Steve AbramowiczHOST
In 1945, Soviet troops seized it, hauling the treasure east as a trophy of victory.
speaker_0HOST
Examples are apparent in Louis Vuitton's LV Dream from 2022, Amazon's The Glow from 2023, Nike's Dream Crazier from 2019, and countless others.
speaker_0HOST
The Nazi worldview was marketed with elaborate rallies designed by Albert Speer and filmed elaborately by Leni Riefenstahl.
speaker_0HOST
Plays were performed at dozens of open-air amphitheaters to evoke a romanticized Celtic and Germanic past, designed to create a quasi-religious communal experience.
speaker_0HOST
Communist regimes likewise used mass pageantry to market their worldview using futurist, industrial, and militaristic themes.
Tony RobinsonNARRATOR
A new mood in the mountains, perfectly caught by the popular mountain films.
speaker_18GUEST
What can be seen in these films, in the Trinity of Mountain films by Frank, Trenker and Riefenstahl, is of course the struggle between the little man and the huge mountain.
speaker_18GUEST
These films were received with great enthusiasm.
speaker_18GUEST
People wanted idols.
Peter SudermanHOST
It leaves open the possibility that that is what happened to her.
Nick GillespiePANELIST
There's a great 1993 documentary by Ray Mueller, a German director, called A Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, where he actually got to spend a lot of time with her near the end of her life.
Nick GillespiePANELIST
And it's this type of thing where she has constantly been telling different versions of the story of her relationship to the Nazi regime and Hitler in particular.
Nick GillespiePANELIST
And it's incredibly fascinating to watch.
AshHOST
a classic way to draw men for sure
Ivy FoxHOST
yeah um but especially doing it to like um doing it to like a black tribal African man is just like extremely Lenny Riefenstahl you know I don't know what
AshHOST
this means
Ivy FoxHOST
to drop an extremely Lenny Riefenstahl is the German filmmaker who directed the big Nazi film I don't remember what it's called.
AshHOST
Triumph of the Will.
Ivy FoxHOST
Triumph of the Will, yes.
Ivy FoxHOST
Yes, and famously there was a black runner there, and she spent a lot of time filming him and taking pictures of him.
Ivy FoxHOST
And then after she was acquitted, she went to Africa and she took a bunch of pictures and films of various tribes there.
Simon WhistlerHOST
He already lived in a society that discriminated against people like him.
Simon WhistlerHOST
Who cared if Germany was yet another country that didn't like Black folk? Adolf Hitler's Olympics opened on August the 1st with a spectacular ceremony memorably captured on film by real-life Stormfront equivalent Leni Riefenstahl.
Simon WhistlerHOST
But while the games were designed as a showcase for the Reich, Hitler was sure to show only the good parts.
Simon WhistlerHOST
For the whole fortnight, racial laws were quietly relaxed.
Frank RichGUEST
He was not a Nazi.
Frank RichGUEST
Uh, he wasn't a, he was a liberal politically to the extent he had any politics, and he's sort of enticed by Goebbels to make m- movies for, for the, the Nazi, uh, film studio that Goebbels set up, not to make propaganda movies like Leni Riefenstahl, but really to make, like, musical comedies and romantic comedies and drama, costume dramas, and he ends up working for him.
Frank RichGUEST
So they, he wasn't making political films.
Frank RichGUEST
He was not a Nazi.
16 more episodes mention Leni Riefenstahl.
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