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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.

Pierre de Coubertin was responsible for the founding of the modern Olympics. Its antique ideals were consecrated in a painting by his father, an artist of the French salon, who pictured modern sportsmen from Paris paying tribute to Athena. The fourth chapter analyses the most notorious visual artwork concerning the games, Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia. Promoted as a documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, but enjoying state patronage from the fascist regime, the status of this film is highly contested in the fields of history and film studies. Here, it is argued that the film evinces attitudes not incompatible with, although not reducible to, Coubertin’s own conflicted views on modernity. This is contrasted with László Moholy-Nagy’s abortive project to film the same games, before a consideration of Gustav Klucis’ constructivist designs for the Soviet response to the Olympics, the Spartakiada, and other constructivist engagements with sport in light of the Soviet emphasis on fizkultura (physical culture).

Pursuing her study of the creation of the Nazi empire’s neo-Roman imaginary, the author analyzes Leni Riefenstahl’s Prologue in Images and essays by Gottfried Benn. She argues that these artists participated in the resurrection of the Greco-Roman past using modernist techniques. In both cases, the act of visually imagining the ancient Greco-Roman world is tied to a fortified imperial gaze that seizes its objects. The author complements her reading of Riefenstahl’s introduction to her film about the 1936 Olympics with an analysis of the architecture of the Olympic sports complex, drawing attention to the skene or scene-building of the outdoor theater. She also puts Benn’s essays in the context of debates about Sparta. In both cases, ancient Greek society and art are refashioned to conform to the Roman image.

This chapter examines how cable cars, new Alpine highways, and mountain films (Bergfilme) popularized the Alps in the 1920s and 1930s. The Alps, once a means to escape from the masses, had become a sanctuary for the masses during the interwar years. The number of visitors to the mountains increased exponentially, aided by the Zugspitzbahn and cable cars. Engineering marvels, most notably the Grossglockner High Alpine Road designed by Franz Wallack, etched new contours on the landscape. Arnold Fanck directed the majority of the popular mountain movies with respected mountaineer Luis Trenker as his star actor and Leni Riefenstahl as his leading lady. The films encouraged thousands to seek out the mountains. Such mass consumerism disgusted most die-hard climbers. Reactions varied, but nearly every response attempted to somehow change consumption patterns and scale back tourism in the Alps. Male chauvinists correlated the growing presence of women to the invasion of machines and condemned both. But some alpinists saw themselves engaged in a national effort against the forces of cultural disintegration and encouraged traffic. Hardcore mountaineers became increasingly reactionary and sought extremist solutions to the dilemmas of mass tourism.

This chapter traces the history of Arnold Fanck’s S.O.S Eisberg (1933), a Hollywood-Germany co-production released in separate versions in English and German by Universal Studios. Starring Leni Riefenstahl, the film tells the story of a scientific expedition lost in Greenlandic ice fjords. Körber considers the film in relation to the rugged, purity-of-nature Bergfilm (‘Mountain film’) genre and examines its proto-Nazi leanings, drawing on Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler (1947) and Susan Sontag’s ‘Fascinating Fascism’ (1975). She also analyses Fanck’s perhaps spurious claims about the authenticity of his representation of the Arctic, which were used as promotional material for the film, and signals their connection to the close collaboration with Knud Rasmussen, who was filming The Wedding of Palo (1934) in Western Greenland at the same time.

Iegor Gran’s two humorous novels poke fun at the self-righteousness, opportunism, anti-humanism, catastrophism, and humorlessness of some environmentalists. More an ecoheretic than an ecosceptic, Gran provides a Rabelaisian and Voltairean critique of environmentalists who take themselves too seriously. O.N.G! recounts a ridiculous war between two NGOs forced to share office space. Despite their lofty ideals, everyday life proves too difficult to manage, and their relationship degenerates into a bloody war over such trifles as parking and bulletin board space. L’Écologie en bas de chez moi is above all a critique of Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s 2009 environmental film Home, which Gran denounces as paternalistic and opportunistic, comparing it unfavorably to Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, a documentary about Hitler’s 1934 Nuremberg Rally. Both are propaganda films featuring aerial photography and stirring music, but Gran finds Riefenstahl much more creative.

Immediately upon coming to power, the Nazis brought the German film industry under their direct command. The 1936 feature film Ewiger Wald (“Eternal Forest”) shows the Nazis’ view of the cycle of life and death in nature and among the people and culminates in the Nazi era. The film’s first historical scene is the Roman defeat in the Teutoburg Forest. Uniquely, it is the Volk, not Arminius, who beat back the invaders with the help of patriotic nature. Rarely has history been presented on screen with such blatant distortion. In its portrayal of Romans and Germans, Ewiger Wald harks back to Die Hermannschlacht of 1924, the subject of the preceding chapter. Ewiger Wald also parallels the Nazis’ greatest self-glorification on screen, Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935). The chapter closes with a discussion of Nazi views about ideological uses of history in films and spectatorship of historical cinema.