Jérôme Bimbenet, a film historian, is the author of the only French biography of Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi regime's filmmaker, portrayed by Andres Veiel in Riefenstahl (2024). He sheds light on this paradoxical figure.

She is credited with systematizing techniques that existed before her, notably the grammar of propaganda. This involves two purely technical camera angles: the high-angle shot and the low-angle shot. In Triumph of the Will, you transition from a high-angle shot of an overwhelming mass of population to a low-angle shot of Hitler all alone, framed with the sky behind him. It's a language that has been widely adopted since. In Olympia, she also systematized the use of inserts, borrowed from Eisenstein: within a wide shot, she inserts close-ups that capture the audience's reactions. Fundamentally, she is credited with breaking away from news reporting by aestheticizing political or sporting events. The way we film sport still owes a great deal to her.

Her work presents two conflicting visions of Hitler. In Olympia, he is humanized because he has the same reactions as the spectators. The film was shot in 1936, just as Germany was trying to join the League of Nations. In Triumph of the Will, he is portrayed as the leader who embodies the German nation. Riefenstahl had even constructed a pit around him to film low-angle shots. I don't think Stalin was ever filmed like that. Hitler was a rock star, he went up to people; Stalin kept his distance. Cinematically, the two demand very different portrayals.

She filmed muscles, feats of strength and self-surpassing efforts. Groups of virile bodies, positioned together, symbolized the body of the German nation, unified and powerful. It's a body that's healthy, blond, athletic, that excludes everything that it itself is not, starting with the Jews. Filming the virile body has always been a way to embody power, from Mussolini to Putin.

He's the foreign body that comes to shatter all racial theories. Contemporary accounts reveal that when Jesse Owens entered the stadium, the German public gave him an ovation. Goebbels actually wanted that cut from the film, but she found it ridiculous: Keeping it in was a necessity, because it proved that Germany was tolerant.

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