"Hitler's favorite filmmaker." That's not how Leni Riefenstahl wanted to be remembered. No, she preferred a more self-serving myth – that she was "only an artist," perhaps a bit naïve, who took on filmic "assignments" from the Third Reich not out of support for Nazi ideology but because, well…

Leni Riefenstahl, known to history as Hitler's favorite filmmaker, has long enjoyed a remarkable degree of approval in Hollywood. Quentin Tarantino has expressed admiration for her cinematic gifts, and Francis Ford Coppola reportedly dined with her at the first Telluride Film Festival in 1974 where…

Curiously, for a woman who directed a movie called Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl seemed to lose control over her own person when she first met Adolf Hitler. "I had hot sweats," the German filmmaker said of seeing the future Führer speak at a rally in 1932. "I was somehow captured, as by…