SOURCE: Goldstein, Laurence. “The Spectacle of His Body.” Michigan Quarterly Review 34, no. 4 (fall 1995): 680-702.

In the following review of Olympia, a book of photographic stills from Riefenstahl's film Olympia, Goldstein addresses the question of whether or not Riefenstahl's images from the 1936 Olympics are based on a “fascist aesthetic.”

Olympia is a reprint of the 1937 volume Schönheit Im Olympischen Kampf (Beauty in the Olympic Struggle), a sequence of some 270 stills, or frame enlargements, from Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl's documentary of the Berlin Olympic Games of 1936. The volume coincides with the publication of Riefenstahl's autobiography and with the release in the U.S. of a German documentary, The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl. Now in her nineties, Riefenstahl is not only, as Susan Sontag calls her, “the most interesting, talented, and effective artist of the Nazi era,” but a director whose film on the Olympics has made her an...