SOURCE: Steyn, Mark. “Cautionary Tale.” Spectator 293, no. 9137 (20 September 2003): 64.

In the following obituary, Steyn asserts that Triumph of the Will is as artificially fabricated as any big-budget Hollywood movie, observing that the film expresses the subordination of the individual.

Leni Riefenstahl was a brilliant cinematographer and editor who could compose and edit anything, except, in the end, her own life. If only she'd been able to snip one problematic decade out of her 101 years, we'd know her as a game old gal who in her sixties went off to live with an African tribe, in her seventies learned to scuba dive, and at the age of 98 survived a plane crash in the Sudan. There was a documentary made about her a few years back in which she's seen getting off the boat at the end of a day's diving. The captain and her friend Horst walk up the pier...