Riefenstahl was critically praised for writing, producing, and directing [The Blue Light], but her real fulfillment came from playing the role of the young woman who has no contact with the real world and who is, therefore, destroyed by it. This unhappy story expresses Rienfenstahl's belief that the artist must, at all costs, remain independent of the material world. In her own life, she has achieved artistic freedom, but at a great cost. Like Junta, she had her own intuitive feelings about nature and was destroyed by her naive disregard of the real world around her, the world she set out to avoid. (p. 9)

[Day of Freedom-Our Armed Forces (Tagder Freiheit-Unsere Wehrmacht), a beautifully photographed and edited film,] vaguely resembles Triumph of the Will, but it is little more than a skillful assemblage of factual footage and lacks any of the thematic or psychological interest of its famous...