SOURCE: Sklar, Robert. “The Devil's Director.” Cineaste 20, no. 3 (1993): 18-21.

In the following essay, Sklar asserts that Riefenstahl's pretenses to artistic filmmaking are at the core of the ongoing controversy surrounding her work.

The man who directed the first Nazi fiction feature, S. A. Man Brand (1933), found steady work as a filmmaker in postwar West Germany. The director of Baptism of Fire (1940), a documentary celebrating the Luftwaffe's aerial triumph over Poland, also made films after World War II. The man who directed the notoriously anti-Semitic Jud Süss (1940) twice went on trial after the war for crimes against humanity, but won acquittal and resumed his career—along with just about every other German director who made films during the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945.

The director of Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938), on the other hand, still vital and vibrant in her ninety-second year, has not made a film...