There’s a lot less ambiguity about Riefenstahl’s previous film. Helene Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl’s most famous accomplishment is Triumph of the Will, a horribly gripping account of the Nazi Party’s 1934 Nuremberg rallies. The film is so dynamic, so compelling, so grand and ambitious, that it ranked at number 19 in a 2014 Sight & Sound magazine poll of cinema’s best documentaries. It is also, on the other hand, a monumental piece of Nazi propaganda. Opening with a caption trumpeting “German rebirth”, Triumph of the Will goes onto imply that Hitler is nothing less than the godlike saviour of Germany. Not that Riefenstahl ever admitted that this was what she intended. “Everything in it is true,” she later protested. “And it contains no tendentious commentary at all. It is history. A pure historical film.

‘Total control’

The Führer was so delighted by this “pure historical film” that he gave Riefenstahl an even bigger, more expensive commission. Olympia Part One: Festival of the Nations and Olympia Part Two: Festival of Beauty wouldn’t just chronicle Berlin’s Olympics, they would be a meditation on everything the Games stood for, and everything Germany could achieve. “Olympia broke the mould of Olympic films in many ways,” writes David Goldblatt in his new book about the Olympics, The Games. “First, Riefenstahl had a degree of active support from the organizers... that no other film-maker had acquired. She had total access and total control, and an immeasurably large crew and budget. Second, in terms of technological and cinematic sophistication, there was no comparison.”