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“... was to select documentary films to be sent to Latin America, but he also, more notoriously, edited Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) with a view to turning its effect on its head. Heroic grandeur would become petty parading. The odds of success must have seemed good. Buñuel was a great practitioner of Sergei Eisenstein’s doctrine that ...”

“... solved the problem by applying proto-Taylorian Mancunian production techniques. Everyone from Leni Riefenstahl and Busby Berkeley to today’s Japanese precision walkers treads the path established by the Tiller Girls. In 1923, the Hungarian artist and Bauhaus teacher László Moholy-Nagy made a collage called Slide in which Tiller-like dancers ...”

“... Star Wars film (1977), with its chilling echoes of the award scene at Nuremberg as recorded by Leni Riefenstahl. Political agendas of stunningly different sorts were woven into the Robin Hood films, and Knight helps us to see each in the context of its time. In the Douglas Fairbanks silent Robin Hood (1922), Robin’s decision to return from the ...”

“... there: on one’s own college campus, lecturing on Barthes or Canetti or Benjamin or Tsvetaeva or Leni Riefenstahl. (And who were they? One pretended to know, then scuttled around to find out.) She was our very own Great Man. If there was ever going to be a Smart Woman Team then Sontag would have to be both Captain and Most Valuable Player. She was the ...”

“... a version of the ‘triumph of the will’, via Mao, but ultimately stemming from Schopenhauer and Leni Riefenstahl rather than Lenin. Before they learnt better, British troops in the world wars used to think each one of them was worth three Germans – or occasionally, stretching it a bit, five. Pol Pot popularised the demented idea that any true Khmer ...”

“... of it: with the writings of Walter Benjamin above all; with European cinema, from Murnau through Leni Riefenstahl to Michael Haneke; with Freud’s Moses and Monotheism; with mid to late Derrida; with Barthes, the decoder of the close-up face in cinema and the figure in the still photograph. She shows us the swaying edifice of Weimar as it goes ...”

“... flesh out the myth – which is then taken to a new level, as erotic as political, by photography, Leni Riefenstahl among the Nuba and the increasing popularity of National Geographic. In the postcolonial era, and especially with the second civil war, aid workers, almost all of them white, take over, courageously letting themselves be dropped off in some ...”

“... Fascism’, Sontag’s dismantling of the cult, canonisation and revisionist whitewashing of Leni Riefenstahl, struck like lightning when it first appeared in the New York Review with its bravura last sentence – ‘The colour is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy ...”

“... with potential interviewees with potential buyers of portraits or art’. Guests included Leni Riefenstahl, who may have helped strengthen Warhol’s stomach as he set out to woo the shah of Iran and his family. ‘The empress paid almost $200,000 for a dozen portraits of herself,’ Gopnik reports. But working with dictators and their wives ...”