Leni Riefenstahl, known to history as Hitler’s favorite filmmaker, has long enjoyed a remarkable degree of approval in Hollywood. Quentin Tarantino has expressed admiration for her cinematic gifts, and Francis Ford Coppola reportedly dined with her at the first Telluride Film Festival in 1974 where both directors were honored. A 2007 New Yorker magazine piece reported, “George Lucas praised her modernity and acknowledged the indebtedness of Star Wars to [Riefenstahl’s] Triumph of the Will.” Such flattery reflects Riefenstahl’s success after World War II in scrubbing her reputation of complicity with the Nazi regime and a widespread buy-in to her carefully...
Monitoring Antisemitism Intel
