Triumph of the Will

Triumph of the Will, directed by Leni Riefenstahl, is the film that I couldn’t remember in Aesthetics this morning. Roger Ebert, in his 1994 review of a documentary about Riefenstahl asks exactly the right question:

“These are by general consent two of the best documentaries ever made. But because they reflect the ideology of a monstrous movement, they pose a classic question of the contest between art and morality: Is there such a thing as pure art, or does all art make a political statement?”