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== Life Before ''Triumph'' ==

Muller's full-length documentary consists of a compilation of in-depth interviews with Leni Riefenstahl where the subject projects herself as a victim of the Third Reich. It must be remembered that Riefenstahl spent most of her life engaged in creating films and was herself an accomplished actress who spent a long career portraying various characters, especially outcasts and heroines. She began her career on the stage and stated in the documentary that becoming a star was “intoxicating.” It can be inferred from her words that she achieved a euphoric feeling upon receiving widespread adulation from the general public. How then must she have felt when she discovered that Adolph Hitler also admired her artistic talents and physical strength?

Riefenstahl had done her own physical work in the Alpine films she made with Arnold Fanck in the 1920s. When she directed her own mountain film in 1932, ''The Blue Light'', she maintained the theme of mountaintops as being a mystical goal with the villagers below being the dispensable mass populace. The mountains not only represented majestic beauty, but were also seen as powerful and dangerous. As an artist, Riefenstahl was acutely aware of how to juxtapose the supremacy of the mountains and Adolph Hitler in her infamous 1935 production, ''Triumph of the Will''. By employing certain camera angles and specific lighting techniques, the director enhanced the image of Hitler and made him comparable to the perception of a mountain; powerful, mystical, and dangerous. Her movies prior to this Nazi propaganda film were made to satisfy her artistic talents and her audience's ideas of fantasy, whereas in ''Triumph'', she catered to Hitler's fantasy and played a part in his mythical existence.