“1934-35: There has likely been no more serious lapse of judgment on the part of the European cultural intelligentsia and artistic avant-garde, including among the political Left, than the reception paid Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. Easily the most renown and lauded of propaganda films in history, it is also one so influential in terms of cinematic technique and formal organization, that its innovations can still be seen in film, video, even commercial advertising today. For such aesthetic excellence, the cultural establishment accorded Triumph of the Will lavish praise and the top honors of the day—including the 1935 Venice Biennale gold medal and the 1937 Grand Prix at the Paris World Exhibition. It has been said that the aura of aesthetic grandeur which Riefenstahl projected onto the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, and of Hitler’s personal charisma as a leader, was so influential, she was in great degree responsible not only for the selling of the Third Reich to the German people, but in winning for it allies and admirers around the world.”

— Diego Rivera at MoMA Makes Us Ask, What Happened to the Radical Left in Art? - The Huffington Post