Writing in The New York Review of Books in 1975, Ms. Sontag said there was a common "esthetic" running through what she called Ms. Riefenstahl's "triptych of fascist visuals" — her early work as an actress in Arnold Fanck's "mountain films," her two principal documentaries and her photographs of the Nuba. "The fascist dramaturgy centers on the orgiastic transactions between mighty forces and their puppets," Ms. Sontag wrote. "Its choreography alternates between ceaseless motion and a congealed, static, `virile' posing."

Leni Riefenstahl, the German filmmaker whose daringly innovative documentaries about a Nazi rally in Nuremberg in 1934 and the Berlin Olympics of 1936 earned her both acclaim as a cinematic genius and contempt as a propagandist for Hitler, died on Monday night at her home in Pöcking, south of Munich. She was 101.

After the defeat of Germany in 1945, Ms. Riefenstahl was pronounced a Nazi sympathizer by the Allies and never again found work as a movie director. But such was the influence of her revolutionary film techniques on subsequent generations of documentary makers that the debate over whether her talent could be separated from her prewar political views continued unabated until her death...