Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia

The opening sequence of Olympia makes explicit the Nazi party's attempt to link it's body ideals to those of antiquity

Much has been written about Leni Riefenstahl's role in crafting the visual rhetoric of the Nazi party, but few sequences so clearly articulate the ideology of neo-classicism found in the body ideals of the Aryan superman. In this opening sequence, Riefenstahl literally envisions Greek statues coming to life, dissolving into the bodies of German athletes performing feats of strength. The sequence is also deeply erotic, with naked or nearly naked images of both sexes seamlessly blending movements that are both dancelike and athletic. These poetic sequences of "universal beauty" allowed Olympia to be among the least reviled of Riefenstahl's films among documentary historians who are allowed to celebrate the film's technical innovations because of the (at least partially) submerged Nazi ideology.