Will Jodie Whitewash Leni?

What is it about Leni Riefenstahl? Jodie Foster, the Academy Award-winning actress, is currently developing a movie about the brilliant and ire-inspiring German director, whose 1935 film Triumph of the Will--made at Adolf Hitler's request--has been widely denounced for glorifying the Nazi Party. Foster plans to both produce and star in the film, which she predicts will be the most challenging of her career.

"There is no other woman in the twentieth century who has been so admired and so vilified simultaneously," Foster said in a statement released by her publicist. In an earlier interview, Foster anticipated that she, too, would be vilified. "I'm going to catch shit on that one," she said.

But Foster is not the first filmmaker in town to flirt with Riefenstahl, whose four-hour film on the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, Olympia, was once reviled by Susan Sontag as "fascinating fascism." George Lucas was so intrigued by Riefenstahl that he parodied Triumph of the Will in the final scene of the original Star Wars. Oliver Stone spliced snippets of Triumph of the Will into his 1991 film The Doors, to re-create a Nazi-themed student film supposedly made by Jim Morrison.

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