KEY POINTS:
Leni Riefenstahl was a film-maker of extraordinary visual power, one of the great film artists of the 20th century.
She was a woman who achieved brilliance in a man's world, an outsider among insiders. But her work has been described as pure evil and she lived at a time and in a country where her talent was focused on one of the most appalling, destructive and repellent regimes in history.
By helping to create the Hitler myth, she glorified and celebrated Nazism. She made it acceptable, even desirable, for millions of Germans to go along with Hitler. When she heard of Hitler's suicide, she took to her bed and wept.
And for nearly 60 years, she tried to deny or obfuscate her role in supporting Nazism. These denials and lies have made it difficult to assess her relationship to the Third Reich.
But in Steven Bach, Leni Riefenstahl has met her match. He systematically and thoroughly chronicles a life so full of contradictions and denials it almost makes you want to scream.
Riefenstahl's attempt to exonerate herself is well matched by Bach's careful investigation. He has, for instance, managed to track down the first film in which a young Leni appears, semi-naked. Later, she denied its existence. But here it is, from 1925, wonderfully titled Ways to Strength and Beauty.
Bach then shows that her early dancing career was never the "unexpected, incomprehensible, unbelievable success" she later maintained it to be. The reviews she quoted were very partially selected.
The phrase she was often heard to utter was: "I must meet that man." The men she had to meet all helped her in one way or another.
Arnold Fanck was the first to cast Leni in a starring role. She sought out Josef von Sternberg but instead he chose Marlene Dietrich. And, ultimately, there was the Fuhrer himself, to whom she wrote adoring letters from 1932 on.
Riefenstahl's relationship with Hitler has been at the core of her notoriety and the subject of endless denials by her.
It's clear that she was never his girlfriend or sexual partner but what is now abundantly plain is that she really was Hitler's film-maker of choice. It was he who asked her to make the Nuremberg party rally films and the film of the Berlin Olympic Games.
She claimed she had nothing against Jews, but blamed Jewish critics for the failure of her first film, The Blue Light, and removed from the credits the names of her Jewish collaborators when the film was re-released in 1938.
Of the often-quoted saga of using gypsy forced labour in her film Tiefland in 1940, Bach shows that the contract she entered into made clear the terms on which she had access to these "extras" and that she knew they were going back to (at the very least) an uncertain future "in the east".
For many years after the war, the accusations of being Hitler's girlfriend returned, this time to haunt her. After several investigations, she suffered a mental collapse in 1948. But she soon recovered and in the Fifties and Sixties resorted to the courts on more than 50 occasions to threaten anyone who disagreed with her account of events.
In her 60s and 70s, Riefenstahl "discovered" Africa and produced several popular photo albums of the Nuba people of Sudan. Even here, she gained notoriety, annoying several anthropologists by barging in to their space and calling it her own.
This is a fine biography but there are a few quibbles.
Bach never describes clearly the films themselves. Her rally films such as Triumph of the Will fascinate as a filmic expression of the fascist ethic but Olympia is a truly great cinematic achievement. She anticipates much of modern sports filming and some of what she and her team invented was 60 years ahead of its time.
What does emerges from Bach's biography is a character utterly obsessive in achieving her objective, whether it was to "meet that man" or to complete a film project or later to clear her name. Anyone or anything that got in her way was seen as purely destructive. Any alternative account was regarded as treachery or libel.
An artist can never be apolitical or exist outside the political environment in which he or she lives. It's a shame Leni never accepted that and devoted almost 60 years of her life to denying it.
- OBSERVER
* Published by Little, Brown
