Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl by Steven Bach - BOOK REVIEW - By Richard Schickel - Los Angeles Times - calendarlive.com (via aidaily):
With "Triumph of the Will" (about the Nazi party rally at Nuremberg in 1934 -- Albert Speer, Hitler's kept architect, was essentially her art director, the occasion was staged with her camera positions always in mind, and the film was financed entirely with government funds) and "Olympiad" (about the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games), Riefenstahl, it's not an exaggeration to say, created almost every significant visual image that we now retain of National Socialism in all its evil pomp. ..The former offers heroic shots of young Aryans larkishly bathing in their encampments before assembling into impressive masses, their individuality welded into anonymous yet strangely glamorous menace..
Later, when the Thousand-Year Reich turned out to have a rather shorter life span than its propagandists predicted and she lived rather longer than normal (she died at the age of 101 in 2003), she devoted most of her energy to litigious self-justification of her years as Hitler's willing executioner of imagery.
The daughter of a plumber, Riefenstahl began her public life as an "interpretive" dancer in the Modernist vein and then did a turn (which she later denied) dancing semi-nude in the film "Ways to Strength and Beauty." She achieved eminence first as a star, then as a director, of "mountain films," a popular, peculiarly Germanic genre in which wild, primitive people dare to scale beautiful yet menacing Alpine peaks, achieving death always? no... and transfiguration at the end of their exertions. Siegfried Kracauer (a mere critic at the time, not yet the eminent historian of German film he would become) saw in these films something "symptomatic of an antirationalism on which the Nazis could capitalize."
...beautiful and terrifying...

Bach is determined to present her coolly, ironically, without loss of his own moral vector. What emerges is a compulsively readable and scrupulously crafted work, not unlike Klaus Mann's "Mephisto," that devastating novel about the actor Gustav Gründgens, another of Hitler's several semiconscious cultural ornaments-apologists. I do not believe this fundamentally ignorant woman ever perceived cf Heidegger the inherent evil in Nazism. Her anti-Semitism was less virulent than reflexive — the common coin of many realms (including the United States) at the time. The disguise she wrapped around her ambition was that absurd, often unpleasant and peculiarly European one of the Grand Maestro, all art for art's sake — hysteria and narcissism mixed with contempt for her collaborators, grandiose graciousness to her groveling fans and patrons, and a talent that was all technique, no soul. huh- Why Riefenstahl's work would continue to impress critics — even Sontag, Riefenstahl's most implacable critical enemy, calls them the two greatest documentaries ever made — is a mystery, given the corruption of their origins and the fact that they are visibly not documentaries at all.
At the end of her life, Riefenstahl discovered a primitive African tribe, the Nubia, and found in them the noble savagery again cf Heidegger she had celebrated in the Alpine films. She published a beautiful, disturbing picture book about them which had a certain rehabilitative effect on her reputation — though not for Bach or this reader.

nicely written. Richard Schickel is a film critic for Time and the author of many books, including "Elia Kazan: A Biography" and "The Essential Chaplin."