THE WONDERFUL HORRIBLE LIFE OF LENI RIEFENSTAHL - fantastic and upsetting at the same time

Before I get into the review, please let me get one thing absolutely, positively crystal clear. In no way am I excusing or condoning anything the Nazis did in World War II. Now I know this may sounds like a no-brainer of a disclaimer, but as I go through this review, I will make some positive statements about Leni Riefenstahl, Nazi sympathizer and propagandist to Hitler and I don't want anyone confusing praise for Leni Riefenstahl the Artist as condoning Adolf, his actions or Nazism in general. Adolf Hitler was, is, and always shall be a mass murdering fuckhead, and I can only hope that he is burning in the deepest, darkest pits of hell.

Now, with the preface out of the way, let us turn our attention to Die Macht der Bilder: Leni Riefenstahl, otherwise known as The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl.

I have to hand it to her; Leni Riefenstahl is a pretty amazing woman: scuba diving at the age of 90, Greenpeace activist, spending years of her life living in Africa with the Nubia tribe, avid mountain climber back in the day when women didn’t do that sort of thing. If not for an eight year period of her life, you'd say she's lived a full active existence that most of us would love to live. Of course the downside - the pink elephant in the room, if you will - was that she had Adolf Hitler on speed dial. No, seriously, she could call up The 'Dolf any time she wanted and chat.

Oh dear.

While it was Joseph Goebbels who ran the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Hitler saw one of Riefenstahl's early movies and became a huge fan (and, depending on if you believe the rumors - lover - but there's no evidence to support that claim). And so Hitler commissioned Riefenstahl to document the upcoming Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, an event that was largely staged for the benefit of her cameras. The end result - The Triumph of the Will. Her next project was Olympia, a documentary on the 1939 Berlin Olympiad, mainly celebrating the power and majesty of the human body. Together, those two (plus a couple more short films here and there) are considered to be the best documentaries* ever put to film. Gorgeously shot with lavish sets and staging, innovated camera techniques well ahead of their time, and deeply influential in the world of film. Hollywood still uses many of the techniques laid down by Riefenstahl to this day.

* The term documentary may not necessarily apply here. While all documentaries are constructed in a way to lead the viewer to the filmmakers way of thinking - and Triumph of the Will certainly fits that bill to a tee - the movie was also constructed from the ground up, with retakes and staged shots and with a level of behind-the-scenes clean up that a normal documentary wouldn’t get. Propaganda? Sure. Documentary? Not so much.

But no matter how you slice it, the subject matter is repugnant and she was best buds with The Most Evil Man Ever for 10 years - and that casts a long, long shadow. And so it falls to Ray Muller and his documentary to deconstruct the occasionally unwilling Leni Riefenstahl, unravel her history, hear her own words, dig deep into her pre and post Nazi career and - most importantly - pose the question can one make art without making a political statement? Is there a line that one can straddle of art versus morality? Can art exist in a vacuum separate from its context?

Despite Riefenstahl obviously well rehearsed answers (she's had 60+ years to practice, after all), Muller and his crew don't mess about. Muller remains objective and neutral, but he does throw the hard fast pitches from time to time. Riefenstahl maintains to this day (well, the 1993 'to this day') that she was never a member of the Nazi Party, that she was an artist first and foremost, that she didn’t infuse her films with a political agenda, thus proving that denial is more than just a river.

We do get a sense from the interviews that Riefenstahl does indeed have a genuine passion for filmmaking - there are some scenes that Muller filmed on the sly showing Riefenstahl bossing around the camera crew to make a specific shot better - and when Muller takes Riefenstahl and some of her old camera crew to some of the locations where she shot Olympia, she comes alive. She goes on about some of the creative ideas, things that didn’t work (attaching cameras to balloons and sending them aloft) and things that worked famously (digging a pit near some of the events to shoot athletes from very low angles).

Frustratingly, Muller doesn’t ask some really basic key questions, like "how did you feel about your fellow Jewish filmmakers being branded, blacklisted - and worse" or asking what *exactly* was her relationship with Hitler? Perhaps these are in the longer, 3 hour cut of the film, but here - man, to have been on Muller's crew at the time.

But even with those unasked questions and other flaws of the film, we still come away with a really good sense of a woman who hasn't quite come to grips with what she did. She's brilliant with this incredible gift for knowing how to edit a film, how to light a shot and where to place the camera for maximum effect, but astounding dumb (or perhaps just willfully blind) to everything going on around her.

THE DVD -
The DVD, released by Kino International, appears to be a straight transfer from their old VHS release. While the A/V quality is clear, it's kind of soft and fuzzy, understandable, considering the documentary was probably shot on 16mm film stock. It gets the job done, and really, we don't need a super sexy, crystal clear picture. The soundtrack is the original German with optional subtitles.

THE EXTRAS -
Nothing - not even a trailer. But then, honestly I can't think of anything else they could include that the documentary didn’t cover?

THE BOTTOM LINE -
Nobody would debate the fact that Leni Riefenstahl is a brilliant filmmaker and has a wonderful eye for editing - however, with great power (or ability) comes great reasonability. But I have to remember that I'm reviewing the documentary about her, not the filmmaker herself. To that end, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl is a brilliant, frank, insightful look into a Wonderful, Horrible artist.