Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl The Wonderful Movie Review

At the age of 95, Leni Riefenstahl remains a vital, seductive ball of energy. Ray Muller's three-hour documentary about her life and career doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of this frustrating enigma. The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl was somewhat hindered at the start by a major restriction; Riefenstahl would only cooperate with the filmmaker if no opposing viewpoints were presented on camera. Muller agreed, but that didn't stop him from incorporating these viewpoints into his questioning of Riefenstahl. And whenever he tried to do just that, Riefenstahl made her displeasure clear in no uncertain terms. Muller's far-from-frail subject would push him, shove him, yell at him, and, luckily for us, all these moments remain in the movie. The clips from Riefenstahl's early films, both as an actress and as a director, are crisp and clear and her filmmaking entries are razor-sharp. But when it comes to larger issues, namely her precise relationship with the leaders of National Socialism, Riefenstahl's recall softens, blurs, and becomes maddeningly selective. “I NEVER socialized with the Nazis,” she insists right after Muller shows us a still of her dressed to the nines and doing just that. “I never used gypsies from concentration camps for my films,” she cries, a few moments after we've seen the actual bill of lading. And what about the gushing fan letter she sent to Adolf Hitler after one of his many invasions? “Well, of course I was ecstatic, we all were, because we thought that the war was over.” We know, because her surviving colleagues tell us so, that Riefenstahl would do anything, ANYTHING to make Triumph of the Will and Olympia exactly the way she wanted to make them. We've seen both her combative style with Muller as well as her skill as an actress, so we ought to be irritated when she tells us that she was an apolitical artist and that she didn't mean to glorify National Socialism with her powerful propaganda films. Empirical evidence and the weight of history contradict much of what she says. But Riefenstahl has the quality of Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity right after she's shot Walter Neff and tells him that she didn't mean it. There's always an element of doubt with a charming seductress. The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl shows how one of the 20th century's most fascinating woman was able to play both ends against the middle in the 1930s, and was still able to do so well into the 1990s. AKA: The Power of the Image: Leni Riefenstahl; Die Macht der Bilder: Leni Riefenstahl.

1993 180m/C GE D: Ray Muller; C: Michel Baudour. VHS, DVD