Triumph of the Shill

But neither Bach nor Trimborn finds any convincing evidence that Riefenstahl was Hitler's mistress. When she was in her 80s, she told a friend that she never had sex with Hitler, but "had he asked, it would have been inevitable. I'm so glad he didn't." She also insisted that she treated with kindness the Gypsies who worked on "Tiefland" and that she tried to prevent their being shipped to concentration camps -- an assertion that camp survivors disputed. As for the massacre in Konskie, Riefenstahl was photographed with an expression of horror on her face as the shooting began and claimed that she ended her work on the Wehrmacht documentary in protest against the killings. Bach and Trimborn show, however, that she continued working on it for some time afterward.

Despite these charges, she was given a clean bill by a series of de-Nazification hearings after the war. The notoriety of "Triumph of the Will" and "Olympia" remained, however. In later years, some critics were able to to praise the cinematic power of her images of the 1933 Nuremberg rally and the 1936 Olympic Games while ignoring the contribution they made to the glorification of Hitler and his Reich. Bach and Trimborn point out the quotations from "Triumph" in such movies as "Star Wars" and "The Lion King," and anyone who has seen "Olympia" knows how profound an influence her innovative camera placements and editing tricks have had on the coverage of sports, especially on TV.

As evidence that she had no sympathy with the Nazi theories of racial superiority, Riefenstahl would point to the fact that "Olympia" documented the achievements of non-Aryan athletes, particularly the African American Jesse Owens. Later, she would similarly cite her expeditions among the Nuba in Sudan, her photographs of whom drew critical acclaim. They also drew a shrewd riposte from Susan Sontag, who wrote an essay linking the photographs of the Nuba with the images in "Triumph of the Will" and "Olympia" as examples of "fascist art." Trimborn underscores the point: "In her work before, during, and after the Third Reich, there was as little room for human imperfection as there was in the racial constructs of the 'Aryan master race,' and so there are no old, ill, or disabled Nuba to be found in her published photographs."

Trimborn's biography is in part a response to Riefenstahl's memoirs, published in Germany in 1987. (The American edition, trimmed by 300 pages, appeared in 1993.) She portrays herself as an innocent, apolitical artist who just happened to be roped into the service of an evil regime. Moreover, Trimborn notes, she had begun to earn a kind of sentimental deference for her longevity -- she died in 2003, at age 101. "She became the icon of her own aged vitality," Trimborn puts it. His book is an attempt to forestall the "watering down of the discussion . . . to prevent people from capitulating uncritically and . . . granting the fascinating figure of Leni Riefenstahl more significance than the historical and biographical facts."

Like Trimborn, Bach unearths the buried facts, finds the truth behind the lies. But he also gives us a better sense of the swirling drama of her life than the more ploddingly academic Trimborn does. Bach makes the vivid and exasperating Riefenstahl come back to life and stand before us to be judged. His research is deeper and his sourcing more meticulous than Trimborn's.

Without citing a source, Trimborn tells us that when Riefenstahl visited Hollywood in 1938, one of the few studio heads willing to meet her was Walt Disney, "who was friendly with the Nazis . . . and regularly participated in meetings of the American Nazi party." Bach makes no such assertions about Disney's Nazi sympathies and notes only Riefenstahl's claim that Disney wanted to screen "Olympia" at the studio but decided not to because he was afraid of "a boycott of his films by left-wing union projectionists should the screening become public knowledge." Bach's version is in line with Neal Gabler's recent, authoritative biography of Disney. Gabler asserts that at the time of Riefenstahl's visit, Disney was fairly apolitical. The chief source of the allegations that he attended Nazi meetings, according to Gabler, was disgruntled animator Art Babbitt, who led the bruising strike against the Disney studio in 1941 that converted Disney into a hard-line right-winger.

One thing is clear from both of these books: Whatever her crimes, the ism with which Riefenstahl should most be identified is neither Nazism nor fascism. Trimborn calls it careerism, Bach narcissism. When Jodie Foster approached Riefenstahl about a movie based on her life, which Foster would both direct and star in, Riefenstahl protested that Foster wasn't beautiful enough for the part. Riefenstahl's choice was someone more fierce, glamorous, foolish and irrepressible: Sharon Stone. ·

Charles Matthews, the former book section editor of the San Jose Mercury News, is a writer and editor in northern California.