‘The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl’ (NR)

When her country's charismatic leader singled out film director Leni Riefenstahl to record his party's upcoming political rally, it seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime. But the leader was Adolf Hitler. The rally was the Nuremberg Party Congress of 1934. And the film Riefenstahl made -- "Triumph of the Will" -- was soon to be vilified as the most effective Nazi propaganda of all time.

In the overly long, but fascinating documentary, "The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl," directed by Ray Mueller, Riefenstahl steadfastly refuses to accept this responsibility. To hear it from this attractive, robust woman (who will be 92 in August), Riefenstahl was an apolitical pawn.

For one thing, the war was -- for her -- nothing but an occupational bother. Before the Hitler summons, Riefenstahl had danced for renowned theatrical director Max Reinhardt. As a film actress, she had starred in a series of popular, mountain-climbing dramas. She had just made "The Blue Light," a film she starred in, edited, directed, produced and co-wrote.

As for "Triumph of the Will," a brilliantly shot and edited movie that makes Hitler and his steel-jawed minions look like the Wagnerian future of mankind, she considers it pure documentary. She did not stage the event, she points out. She did not create the content of the speeches. She recorded the event simply as an artist.

Riefenstahl allows that she was "appalled and confused to have lived through that period." She was never a Nazi Party member, she insists, and knew nothing about the Holocaust until after the war. But when Hitler's troops marched into Paris in 1940, she sent him an effusive telegram: "Your deeds exceed the power of human imagination. They are without equal in the history of mankind. How can we [the German people] ever thank you?"

When Mueller reminds her of this, Riefenstahl replies she was merely expressing relief that the war was over. More absurdly, she denies recruiting Gypsies from a Salzburg concentration camp for "Tiefland," a non-propagandistic drama she made that required Mediterranean faces. But the evidence -- as an excerpt of the movie clearly proves -- appears otherwise.

"The Wonderful, Horrible Life" also deals with "Olympia," Riefenstahl's other famous film. A government-commissioned, multi-camera document of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, it has influenced the way sports has been covered (right through ABC's "Wide World of Sports") ever since. "Olympia," which bestows godlike status on its athletes, also has been described as the articulation of a fascistic aesthetic. Divers seem to ascend to the heavens. Naked javelin throwers -- grandiosely framed against the sky -- hurl spears into the cosmos. But again, Riefenstahl insists, she was just trying to make an exciting movie.

Speaking of which, Mueller's film -- at 183 minutes -- begs for radical editing. Mueller never met an interesting point he couldn't repeat -- and he doesn't know when to quit a scene. He also favors shots of himself interviewing -- or bickering with -- Riefenstahl, as if this film is about two great subjects, not one.

Although the movie (divided into two parts) provides interesting details about Riefenstahl's postwar life, it does so long-windedly. Reduced to a cinematic pariah, Riefenstahl spent 20 years in the artistic doldrums. But in the 1960s, she moved to Africa to live with -- and film -- the Nuba tribes of southern Sudan. She published a book of tribal photographs in 1973, but her 3,000 meters of film footage remained unedited.

In the movie's flabbiest section, Mueller shows Riefenstahl directing an as-yet-unfinished underwater sea epic during the 1970s. It's tedious to watch, as Riefenstahl scrutinizes meters and meters of fish footage. However, one scene, in which an underwater, scuba-geared Riefenstahl sensually strokes an undulating sting ray (whose tail could instantly kill her) is almost worth the wait.

"The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl" is in English and German with subtitles.