Nothing tests Keats's adage that beauty is truth more severely than the work of the Third Reich's leading filmmaker, whose notorious documentaries Triumph of the Will
and Olympia
cloaked the hideousness of Nazi Germany in grand, gorgeous, emotionally overpowering imagery. In this soberly critical biography, film historian Trimborn analyzes the brilliant techniques with which Riefenstahl "replace[d] politics with aesthetics" and made Hitler "an almost erotic object" to the adoring German masses. (Her mystically monumental style, he notes, lived on to influence Hollywood blockbusters like Star Wars
and The Lion King
, as well as Mick Jagger's stage shows.) He also dissects the lesser falsehoods Riefenstahl propagated to downplay her close relationship with Hitler and complicity with the Nazis. He reprints examples of her fawning praise of the fuehrer and reconstructs her erasure of a Jewish collaborator from the credits of one of her films, her use of Gypsies interned in a forced labor camp as extras (many of whom were later sent to Auschwitz) and her witnessing of a massacre of Jews in Poland, which she protested but which didn't dilute her enthusiasm for Hitler. Trimborn's brisk, lucid account gives the director her artistic due while sternly correcting her evasive mythology, and makes for an illuminating look at a fascinating, troubling figure. Photos. (Jan.)
