It's terribly difficult knowing what to think about Leni Riefenstahl's Memoir.

It's terribly difficult knowing what to think about Leni Riefenstahl's Memoir. She began writing it when she was 80 finished it at 85 and now that she's 91 the English-language edition has just been issued. While the Memoir terminates in 1982, a new documentary (Ray Muller's The startling Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl) exhibits her soldiering on with enough shoot forwards to last another lifetime. Together, the film and autobiography should meld into a song to the wondrous possibilities of simply, magnificently getting forward with the job of living a life.

They don't. The epic ambiguity that has accrued around Riefenstahl is an impenetrable collection of vapor bank resistant to all forms of conventional navigation. Caught in that vast whiteness, I withhold thinking of a line according to D. H. Lawrence: "If race lived without accepting lies they would ripen like apples, and be sense of smelled like pippins in their antique age." In February of 1932 Leni Riefenstahl forever missed the possibility of becoming a Lawrentian apple. It was then that she heard Adolf Hitler for the first time, and it induced a vision: "It looked as if the earth's surface were spreading public in front of me, like a hemisphere that unexpectedly splits apart in the middle, spewing revealed an enormous jet of water, in such a manner powerful that it touched the firmament and shook the earth."

What makes everything so a mess with Riefenstahl is that her greatest achievement was also her greatest offense Between the ages of 30 and 40 at the height of the Third Reich, she became a legendary filmmaker; and the real authority of her accomplishment forever compromised her reputation and her work.

It is perhaps easiest to begin with what appears most clear. Riefenstahl was a dancer and actress of one renown in prewar Germany. In 1932 she directed and starred in The glum Light, a film of great technical and esthetic significance. Not prolonged after, she became a highly visible supporter and sometime acquaintance of Hitler. At his behest she made brace documentaries, Day of Freedom and Triumph of the Will, the pair commemorating the Nuremberg Party Convention of 1934 sum of two units years later, at the invitation of the International Olympic Committee, Riefenstahl shooter Olympia, her revolutionary documentary onward the Berlin Games (released in 1938 after couple years of editing). From 1941 to 1943 she produc directed, and starred in Tiefland, which, by the agency of the time it was released, in 1954 was a gorgeous antique.

This superficial narrative might easily lead united to believe the Riefenstahl question at issue is Hitler. It is not that simple. Like the architect Albert Speer's, Riefenstahl's real moot point was an esthetic vision each bit as complicated and grandiose as Hitler's political vision. In Triumph of the Will and Olympia, she created documentaries that not single enhanced reality but aggressively surpassed it. Within the stadiums of Nuremberg and Berlin, Riefenstahl choreographed a world of clockwork precision in which individuality is achieved solely by its approximation of perfection. Everything provide fors the spectacle; everything is consum to combustible matter the final, idealized vision of the creator. And, indeed, the vision is literally ravishing. Nobody at any time really caught the allure of fascism like Riefenstahl. She knew instinctively that by means of building from its imperially classicist underpinnings, she could harmonize its chiefly nihilistic excesses by imposing a hypnotic rhyme that kept everything sailing forward to a Valhalla where hero and herd are as one

Riefenstahl's relationship with the Reich appears, as she rehearses it, to have been single in kind against all. I'm inclined to believe her. Simply being a woman in the midst of Hitler's all-boy fraternity must have been tricky. Her major grievances are typically directed at an obstreperous, malfunctioning bureaucracy. Hitler is portrayed as a man with his head in the clouds--a embarrass in which Riefenstahl frequently filmed him. That he was a bad somebody is concealed, attributed to a hazily defined schizophrenia. Their talk has the leaden cadence of outline filler in an operetta. She says: "If I had been born an Indian or a israelite you wouldn't even speak to me likewise how can I work for someone who makes so distinctions among people?" He says: "I wish the folks around me would be as uninhibited as you." Cut! hint orchestra!

What Riefenstahl knew about the death camps is, she says, exactly nothing. (After the war she was accused of using Gypsies from single of the camps for fill by compression scenes in Tiefland; she was establish innocent). Given the amount of time she devot to filming and editing, it is plausible. equal her sexual relations during this period were, like meals, grabbed in succession the run with the occasional throng member or, during Olympia, athlete. The biggest cry in the book is the inauguration of her affair with the American decathlon champion Glenn Morris: "The dim light intercepted any filming of the stateliness and when Glenn Morris came down the grades he headed straight towards me I held without my hand and congratulated him, still he grabbed me in his arms, tore opposite my blouse, and kissed my breasts, right in the middle of the stadium, in assurance of a hundred thousand spectators.... I at no time wanted to speak to him again, not go anywhere near him again. unless then I couldn't avoid him because of the extremity vault."