Olympia represents in some ways a quantum leap, with Riefenstahl using unheard-of techniques to fix the reality of the moment onscreen. To photograph a footrace, she stretched supine in a wagon, holding a small camera and was frenziedly pushed alongside the runners. For pole-vaulters, she hid in a hole and shot them from below. Some of her ideas were impossible to implement -- for example, her desire to be catapulted through the air with a camera in her hand. She spent months editing Olympia and incorporated a variety of strategies -- including disguised reverse shots, forced perspectives, and rhythmic editing -- that breathe life into the film. Olympia, and later her series of photography books on African tribes like the Nuba, brought charges from Susan Sontag and other intellectuals that Riefenstahl’s cult of the (male) body beautiful represented an unmistakable fascist ideal. However, her portrayals of the physical beauty of black tribesmen (shown liberally in clips throughout this film) would appear to put her entirely at odds with Hitler’s pathological race theories.

The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl tries to make sense of a complex figure, and in its three hours-plus running time, it succeeds as much as can be expected with the mysterious Riefenstahl. In spite of her extreme age, she is as articulate and powerful as ever, and the film provides a rare opportunity for an extended look at her, with fascinating if not unpredictable results.

Hints of a defensive, dictatorial personality emerge in her dealings with the filmmakers, particularly when she is asked about her political views, her feeling about a "fascist aesthetic." She is also very domineering in her dealings with their shooting methods, arguing about set-ups and shots, complaining bitterly when they ask her to walk and talk at the same time ("I have never done this!" she objects). On the other hand, all directors are dictators -- such behavior is often practically admired in men, as the popular image of auteurs like Stroheim or Sternberg in jodhpurs, perhaps carrying a whip along with their bullhorn, shows. And it’s surely unrealistic for director Müller to expect a visualist like Riefenstahl not to comment on the visual aspects of a film about her life.

Riefenstahl emerges as in some ways a timeless, almost supernaturally powerful character -- also tragic and possibly self-deluded. Perhaps the same internal forces that made her create such powerful, lasting art render her incapable of admitting even decades after the fact that she was, at least for a while, a willing architect in the creation of Nazi mythology.

On the other hand, the inevitable question arises: Were Riefenstahl a man, would she have been treated as venomously? It isn’t as if we stop looking at movies with "charming" Maurice Chevalier because he was racist and pro-Nazi, or at actor Ward Bond because he supposedly enjoyed beating up suspected Communists in the 1950s. Elia Kazan has been forgiven by many for helping ruin the lives of numerous others during the 1950s HUAC hearings, and he, like Riefenstahl, has never remotely apologized for being complicit with fascist historical forces. The excuse for Kazan is that his films are treasurable works of popular art, and some no doubt felt that in such a situation, given the choice between adhering to principle and not working/eating or becoming a snitch and maintaining a career, they would do what he did. Riefenstahl’s art is by contrast almost too remote to cause such easy identification, and the fact that she was a woman working unquestionably as would a man of the time makes her achievement, in the eyes of many, practically blasphemous. Of course, her films will be remembered and studied long after Riefenstahl and her army of critics are gone.