Nuance and ambiguity are by their very nature hard to grasp.

I don't see how these reviewers didn't understand that she was all of these things. Sure she was, but the point is how will she be remembered? Will all of her lies actually result in her legacy being cleansed of it's deserved stains?

We can see that she was both things, but the question of which is primary in the history of both politics and film is an important one.

You could say Hitler was a genius too, but who would?

Hitler was a military genius. Morally, a travesty, but as a military power, he effectively achieved his aims. His aims were wrong, but at least he didn't pretend he was defending or liberating anyone as today's governments and leaders do. What Bush obviously forgets when he styles himself a 'war president' is that war is killing. Malum in se.

Leni Riefenstahl was a genius and an innovator. So she believed her own propaganda, but what was happening in Germany at the time was unprecedented. Of course she denied things well into her old age- she didn't have an outside perspective, and she probably never was able to accept the horrific reality of what really happened in Germany.

Like D.W. Griffith, a racist, but film and the assemblage of film as we know it today would not exist if it weren't for Griffith.

Examine Riefenstahl's 'Olympia', and note the coverage of Jessie Owens. Jessie Owens, being black, goes against Hitler's ethnic beliefs, and yet he's been cut into the same film with this black American athlete that the German audiences were shown to have adored.

ahem: correction. Okay, so, she was involved with the military and with Goebbels and Himmler, and she's a hypocrite, but her films are brilliant.

Her films are pretty, not brilliant. Yes she had a great eye, but beyond that? Perhaps she had a marketers eyes for icons, in other words playing on the basest and thus most common stereotypes in human thinking. That's not particularly brilliant. She was gifted as a visual artist. And she had good marketing sense. Big deal. Oh and she happened to have lived at about in time where both could be exploited by fascism in service of Hitler's cult of the soil-body-race. If she hadn't been Hitler's film-maker she would have been a minor footnote to German expressionism and documentary films.
If I had to save say 25 films from cinema from it's beginning to the end of WWII, none of hers would come close to making that list. Griffith's Broken Blossoms would make anyone's list. He had his bad qualities, but he had a real genius for film Folks don't watch Griffith because he was a racist. No one watches Riefenstahl unless they have been drawn to her by a morbid fascination for watching humans under Hitler's spell.

Annie,
The reviewers saw (through) her quite clearly.
Now, it would be nice if you didn't mistake genius-for-self-promotion for genius.

Victoria @ 3: Hitler was a military genius? That's a stretch. I could go into his micro-management that infuriated his professional officer corps (the true geniuses at the German military's disposal), or his steadfast refusal to ever retreat, even where strategically obvious, or a thousand other well-known critical flaws Hitler had as a commander-in-chief, but I can boil it all down in to one word: RUSSIA. Are you instead trying to say he was a realist when it came to war? Because that makes some sense, I grant.

Also, Flamingbanjo @ 1: "Nuance and ambiguity"?!? In this thread, you only get ONE, NO CONJUNCTIONS! Nuance OR ambiguity, pick one or I will be confused.

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