"It makes me sick," said Hitler in 1934, "when people make art under the guise of politics. Either art or politics." This is rubbish, of course, since politics such as his always condition and constrain art, but nobody more fervently believed in the fraudulent notion of an opposition between the two than Leni Riefenstahl. Hitler's belief, after all, was the basis upon which her reputation as a great, if not the greatest, female film director of cinema's first century rests. That she was a willing and unrepentant fascist propagandist to the very end of her long life is forgiven; instead, she is positioned as the epitome of the undeniably significant row of talent which served, almost by accident in her case, an evil ideal.

Riefenstahl was 'Hitler's favourite film–maker' and, latterly, a neo–Nazi icon, the last prominent survivor of the 1000–Year Reich. Although she made few films, her two–part feature on the 1936 Berlin Olympics to all intents and purposes invented the Olympic Games movie. Her coverage of the sixth Nazi Party Congress of 1934 in Nuremberg, [i]Triumph of the Will[/i], is one of the few documentaries to be firmly established in the cinema's canon of great works as, in Susan Sontag's words, "the most successfully, most purely propagandistic film ever made". For Sontag, Riefenstahl is "the one woman who made films that everybody acknowledges to be first rate".

Riefenstahl's admirers are not necessarily fascists. Rather they (and we) are susceptible to the epic image of dehumanised massed humanity which was her stock in trade. Shots of the serried ranks of the party faithful captured on film in Nuremberg by her cameramen are, in this sense, no more and no less fascistic than are the images of serried ranks of chorines as slave girls filmed the same year in Hollywood by Busby Berkeley for [i]Fashions of 1934[/i]. Fascist aesthetics are not an alien imposition on Western taste but a mere expropriation of some aspects of it.

From the Romantics on, we have given a privileged, even amoral, license to the artist as observer. Ruskin, for example, instructed the young painter exactly to maintain the distance between artistic practice and social behavioural norms (including political stances) that so sustained Riefenstahl: "Does a man fall at your feet, your business is not to help him but to note the colour of his lips; does a woman embrace her destruction before you, your business is not to save her, but to watch how she bends her arms."

This lingering 'art–for–art's–sake' justification allowed Riefenstahl to claim she was merely doing her business filming for Hitler. She was just noticing the Führer's lips, or how the SS bent their arms. By this logic, it would not be possible to question Riefenstahl's spectacular images on political grounds, because the politics had been leeched out of her art, clearing her to lay claim to being a great artist, 'an authentic genius'.

Except that she was no such thing. Take [i]Triumph[/i]: Any triumph to be had is not hers but Albert Speer's, the architect who built the gigantic sites and choreographed the thousands of party members. All Riefenstahl had to do was get her newsreel cinematographers, more than 40 of them according to some accounts, to point their cameras at the result. Speer's spectacle was so big that it unavoidably deposited breathtaking images before the lenses of Riefenstahl's hack operators. Her contribution was primarily in the cutting room but her fascistic, fetishistic obsession with parading Nazis destroyed her judgement. Eleven minutes and seventeen seconds of outdoor marching with flags is followed by eighteen minutes and four seconds of outdoor marching without flags, followed by fifteen minutes and ten seconds of the closing ceremony (mostly marching with flags, but indoors this time). I would misrepresent the huge variety of images on offer were I not to mention that the marching was broken up by two speeches from Hitler, one from the leader of the SA (the 14th, 15th and 16th orations in the film) and one closing line from Rudolf Hess, which Riefenstahl had to retake in a Berlin studio because she missed it in Nuremberg: "The Party is Hitler but Hitler is Germany as Germany is Hitler. Hitler. Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!"

The Olympic Games films are admittedly less stultifying, but their most famous sequence — divers cross–cut into a balletic display against a heavily filtered darkening sky — had virtually nothing to do with the event. Riefenstahl staged most of it — not the only sequence with such inauthentic footage — and the film also includes other specially shot pick–ups to cover the inadequacies of the actual coverage, or lack thereof.

[i]Tiefland[/i], Riefenstahl's one feature film, completed after the war, does not redeem her. The film is an hilariously inept pile of hokum about a beautiful Romany princess (played by Riefenstahl herself) which drags and meanders unbearably, when not being simply confused. So, [i]pace[/i]Sontag, it is quite easy to dispute that 'everybody acknowledges' Riefenstahl's stature. Despite widespread opinion, her films are for the most part too repetitive, too prosaically shot, too poorly edited and too turgidly paced to justify the critical acclaim she has enjoyed, even if their fascist content and sensibility is completely ignored as she and those she has apparently duped would want.

Riefenstahl's films then, were undoubtedly propaganda; but did they even work on this level?The evidence that Riefenstahl's work ever influenced anybody to become a Nazi is as hard to find as is the causal relationship between violent crime and violence on the media. It is easier to demonstrate that [i]Triumph of the Will[/i] is the anti–fascist film par excellence, so constantly quarried has it been as the best source of images of Nazi insanity. Even at the time, German audiences showed no liking for it. Propaganda minister Goebbels hated it, (and her too — a fact she played up in her ineffectual post–war de–Nazification process). It offended his basic principle that there was no advantage in having "our SA marching across stage and screen". Not only that, the 16 speeches in the film were all carefully edited to justify, albeit covertly, Hitler's murder of the SA leadership under Röhm. Remnants of the old guard were still being rounded up when the rank–and–file gathered in Nuremberg just weeks later. Goebbels, obviously, had no desire to have them or the millions of less committed Germans reminded of the massacre when the film was released in 1935. All this makes nonsense of the rhetoric which sees [i]Triumph[/i] as a propaganda masterpiece.

The film's sensitivity to the nuances of internal Nazi party stresses — displayed in everything from the editorial decisions about the speech extracts to the different emphases given various Nazi organisations — refutes Riefenstahl's oft repeated claim that she was a political naïf: "I knew nothing of Nazi politics"; as does her support of Hitler years before he came to power. She always made much of the fact that she was not a member of the party, but that was only because Goebbels realised early on that sympathetic artists and media workers were of more use if they seemed to be independent.

For all that she cannot readily be condemned for the evil impact of her work, nevertheless she was guilty of far more than passive complicity with Nazism. For [i]Tiefland[/i], she used Romany extras transported from a holding camp in Austria and, after filming, returned them to the concentration camp system where most were murdered — another fact she always vigorously denied. Some of the children who were used in the film, though, did survive and, for her 100th birthday, gave her an unexpected present: they summoned her to court for the German crime of Holocaust denial.