Leni Riefenstahl, Nazi Slut

Film reviewer Richard Schickel has posted an incredible review of Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl by Steven Bach over at The Los Angeles Times, perfectly summarizing the quality of a woman who had her moral compass blinded by her pursuit of aesthetic excellence and spent the rest of her life spinning self-justified lies trying to get the world to forgive her.

The review also has a pitch perfect first sentence:

Leni Riefenstahl was a slut. Steven Bach is too graceful a writer and too nuanced a psychologist to summarize this life so bluntly, but, for the reader of his brilliant biography of the Nazi filmmaker, that conclusion is inescapable. We are not speaking primarily of her sexual life, though it was relentlessly busy (her taste ran to hunky jock types and, equally, to men who could advance her career). That epithet applies also to her blind — and blinding — ambition. There was no one she would not try to seduce, in one way or another, in pursuit of fame, fortune and power — including, of course, smitten, impotent Adolf Hitler, who was über alles among her admirers

You know, I know many people who admire Leni Riefenstahl's work, where as I have always felt it to be sickening, not just because Riefenstahl was corrupt and morally loathsome, but because of the maudlin, melodramatic aestheticism of her work.

'Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl' by Steven Bach [Los Angeles Times]