A small news item about Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin caught my eyerecently. It seems that Leni Riefenstahl, the master propagandist of theThird Reich, had liked one of his films so much she’d sent him ahand-written fan letter. Maddin had the letter framed.

It struck me: suppose I were a medical researcher who had just published apaper and I got a note from Joseph Mengele, the Auschwitz “Angel of Death,”gushing about my work. Would I do what Maddin did?

But obviously Maddin doesn’t see Riefenstahl that way and neither do manyothers. By the time she died last month at the age of 101, she had longsince ceased to be a pariah. Her rehabilitation as a cultural icon has beenremarkable, her own personal “triumph of the will.” It started in the 1960swhen she was embraced by the film avant-garde. Soon after she began to bepromoted as a feminist culture hero (which would be funny if it weren’t soawful, given that Hitler was fond of calling her “my perfect German woman”).

She could count among her admirers Jean Cocteau and Mick Jagger, shehobnobbed with Andy Warhol, and Jodie Foster is trying to turn her life intoa biopic. You can see how far her rehabilitation has come when you considerthat she was nearly run out of town when she showed up at the 1976 MontrealOlympics, but just before her death a quarter century later, theInternational Olympic Committee bought the rights to her film Olympia,calling it “the pearl of our collection.”

Yet the plain truth is that Riefenstahl was a monster. Her best-known films,Triumph of the Will and Olympia, glorified the most barbaric regime inhistory. She was the Third Reich’s media darling and in many respects thefemale face of Nazism. For half a century after the war she did nothing butlie to cover up that role, lies that only the willingly credulous couldbelieve. (A few years back evidence came out that she even had a hand inpacking off to Auschwitz some Sinti and Roma people after she had used themas film extras.)

But she wasn’t just any old Nazi monster. She was a “beautiful” monsterwhose films are extraordinary technical achievements. And therein lies theproblem: you couldn’t find a starker contradiction between form and content,art and reality, than in these films.

And so you get a predictable dichotomy of reactions to Riefenstahl — eitheroutrage at her politics or adulation for her artistry. In the film communityadulation tends to win out. Here, for instance, is Piers Handling, head of theToronto International Film Festival, reacting to the news of Riefenstahl’s death: “She wasa truly great innovative filmmaker who should be remembered for that ratherthan for her politics. Triumph of the Will and Olympia could be calledpropaganda, but they also happen to be two of the greatest films ever made.”

You have to wonder, though — how can you watch a film like Triumph of theWill without remembering the politics?

Personally I’m much more on the “outrage” side in this debate, but I thinkboth approaches miss something essential about Riefenstahl. They both hingeon a “despite”: she was a political monster despite her talent or else shewas a great artist despite her politics. But the truth is more troubling:her achievements were only possible because she was a monster.

Art is an illusion that illuminates reality. But what happens when realityitself becomes overwhelmed by illusion? What kind of art can come out ofthat? The Third Reich was one big show, a political phantasmagoria with itsführer cult and “master race” ideology.

Not surprisingly, prominent Nazis like Goebbels spoke of themselves as“artists” shaping a new Germany. Several years ago, Harper’s magazine ran acontact sheet that had recently been discovered of photos of Hitler from themid-twenties practicing expressionist acting mannerisms. And you can see thesame gestures, only polished up to look like “spontaneous” passion, inHitler’s speeches in Triumph of the Will.

Riefenstahl’s work fits perfectly into this perverse conception of art.Triumph of the Will is ostensibly a documentary about a Nazi party rally inNuremberg in 1934, but the rally itself was largely an illusion, staged forthe purpose of being filmed, with Riefenstahl heavily involved in theplanning. Just how much the whole event was a “performance” is brought outby the fact that when some footage got spoiled showing speeches by severalNazi leaders, Hitler had them go back into an empty studio and do a“retake”.

The Nazis were eager to produce these kinds of “beautiful” illusions andRiefenstahl was particularly good at making them. Her technical advancesamounted virtually to a new cinematic language. But it was a language calledinto existence by the Nazis’ need for new ways of lying.

Which brings us up against a paradox: Triumph of the Will may well be agreat film, as Riefenstahl’s admirers insist, but is it art? Because in thefinal analysis art always deepens our understanding of what it means to behuman, and in that sense it has an irreducible link to truth. ButRiefenstahl’s “art” does nothing of the kind.

Watching Triumph of the Will is actually quite a boring experience — unlessyou are a Nazi. You can be impressed by the technique — e.g. the descent ofHitler through the clouds as a Wagnerian demi-god, the shots of all thoseimpressively arranged anonymous masses and the conjuring up of a sense ofinvincible force and historic destiny, which of course was the whole pointof the exercise. You can be impressed but you cannot be engaged, andeventually all the goose-stepping and Sieg Heil-ing just leaves you numb,apart from the inevitable feeling of horror and revulsion about what allthis led to.

Of course there were other artists, Ezra Pound for instance, who embraced orflirted with fascism. But their political beliefs, however shameful, were incidentalto their artistic achievement. Riefenstahl’s case is entirely different:take away fascism and there is nothing significant left in her work.

You can see that in her legacy. Her techniques are now standard practice intelevision commercials and music videos — in other words, wherever “beautiful”images are used to propagate lies. When George Bush did his fighter pilotphoto-op landing on an aircraft carrier to claim victory in Iraq, thescene was pure Riefenstahl. (Much the same can be said about her influenceon sports coverage: Olympia pioneered the transformation of events like theOlympics into orgies of flag-waving.)

So she does belong in a pantheon, but not with the greats of cinema. Shebelongs instead with the “brilliant” chemist who invented Zyklon-B gas orthe “great” minds who designed the concentration camps or the “artistic”temperaments who organized the book burnings. She belongs, in short, in apantheon of barbarism.