Barring her being given a decent dose of Scopalamine, it was highly unlikely that Leni Riefenstahl was ever going to acknowledge in any interviews the extent of any complicity she may have had in the Holocaust - either actively or passively, but this documentary uses an astonishing collection of archive, much of it her own, to try to piece together something of the life of this visionary and enigmatic filmmaker. Using images from her own on-screen roles there is something of the Garbo to her beauty and it’s not hard to see why she captured the eyes and reputedly the ardours of people like propaganda master Josef Goebbels. It seems, though, that the Führer himself understood the value of her creative eye and pretty swiftly she is at the top table of the Reich. With the war starting, though, she is required to turn her more artistic talents more to those extolling the Nazi war machine and this is where issues around the gassing and incinerations of the millions starts to become more of a focus of this challenge to her own version of events. Now given the subject matter and the huge amount of material available, I have to admit that I was a bit disappointed by the structure of this. It’s a bit all over the place and lacks the cohesion a guide narration might have provided. There is simply too much here for us to sift through, much of it contradictory, and with such a vast collection of papers, reports and investigations for us to consider some distillation would have been useful. On the aesthetics front, though, the imagery of the discobuli-style athletes demonstrating the epitome of the Arian race - lithe, handsome and physically perfect is hard to dispute in terms of it’s effectiveness on a population desperate for hope. Philosophically, hindsight makes judgements a lot more black and white than the situation was at the time, and as she puts it herself, nobody wanted to argue with Hitler at the start and nobody dared afterwards - and I think this does give us an inkling of just how perilous and dispensable even her position was as the war progressed and her uses dried up. We will never know the true extent of her involvement, or not, and I’m not sure after ninety minutes here I’m really that much the wiser save for thinking that this was a shrewd and charismatic woman who went with the flow.