Bad timing explains the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s presentation of Riefenstahl, Andres Veiel’s documentary about the late German actress and filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. The exhibition of Riefenstahl seems odd since there is little interest in film scholarship or classic German cinema. But Veiel takes on Riefenstahl, dissecting her legendary films Triumph of the Will and Olympia, renowned as celebrations of the Nazi era, and her late-career excursion to Sudan for the photo book Die Nuba, The People of Kau to explore her infamous reputation.

Veiel’s film follows the “Punch a Nazi” slogan that trended a few years ago, but his documentary runs into the “vibe shift” problem: all moral issues being currently up for debate or defense. The self-declared, modern-day enemies of Nazis are “anti-fascist” mobs whose violent activists have ironically been made into a legitimized and protected class by politicians and mainstream media (as in the perverse celebrations of Charlie Kirk’s assassination and the hero-worship of Luigi Mangioni for murdering health insurance CEO Brian Thompson).

Veiel’s bad timing signals media culture’s hypocrisy. He uses simple-minded, dishonest, virtue-signaling in his effort to destroy an already controversial figure. High irony: Veiel’s hostility is a version of the ethnic side-choosing, and the dubious sense of superiority shown in the anti-Israel stance of contemporary liberals and the United Nations.

This Riefenstahl hit job also comes just as the Me Too movement and feminist self-righteousness have lost steam. Veiel contradicts the values meant to define female artists — courage, imagination, ambition. All that is forgotten in the case against Riefenstahl. Veiel includes a CBS 60 Minutes Dan Rather interview from 1979 as part of his attack — particularly bad timing given the recent humiliating lawsuit over the network’s veracity.

By attempting to besmirch Riefenstahl’s legend, Veiel takes first-hand investigatory footage from Ray Müller’s The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, from 1993. This appropriation, minus Müller’s honest, intellectual rigor, leaves Veiel with an unexpected dilemma.

Moral and political scolds can’t handle the ambiguities of art and human nature. It is inexcusably facile to deny Riefenstahl’s complexity. (She candidly identifies herself with Third Reich architect Albert Speer: “We immediately felt a rapport when it came to art and our professions . . . strong-willed, idealistic, prepared to make sacrifices and uncompromising.”) Instead Veiel emphasizes a clip where she is ambushed on a German TV chat show by “an activist grandma,” yet he never confronts how film-culture gatekeepers deny Riefenstahl’s aesthetic contribution to movie history.

The doc is most fascinating when Riefenstahl is seen reviewing her controversial work on Triumph of the Will, explicating its visual composition and temporal editing:

Now comes an interesting part. The effect is created by the camera elevator. Now the camera pans over to one side, and then it pans back over to the other side, and these two shots combine to create the form of a circle and the resulting effect is very powerful. The column of flags, [keeping to the beat of music] overlap. Those are Stahlhelm flags. Exactly in sync with the music. . . . It was the only way to make a really vibrant film. It was the only way to transcend the Wochenschau newsreel.

She’s an aesthete. Despite commanding 30 different cameramen for her epic Olympia, about the 1936 Berlin Olympics, she is scorned; perhaps female filmmakers are respected only when they parrot certain political slogans, as Greta Gerwig, Mati Diop, and Olivia Wilde do. Capturing movement, human effort, experience, and beauty is the essence of cinema — and Riefenstahl’s exalted vision ranks with Michelangelo’s.

Few filmmakers, female or male, legitimately earn aesthetic laurels. How one values Riefenstahl’s art is a personal issue, but to deny it for the sake of politics or morality hinders our struggle to appreciate art. Veiel tries to hang Riefenstahl for her intentions, as he sees them — unearthing the forgotten accusations that she exploited gypsies for her last film Tiefland (“Lowlands”) and was indifferent to their eventual execution at Auschwitz. But no artist can withstand absolute moral scrutiny. We’re merely left with the horrors of war and the foibles and idiosyncrasies and failings of human behavior that we condemn at our own risk.

Riefenstahl didn’t need the ideological shift of Obama–George Floyd to inspire her ethnographic aestheticization of the black African Nuba. Footage of her staging the Nuba photos recalls her cinema past. (“I didn’t ‘make’ them; they were like that,” she said of the noble tribesmen so like the Aryans of her early mountain films.) Liberals must contend with the irony of Die Nuba, and with Riefenstahl posing with Warhol at her book launch — after all, there was no diversity tokenism at Warhol’s Factory.

Veiel’s judgmental view raises the riddle of artistic heroism and provokes more ethical questions than he can answer: Why haven’t the media investigated the dubious histories of modern figures? Will Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, HBO documentarian Alexandra Pelosi, be remembered as an enabling propagandist? How would Kamala/Biden supporters Oprah and Beyoncé hold up under Veiel’s scrutiny? Condemning Riefenstahl comes too easily for the cancel-culture era. So long as there are cineastes, the greatness of her artistry compels our awe, if not our humility.