Film Studies: How truth was tricked with a great eye and an empty head

On the one hand, we tell ourselves that Adolf Hitler and Leni Riefenstahl are very bad things. Yet this is the third time in the space of a few years that I have been asked by this paper to reflect on Ms Riefenstahl, and I note the ceaseless flow of movies that bear upon Hitler and Hitlerism.

Last year, on television, we saw the outstanding Conspiracy, a dramatised reconstruction of the Wannsee conference that argued about the most effective ways to dispose of Jews. Hitler did not even appear in that film. Himmler was the officer in charge, but the Führer was there in every salute and heel-click, and in the unvoiced fear that oppressed all those bureaucrats.

I have just seen a new documentary, Blind Spot, which is nothing more or less than a talking head: Hitler's private secretary in his last years, speaking for the first time about what she felt then, and how she sees it now. And then there is a feature film, Max, in which John Cusack is a wounded war veteran trying to run an art gallery in post-War Germany. This odd little man calls on him with pictures – awful pictures – but the dealer becomes fascinated by the way the man talks about the world, and by his efforts to grow a moustache.

There's always that odd human touch: a young man tries to sustain a moustache, and his secretary remembers how, when she knew him, though he could be amiable, gentle and kind, he did not like to be touched. That made me think of maybe the finest thing Leni Riefenstahl ever did. At the start of her film, Triumph of the Will, Hitler is in a plane flying to Nuremberg to attend the Nazi party rallies. The filming gives every sense of some divine figure coming down from the skies. How does she do that? The burnished sky. The heroic aircraft. The rising power of the musical accompaniment. The camera angles to cover Hitler. The crowd surging forward, so full of passion.

It's in picking those details that anyone makes a film, and reveals their attitude.

But then Hitler enters an open car to be driven through the packed streets of the city. There is a superb close-up of his hand in "his" salute, covered by a tracking camera as his car moves forward. The hand is cupped – as if, after hours and years of saluting, even Hitler was weary. But the cupping of the hand allows something magical – sublime – for as the car moves, so the sun shifts and sunlight, like honey, seems to fill his hand. You may wish to resist fascism and its force with every nerve in your body and every atom in your mind, but this is a tricky moment. For it is beautiful, and beauty has its way of slipping through every defence. You may sigh; you may begin to tap your foot to the great drive of marching music.

You have your choice. At the same time, you can imagine the effect the film had when first seen in Germany – at a time when Hitler was not quite known to history as a monster. But then ask yourself this: in a supposed documentary film, how was that shot of the hand obtained? Did Leni Riefenstahl see it in nature as the motorcade passed by? In which case she would have been in no position to get the very tricky shot for her film. So, did she say, stop the motorcade, let's do it again? Or was the shot imagined in advance? Was the camera set-up in readiness for it? Did she even say, "Führer, dear Führer, if you just cupped your hand a little." And the Führer says, "Fräulein, the Führer's hand must be vigorous!" "Oh, Führer, do it for me." Yes, of course I'm making this up, but it's not implausible and it's actually a welcome touch of humanity to see this little moustache acting the superman and being coaxed into taking "direction".

The larger point I'm making – and I think it can hinge on a detail – is that Triumph of the Will is only in part a documentary or the record of an event. It is rather more the calculated celebration of a staged event. It is a film made just like a "story film" in which Hitler is not simply a real man but a character from living legend. And the truth is that Leni Riefenstahl was both good enough to make that kind of film – and make it beautiful – and misguided enough not to notice how truth had been tricked.

It takes a very great skill and an enormous degree of moral character to film anything without glorifying it, or falling in love with it, and Leni Riefenstahl – 100 on Thursday, a survivor – lacked that moral character. She had a great eye, and an empty head. And the lesson is to realise how often those things go together in film-makers.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk