To hear a podcast about Freke’s review of ‘Leni Riefenstahl, click here.While the world was awash with the satisfaction that came from America electing its first African-American president, as the humdrum of an eternal presidential campaign click-clacked to a standstill, I had a brain freeze. What was I going to write about?I was stuck. Should I have picked Rob Reiner’s “The American President,” that fairy tale about a candidate who wins the national election, even though he is an ACLU member and had engaged in an affair with an environmental lobbyist? Or should I have gone with Philip Kauffmann’s “The Right Stuff,” a cinematic rendition of Tom Wolfe’s book that celebrated America’s ascendancy during the space race — Barack Obama’s election and the space missions, had similar salutary effects on the national unity.I finally decided to go with Ray Muller’s “The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl,” a film dealing with whether an artist is responsible for the crimes committed by the governing regime.Riefenstahl is arguably the most famous female director of all time. Born in 1902, she started out as a free form dancer before taking a turn in Arnold Fanck’s German mountain films in the 20s.Riefenstahl directed her first film, “The Blue Light,” in 1932 and a year later met Adolf Hitler, establishing a relationship that would haunt her forever. Following this meeting, she made two controversial films: “Triumph of the Will” and “Olympia.””Triumph of the Will” was made in 1935 and documents the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg. The film features several fiery speeches by the Fuhrer, interspersed with images of crowds of fawning Germans, taken in by their charismatic leader.”Olympia,” made in 1938, was a documentary about the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It was commissioned by the International Olympic Organization and is considered one of the pioneer films in the genre. In his entry to TIME magazine’s All-Time 100 movies, film critic Richard Schickel noted that “Olympia is an amazing technical and artistic achievement. The film’s innovations directly influenced all televised sports coverage.”Yet, while the technical mastery of Riefenstahl’s films is without doubt, there are many people who frown on the ideological content of her work. Critics claim her films show a director who was very comfortable espousing the Nazi party line that Jews, blacks, gypsies, etc., were second-class human beings.Others argue that her emphasis on the perfection of the sculpted torso, the cult of the body beautiful, masked a tendency to fascism and provided cover for an evil regime that instigated the murder of 6 million Jews.Muller’s film is partly a biography of this fascinating woman, and is also an investigation into Riefenstahl’s complicity in Nazi war crimes. It is a stimulating intellectual journey, but one that is bound to end up short because of the subject’s reticence in accepting guilt.In an article entitled “The Riefenstahl question,” freelance author Mark Daniel Cohen asks if there could ever be legitimate art whose subject was evil and what the relationship was between beauty and evil.”Beauty may be truth, but is beauty good? Is it ethical? Should we trust it,” Cohen asks.These are important questions worthy of seasoned intellectual scrutiny. Should Riefenstahl be condemned because she actively collaborated with Nazis? Is she culpable because her attempts to showcase beauty provided cover to an evil regime?If that is the case, what can be said of filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein whose film “Battleship Potemkin” whipped up revolutionary fervor for the Marxist-Leninist Soviet Union — a country which perpetrated worse horrors in the Gulag and the trips to Siberia?We look at the past with the benefit of years of hindsight, yet we forget history is not inevitable. If Germany had won World War II, would Frank Capra have been vilified for making “Why We Fight,”  a series of documentaries in support of a government that dropped the atom bombs over Japan?The point is not to equate the Allies and the Axis; rather it is to inquire if we put too much faith in artists. We expect them to oppose the zeitgeist, to speak truth to power, even when most people were unwilling to do the same because they believed they had too much to lose.I argue for a dichotomy between art and morality. At the risk of coming off as an immoralist, I believe beauty can be created from evil objects. We all know art in its representation is already imbued with the aesthetic, political and moral choices of the artist. Hence, there is no need to differentiate between just art and evil art; the only distinction should be between good art and bad art. Though filmmakers like Riefenstahl, Eisenstein, D. W. Griffith, and Elia Kazan made wrong personal choices in life, we should cautiously appraise their works, instead of outrightly invalidating their corpus because of a well-meaning, but spurious nexus with fascist art.—-Contact Freke Ette at [email protected]