By any measure, Leni Riefenstahl led an extraordinary life. Born in 1902 in Berlin to reasonably well-to-do parents, Leni grew up willful, manipulative and pretty - very pretty.

Attracted to dancing and acting from her teens, she parlayed a small talent into a regional success in Germany in the 1920s with an almost instinctual grasp of publicity and well-timed opportunism. Ambitious and utterly focused on herself and her career, she formed and broke professional and romantic alliances with astonishing speed and calculation, efforts that landed her starring roles in silent movies promoting an exalted view of the German character as athletic, heroic and self-sacrificing.

None of which, of course, would merit much more than a passing nod from history, much less this new biography by Steven Bach, Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl. Except that, scrambling hard in the cutthroat world of moviemaking in the chaotic years following Germany's defeat and humiliation after World War I, Riefenstahl, in 1932, hitched her wagon to a rising star, not of film, but of politics - Adolf Hitler.

The story of how Riefenstahl came to be the single most important propagandist of the Nazi regime has been told and retold many times before, as has the story of how she came to direct, photograph and edit her film, Triumph of the Will, of the 1934 Nazi Rally in Nuremberg - a film that, despite its subject, is to this day considered a landmark in film history.

This is the paradox that lies at the heart of Riefenstahl's career: art and fascism, beauty and totalitarianism. As Bach writes, "Agreement was all but universal that, at only thirty-two, she had created a new kind of heroic cinema. With art and craft, she had wed power and poetry so compellingly as to challenge the artistry of anything remotely similar that had gone before."

Lest you think from those words that Bach is a Riefenstahl defender, let me assure you that he's a dedicated member of the opposite camp. This book is a short, sharp, hard jab at the Leni Legend. Bach intends it, I think, as a knockout. It is, in its way, an indictment: 300-plus pages of detailed facts and references showing that, contrary to almost six decades of denial from her, Riefenstahl's involvement with and complicity in the Nazi regime was eager, willing and knowing.

There is hardly a word, written or spoken, by Riefenstahl in defense of her actions that Bach does not challenge. He's particularly good at unraveling the tangled financial backing for her films made during Hitler's rule, showing that through front organizations intended to give an air of independence to her productions, it was Nazi money provided to her by Hitler and Joseph Goebbels for the purpose of promoting the Nazi party on both the German and world stage.

In a book in which virtually every page reveals the moral and ethical compromises Leni made for her "art," two stand out. First, there is her presence in September 1939 in Konskie, Poland, during the slaughter of defenseless Jews by the invading German army. Here, it is not a question of whether or not she could have done anything to stop the murders: She was a civilian and a woman. The murders, mere harbingers of the mass murders to come, were unstoppable in that time.

What is unconscionable is that nothing that day made her stop and rethink her involvement with a regime so indifferent to suffering. Riefenstahl maintained to the end of a long, long life that she was just a filmmaker, an artist, naive and trusting, that she had no notion of politics and power. But that day, she saw the ultimate power of politics, the power that issues from the hand that holds the gun.

The second incident has to do with Riefenstahl's use, in 1940, of Gypsies in a concentration camp as extras for a film she was shooting: "Here, behind barbed wire, her moral vision blinkered by self-interest and obsession with her film, Leni found all the 'Spanish flavor' she needed."

Though she would deny that she had ever been to the camp in question, Bach points out that "a number of Gypsies who worked on the film and survived Auschwitz later testified they had seen her . . . wearing slacks and carrying a briefcase in the company of two men . . . with police or SS guards."

When Riefenstahl died in 2003, she was 102 years old and still famous, still defending herself. As Bach writes, "She was the inexhaustible curator of her legend." Whatever her place in film history, Riefenstahl's place in world history is, I imagine, unshakable: hers is a cautionary tale of power and corruption, of the cost of making art in a slaughterhouse.

Bach has done an excellent job of examining the ledgers of that cost in a book that is direct, forceful and admirably restrained in rhetoric and hyperbole. But I doubt it's the last word. As the old Latin saying goes, Ars longa, vita brevis - Art is long, life is short. The controversy over this fascinating filmmaker is unlikely to subside as long as we continue to see ourselves - our hopes and dreams, nightmares and fears - in the images that we project against the dark walls of history.

Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl

• By Steven Bach. Alfred A. Knopf, 368 pages, $30.

• Grade: A

Triumph's triumph

After Riefenstahl's film glorifying Hitler, Triumph of the Will, was released in 1935, it:

• Won gold medals at Mussolini's 1935 Venice Film Festival

• Won the Grand Prix of the 1937 Paris Film Festival

• Attracted 100,000 spectators to Germany's prestigious theater, the Palast am Zoo, in its first three weeks

• Prompted Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany's propaganda minister, to say: "Whoever has seen and experienced the face of the Fuhrer in Triumph of the Will will never forget it. It will haunt him through days and dreams and will, like a quiet flame, burn itself into his soul."

Duane Davis is a freelance writer living in Littleton.