Profile - William Cook on the contentious career of the woman who made the Nazis beautiful

This year, one of the world's most remarkable film- makers marks her 100th birthday by releasing her first film in nearly 50 years. Impressions Under Water is the result of a quarter-century of diving in the Indian Ocean, and it promises to be just as arresting as her directorial debut, The Blue Light, the mystical mountain movie she made 70 years ago. Yet Leni Riefenstahl will always be remembered for two films she made during the Third Reich - Olympia, about the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, and Triumph of the Will, about the 1934 Nazi party rally in Nuremberg. If these films had been as dire as most Nazi-sanctioned cinema, her contribution to Hitler's Reich might have been forgotten. However, unfortunately for Riefenstahl, she created two cinematic masterpieces, and they have haunted her ever since.

Calling Riefenstahl's films documentaries really does not do them any justice. She was a dancer before injury forced her into acting, and then directing, and Olympia feels far closer to ballet than reportage. It is an intense evocation of athleticism, shot in an innovative, intimate style that still feels fresh today. Riefenstahl filmed her athletes close up, in shadow, in silhouette, from the air and underwater. She dovetailed live and staged footage to create a sporting epic with all the narrative thrust of an action thriller. Her theatrical techniques have since become standard practice, but they were revolutionary at that time - and compared to most modern films, her work still looks avant-garde.

Edited by Riefenstahl herself, over two years, from 250 miles of film, Olympia was showered with prizes at home and abroad. Her Meisterwerk was invaluable PR for the Nazis, but its Graeco-Roman pagan grandeur coincided rather than conspired with Nazism's crude neoclassicism, and Jesse Owens, not Hitler, is its true star. It is irrevocably tainted by the evil tyranny under which it was produced, but even so, even now, Olympia is still regarded as one of the greatest documentary films ever made. However, Riefenstahl's films were fiction of a kind, and her bold poetic abstraction in the film she made before Olympia, Triumph of the Will, proved even more helpful for Hitler. "I am not looking for a newsreel," Hitler told her, "but an artistic document." This "artistic document" has plagued her throughout her long life.

Triumph of the Will asks an avalanche of questions about art and ethics. Does creating a record of such a sinister spectacle automatically legitimise it? Is a virtuoso account worse than a more mediocre version? Does every artist have to have a point of view? Riefenstahl's point of view is that of an actor in a costume drama. She films the rally like a cup final, a mystery play or a religious pageant. If Olympia is ballet, then Triumph of the Will is opera - but an opera that makes murderous thugs look like mythic heroes. Yet this film won foreign as well as domestic awards.

Out of shot, off camera, the ethical perspective becomes even more blurred. How far did Riefenstahl choose this film? How far could she have refused it? How much had she seen of what the Nazis had already done? How much could she have foreseen of what they would do in the future? None of us, least of all Riefenstahl, can know the whole truth.

What is truly frightening about Triumph of the Will, and, to a lesser extent, Olympia, is that it proves that art is amoral. Its morality depends purely on its context. In a moral context, it is moral. In an immoral context, it is immoral. As Gitta Sereny says in The German Trauma, her profound book about Nazi guilt, for Riefenstahl beauty was an aesthetic inspiration - for the Nazis, it was a moral imperative. In Triumph of the Will, her aesthetic inspiration and Hitler's moral imperative collided, to cataclysmic effect.

After the war, Riefenstahl fought tirelessly to defend her tarnished reputation. She contested more than 50 libel suits and won all bar one. Some false accusations were not so much ideological as downright misogynistic. No, she had never been Hitler's mistress. No, she had never danced naked before him at the Berghof. More importantly, she never joined the Nazi party, and remained loyal to her Jewish friends and colleagues, who were happy to testify in her favour. "I have no doubt," writes Sereny in The German Trauma, "that she knew nothing of what was planned and of what finally happened to the Jews." Nevertheless, her property was seized, her assets frozen, and she spent several years under house arrest. She was cleared by two denazification tribunals, but after French appeals she was classified as a "fellow traveller". Whether you think her treatment cruel or kind depends upon your yardstick. Like many others of her generation, she suffered. Unlike many others of her generation, she survived.

In 1954, she finally released Tiefland, the escapist feature film she had shot, off and on, throughout the war. Tiefland was a romantic fantasy - Riefenstahl starred as a Spanish dancer - but despite the support of Jean Cocteau, who called her "the genius of film", she found it impossible to pursue a conventional cinematic career. Instead, she turned to photography, and created her third Meisterwerk - as free as she ever could be from the spectre of the Third Reich.

During the Sixties and Seventies, Riefenstahl photographed the remote Nuba tribes of Sudan, creating a striking celebration of an ancient and vanishing civilisation. Susan Sontag found this work "consistent with some of the larger themes of Nazi ideology". Yet fascism plundered its mongrel iconography from a wide array of cultures, from the Greeks to the Vikings, from Romanticism to futurism. The cult of the noble savage stretches far further back than the Third Reich. Hitler would have hated these photos, and, within her own finite compass, these heroic portraits are perhaps the best way Riefenstahl can find of refuting his wicked crusade against "subhuman" and "degenerate" art.

Yet a lifetime after Hitler's rise and fall, the film she made for him still follows her. "I put myself into the minds of the victims," she told Ray Muller in his fine biographical film, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl. "How awful for them to see those swastikas, the SS men and the SA - people we'd never thought of as criminals." Understandably, for many, she has been insufficiently repentant. But there are limits to how much remorse one human being can bear. "I condemn all that happened, but it doesn't help - they don't believe me," she told Muller. "It casts such a shadow over my life that death will be a blessed release."

Good or bad, right or wrong, Riefenstahl remains an exceptional artist and an extraordinary woman. When I met her, in 1992, she was already 90, but could easily have passed for 20 years younger, as indeed she did when she trained as a diver, passing herself off as 50 when she was actually 70. "Underwater, I am in another world," she told Sereny. "It has allowed me, for the first time, to understand religious faith, and that is the film . . . yes, perhaps the last one . . . I want to make." Face to face, and in her absorbing yet unanalytical autobiography, Riefenstahl struck me as fiercely intelligent but fundamentally unintellectual, and it is this contradiction that makes her legacy so difficult, yet so dynamic. After all these years, Riefenstahl's genius remains a beautiful but disturbing problem.

Impressions Under Water will be released for Leni Riefenstahl's 100th birthday in August 2002

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