My wife and I saw the new Leni Riefenstahl documentary this weekend. Compared to the documentary from the early 1990s, “The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl,” the new one falls short. Though stylishly made, it doesn’t break much new ground, and in certain ways, fails to do what the earlier documentary did: Explain why people are so fascinated by Riefenstahl in the first place.

The first documentary devotes a good chunk of the film to explaining how pioneering were Riefensthal’s techniques, how innovative her approach to film and propaganda. It’s only by appreciating her filmic achievements that we can wrestle with what a monster she was. The original film quotes her saying something to the effect that people are charismatically drawn to other people who devote themselves, almost fanatically, to their work. It’s quite a brilliant bit of insight, and surprisingly wise to herself and her draw. The film enacts that principle by leading us in to her infernal workshop. The new documentary tends to keep a distance from the painstaking care and creativity of her films, leaving the audience to wonder why anyone should care about her at all.

In both films, Riefenstahl comes across as a grade-A narcissist, someone who conforms to Arendt’s portrait of Eichmann, incapable of seeing the world as others saw it (unless they were one’s superiors) but devoted to the work. Like Eichmann, Riefenstahl also had penchant for aesthetic fantasy that consistently carries her away from the reality in front of her.

But only in the first film do we see how that moral shabbiness is married to genius, and why it is that someone like Riefenstahl, who thought that physical beauty inevitably meant moral beauty, could wind up looking like the ugliest person of all. As my wife said, you can’t even watch or look at her throughout the film; she’s the grotesque she so sought to avoid in and through film.

That said, what the new documentary does well is to show how much Riefenstahl’s postwar fate mirrors the sensibilities of the German people. In several ways.

First, the film brings out how closely Riefenstahl tried to hitch her cart to the shooting star that was Albert Speer. People forget this now (and the film doesn’t explicitly mention it), but back in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s, Speer was the good face of the Nazis. He had expertly engineered his public atonement, beginning with the Nuremberg Trials, taking on his shoulders the guilt of the regime, while subtly steering clear from any specific discussion of his concrete and actual crimes. (That was the power of Gitta Sereny’s book in the late 1990s; she finally exposed the entire ruse.) Speer served his time in Spandau and then became, through his memoirs, the conscience of the repentant. (Fun fact: When Arendt died, she had Speer’s memoirs at her bedside, waiting for her reading and review.) The documentary shows how much Riefenstahl saw in Speer a strategic ally, someone who could help her engineer her comeback. There are recordings of phone calls between them, where she is asking him about speaker fees and the writing process (while she worked on her memoirs), kibbitzing about their plans together, and such. It just shows what an industry Nazi rehabilitation was, and how much the publishing industry played into it.

Beyond that, the film features all the phone calls and letters Riefenstahl got from the German public, particularly after one memorable confrontation she had with a German woman on television, whose only claim to fame was that she was “a worker” who refused to go along with the regime. (Cue “Questions From a Worker Who Reads.”)

The public reaction to Riefenstahl in the 1970s and 1980s was tremendous. She got tons of adoring fan mail and calls. Her fans got her in a way that few of her critics, save Susan Sontag, did. They understood all too well what Riefenstahl was doing: making life beautiful, unlike all the “cripples” (someone in the film uses that language) and workers who wanted to make Germany ugly and foul. The chilling last moment of the film is a recorded call from someone who reassures Riefenstahl that once Germany gets through a couple of generations of ritualistic housecleaning for its sins, the real Volk will return and assume their place in the sun.

I tried to avoid the cheap presentism that the film’s reviewers want to indulge in, but it’s hard not to see how skillfully the film speaks to the current moment: particularly with regards to how the right deals with the politics of shame over the past. The German public who support Riefenstahl clearly bridle at all the constant summoning of and apologizing for the evils of Nazism—much like Trump and his followers do when it comes to the discussion of slavery.

What the film brings out is how a politics of shame over the past is countered, in someone like Riefenstahl, by an invocation of beauty based on a romance of reality. That that beauty is something that people believe has been shat upon by all the leftists and workers and immigrants and such, makes it all the more beautiful in their eyes. It’s the elusiveness of a beauty that’s been lost that they are moved by. The fact that it doesn’t correspond to any kind of reality, in the present or the past, doesn’t matter. It’s the very fact that it is an image, that it does not exist, that matters. It’s the lover’s longing glance at the beloved who is no more, Narcissus reaching out for his image in the water, that’s the guiding gesture of the whole thing.

One other note about the film: It makes of point of noting that Riefenstahl’s famous trips to Sudan in the 1960s were all paid for by corporate sponsors. Each one gets plenty of product placement in her photographs and films. That’s not something that Sontag picked up on, as I recall, in her discussion of Riefenstahl’s Africa fetish; nor is it something the earlier documentary mentioned. But it was a critical part of her rehabilitation. Indeed, that’s who, or what, paid for it.