In Biography, Where Does Emotion Come In?

Steven Bach, biographer of Leni Riefenstahl, says strict “objectivity and detachment” were not his guidelines in writing about the filmmaker’s life. “To deny that my subject aroused intellectual or emotional responses that were considerably less (or more) than neutral would have been as false as the avalanche of denials she herself trotted out to justify her life of great achievements and appalling transgressions of humanity in the name of Art.”