"The People of Kau" reflects a perfect marriage of artist and subject. The villagers seem to have built their village to suit Riefenstahl's specifications for scope and primitive mystery, their jumble of thatched towers rising from the rocks like magical mushrooms. The glistening, perfectly sculpted bodies satisfy her appetite for the sensual and the ideal. Perhaps not even a dreamer like Riefenstahl could have imagined the astonishing masking rituals that the warriors perform. Once, sometimes twice a day, out of a basically esthetic impulse, they paint their faces, transforming them into stunning abstract canvases…. Riefenstahl captures them like so many primitive Picassos, luminous against beautifully controlled backgrounds of remarkable depth.

Riefenstahl has also used her Leicas to document the stoicism of the Kau tattooing rituals, the bloody ballets of the gladiators and the sexual frenzy of the mating dances. But her interest is not really anthropological. There is...