Judith Thurman has a good essay this week in The New Yorker on Leni Riefenstahl and two new books about her remarkable life. As a college student, I was enthralled by Riefenstahls's mastery of film as displayed in her two Nazi propaganda pieces Olympia and Triumph des Willens. Only a filmmaker of genius could capture the beauty of the human form, or the thrill of the crowd as did Leni Riefenstahl. Yes, the content was evil, but the form was sublime - that was my argument back then (under the influence of the prevailing New Criticism). Only later did I see the wisdom expressed by Susan Sontag in her famous essay Fascinating Fascism (1974). Riefenstahl, the "indomitable priestess of the beautiful"(Sontag) embraced the fascist aesthetic. Through her filmmaking genius she was successful in showing that National Socialism stood for more than simply brutishness and terror:
National Socialism—more broadly, fascism—also stands for an ideal or rather ideals that are persistent today under the other banners: the ideal of life as art, the cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage, the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community; the repudiation of the intellect; the family of man (under the parenthood of leaders). These ideals are vivid and moving to many people, and it is dishonest as well as tautological to say that one is affected by Triumph of the Will and Olympia only because they were made by a filmmaker of genius. Riefenstahl's films are still effective because, among other reasons, their longings are still felt, because their content is a romantic ideal to which many continue to be attached and which is expressed in such diverse modes of cultural dissidence and propaganda for new forms of community as the youth/rock culture, primal therapy, anti‑psychiatry, Third World camp‑following, and belief in the occult. The exaltation of community does not preclude the search for absolute leadership; on the contrary, it may inevitably lead to it.
Riefenstahl and Hitler had a symbiotic relationship. Hitler enabled Riefenstahl to realize her art on a monumental scale, while Riefenstahl's films gave the Nazis an illusory moment of transcendent meaning above and beyond the terror that lay at the core. It was Sontag who showed me the impossibility of separating the form from the content. Thurman writes of Riefenstahl's narcissism:
And in one respect it was logical for her to love Hitler: he had the insight to recognize what her love could give him—a perfect reflection of itself.
It is instructive to compare Riefenstahl's career with that of another creative genius: Wolfgang Koeppen. Koeppen, for whatever reason, was unable or unwilling to leave Germany during the darkest days of Nazi tyranny. But he refused to embrace the fascist aesthetic. Rather, he managed to survive by writing screenplays for the German film industry in Berlin, working on projects that were certain never to be produced. When his apartment house in Berlin was destroyed by an Allied air raid he went underground, spending the rest of the war in Munich.
Koeppen, the difficult modernist, died in relative obscurity. Riefenstahl, the prophet of beauty in the service of tyranny, was famous throughout the world when she died in 2003 at the age of 101.
Do check out the less well known Riefenstahl films too, they're much more telling. "Sieg des Glaubens" is about the Parteitag before the one featured in "Triumph.." and much more down to earth. You can see Roehm (thats why it was banned by the Nazis) and Hitler makes a speech that could be televised on Fox or CNN today without problems. "Unsere Wehrmacht" also would pass as a stock documentary nowadays.
It's pretty wrong to concentrate on the video clip esthetics in "Olympia" as fascist themselves, I think. It's about what kind of ideas are being transported that way.
Posted by: name | March 18, 2007 at 12:40 PM