[LEN-E] Learning To Love Leni Riefenstahl

[Thomas Köhler]

Hi Ron,

this is a very interesting article indeed. Much as I sympathize with the 
author's point of view in general, there are nevertheless some points 
with which I can't really agree. And please excuse that this is a VERY 
long post :-)

Let me comment on some passages:

 >Is not what she encountered down there her ultimate object, the 
obscene and irresistibly thriving eternal force of life itself, what she 
was searching for all along? And does this not apply also to her 
personality?

This is a very good observation that does immediately make sense to me, 
as far as it concerns her films. This tendency started already with 
Fanck's "Der Heilige Berg", I'd say. Curiously, the manuscript for that 
film was expressedly written for her by Fanck, so I wonder whether he he 
had sensed that 'searching for the life force' in her from the 
beginning? However much the search for this 'eternal force' is expressed 
in her art, I find it generally problematic to apply this to her 
real-life personality so quickly. She was a clever and very determined 
woman in her personal relations it seems, and certainly not a mystic.


 >Is Junta, the lone and wild mountain girl, not an outcast who almost 
becomes the victim of a pogrom—there is no other appropriate word—by the 
villagers? (Perhaps it is not an accident that Béla Balázs, Leni’s lover 
at that time who co-wrote the scenario with her, was a Marxist.)

Ahm.... I may have simply forgotten about this, but was Balazs actually 
her LOVER? That would explain better why she tried to keep his work on 
the film secret in later years. The thing about the 'pogrom' in "Das 
Blaue Licht" seems to make sense, but is nevertheless a short circuit, 
as you could easily reverse the argument: the Nazis could easily have 
said that the villagers represent just the greedy mass (or in their 
language: the Jews) who do not care for the holy aesthetic and spiritual 
'German' values represented by Junta. I generally think the film can 
only be understood in the context of German Romanticism, and thus any 
likening of the story to the later events in Germany seems far-fetched 
and somewhat inappropriate to me, even if it's intended as a defense.

Further, the comparison to Schönberg is interesting. It might prove that 
artists aren't always the best democrats or possess buddhist equanimity, 
but somehow I have the feeling that the author brings up Schönberg 
(without mentioning it) because he was Jewish. But it's indeed a 
difference whether you talk about "degenerated" art or "degenerated" 
people. Schönberg's "Harmonielehre" is an aesthetic manifesto, nothing 
more. Provocation is part of it, and even if he used similar terms as 
the Nazis later did, I find his rhethoric far less offensive because of 
the different context.


About the parades etc.:

 >It was Nazism that stole them and appropriated them from the workers’ 
movement, their original site of birth.

I seriously doubt that. First of all, Mussolini's Italy was roughly at 
the same time as Lenin's Russia, and one wonders which movement actually 
originated them, if any of them.. But likely they go far more back into 
history. Organized masses etc. could be found in Frederick's Prussia in 
probably much a similar way, and if you want to, you might go back to 
ancient Sparta. The phenomenon has little to do with the workers' 
movement. They "ex-apted" it, too, I would assume.


 >There is no fascism avant la lettre, because it is the letter itself 
that composes the bundle (or, in Italian, fascio) of elements that is 
fascism proper.

This is only true if you understand the term as specific polito-social 
conglomerate. There are descriptions of 'fascism' as a state of mind 
very early. Although seriously flawed in many ways, one of the best 
analyses of that state of mind and its possible origins for me is still 
Wilhelm Reich's "Mass Psychology of Fascism". And that wasn't written 
with 'hindsight', but already in 1935.



 > When we say that the organized spectacle of thousands of bodies (or, 
say, the admiration of sports that demand high effort and self-control 
like mountain climbing) is “proto-fascist,” we say strictly nothing, we 
just express a vague association that masks our ignorance.

There IS a very big difference between the 'organized spectacle of 
bodies' as in the parades in Russia or Germany and the body exertion and 
effort in sports. The sportsmen decide for themselves to undergo this 
training, to make the mental and physical effort (much as a virtuoso 
instrumentalist), whereas those who (have to) partake in the parades are 
forced to do so by those in control. And that's a completely different 
thing.




 >Why should her case be different from that of Ezra Pound, William 
Butler Yeats, and other modernists with fascist tendencies who long ago 
became part of our artistic canon?

Easy. While Pound was certainly a supporter of Mussolini, little of it 
is apparent in his works, and that little wouldn't have any mass appeal 
because of the specific high modernist/experimental way in which his 
work is written. Yeats briefly flirted with some Anglo-Irish fascist 
group in the 30s, but despite of his elitist stance, soon saw that he 
wasn't in the right company. He wrote a few 'popular' poems for that 
group at the time, and they are clearly the worst he ever wrote (I might 
say that because Yeats is actually my favorite poet and I know his work 
very well).
Zizek might have even thrown in a firmly conservative modernist like 
Ernst Jünger as another example, but even in Jünger the tendency to 
aestheticize and mythologize war isn't congruent with his real-life 
stance towards fascism: though especially Germans tend to lump him in 
with the Nazis, he was actually against them (for political, 
philosophical and aesthetic reasons) and at the end of the war was in 
the vicinity of the Stauffenberg group.

So, all in all, I think the case with Leni is much more complex and 
sadly also more problematic, and it doesn't much help if the author 
brings up those many examples of other modernists that superficially are 
similar. They are not. There's no need and little possibility in my view 
to try to 'whitewash' Leni as a person. There's only a need to regard 
her work on its own terms, as art.


Best
Thomas




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