WILL SHE EVER DIE?

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The work of Leni Riefenstahl, who died in 2003, seems to lend itself to a teleological reading, progressing towards its dark conclusion. It began with Bergfilme which celebrated heroism and bodily effort in the extreme conditions of mountain climbing; it was followed by her two »Nazi« documentaries, celebrating the political and sport bodily discipline, concentration and strength of will; then, after World War II, in her photo albums, she rediscovered her ideal of bodily beauty and graceful self-mastery in the Nubi African tribe; finally, in the last decades, she learned the difficult art of deep sea diving and started shooting documentaries about the strange life in the dark depths of the sea.

We thus seem to obtain a clear trajectory from the top to the bottom: we begin with the individuals struggling at the mountain tops and their gradual descent, untill we reach the amorphous thriving of Life itself at the bottom of the sea - is not what she encountered down there her ultimate object, the obscene and irresistibly thriving eternal Life itself, what she was searching for all along? And does this not apply also to her personality? It effectively seems that the fear of those who are fascinated by Leni is no longer »When will she die?«, but »Will she EVER die?« - although we rationally know she will soon die, we somehow do not really believe it, secretly convinced that she will go on forever…

     This continuity is usually given a »proto-Fascist« twist, as is the case in the famous Susan Sontag essay on Leni »Fascinating Fascism«. The idea is that even her pre- and post-Nazi films articulate the vision of life which is »proto-Fascist«: Leni's Fascism is deeper than her direct celebration of the Nazi politics, it resides already in her pre-political aesthetics of Life, in her fascination with the beautiful bodies displaying their disciplined movements… Perhaps, it is time to problematize this topos. Let us take Das blaue Licht: is it not possible to read the film also in exactly the opposite way? Is Junta, the lone and wild mountain girl, not an outcast who almost becomes the victim of a pogrom by the villagers – a pogrom which cannot but remind us of the anti-Semitic pogroms? Perhaps, it is not an accident that Bela Balasy, Leni's lover at that time who co-wrote the scenario with her, was a Marxist…

     The problem is here much more general, it goes far beyond Leni. Let us take the very opposite of Leni, Arnold Schoenberg: in the second part of Harmonienlehre, his major theoretical manifesto from 1911, he develops his opposition to tonal music in terms which, superficially, almost recall later Nazi anti-Semitic tracts: the tonal music has become a »diseased,« »degenerated« world in need of a cleansing solution; the tonal system has given in to »inbreeding and incest«; romantic chords such as the diminished seventh are »hermaphroditic,« »vagrant« and »cosmopolitan«… nothing easier than to claim that such a messianic-apocalyptic attitude is part of the same »spiritual situation« which gave birth to the Nazi »final solution.« This, however, is precisely the conclusion one should AVOID: what makes Nazism repulsive is not the rhetoric of final solution AS SUCH, but the concrete twist it gives to it.

Another popular topic of this kind of analyses, closer to Leni, is the allegedly »proto-Fascist« character of the mass choreography displaying disciplined movements of thousands of bodies (parades, mass performances on the stadiums, etc.); if one finds it also in Socialism, one immediately draws the conclusion about a »deeper solidarity« between the two »totalitarianisms.« Such a procedure, the very prototype of ideological liberalism, misses the point: not only are such mass performances not inherently Fascist; they are not even »neutral,« waiting to be appropriated by Left or Right - it was Nazism who stole them and appropriated them from the workers' movement, their original site of birth. None of the »proto-Fascist« elements is per se Fascist, what makes them »Fascist« is only their specific articulation – or, to put it in Stephen Jay Gould's terms, all these elements are »ex-apted« by Fascism. In other words, there is no »Fascism avant la lettre,« because it is the letter itself (the nomination) which makes out of the bundle of elements Fascism proper.

Along the same lines, one should radically reject the notion that discipline (from self-control to bodily training) is a »proto-Fascist« feature - the very predicate »proto-Fascist« should be abandonned: it is the exemplary case of a pseudo-concept whose function is to block conceptual analysis. When we say that the organized spectacle of thousands of bodies (or, say, the admiration of sports which demand high effort and self-control like mountain climbing) is »proto-Fascist,« we say strictly nothing, we just express a vague association which masks our ignorance. So when, three decades ago, Kung Fu films were popular (Bruce Lee etc.), was it not obvious that we were dealing with a genuine working class ideology of youngsters whose only means of success was the disciplinary training of their only possession, their bodies? Spontaneity and the »let it go« attitude of indulging in excessive freedoms belong to those who have the means to afford it – those who have nothing have only their discipline. The »bad« bodily discipline, if there is one, is not the collective training, but, rather, jogging and body-building as part of the New Age myth of the realization of the Self's inner potentials – no wonder that the obsession with one's body is an almost obligatory part of the passage of ex-Leftist radicals into the »maturity« of pragmatic politics: from Jane Fonda to Joschka Fischer, the »period of latency« between the two phases was marked by the focus on one's own body.

So, back to Leni, what this means is not that one should dismiss her Nazi engagement as a limited unfortunate episode. The true problem is to sustain the tension which cuts through her work: the tension between the artistic perfection of her procedures and the ideological project which »co-opted« them. Why should her case be different from that of Ezra Pound, W.B. Yates, and other modernists with Fascist tendencies who long ago became part of our artistic canon? Perhaps, the search for the »true ideological identity« of Leni is a misleading one: there is no such identity, she was genuinely thrown around, inconsistent, caught in a cobweb of conflicting forces.

Is then the best way to mark her death not to take the risk of fully enjoying a film like Das blaue Licht which contains the possibility of a political reading of her work totally different from the predominant one?