Wednesday 31 January 2007

THE FUHRER



By Daniel Miller

An airplane appears in the skies over Nürnberg. Accompanied by the strains of Wagner, slowly bleeding into the Horst-Wessel-Lied, the Führer is descending, like an eagle, or a god. Upon landing at the aerodrome, he will emerge from his plane, to thunderous applause, thence to be driven into the town, through cheering crowds, and even a cat, entranced, will stop to behold him.

Upon meeting Riefenstahl in 1971, a swooning Mick Jagger told her that Triumph of the Will was his favourite film, “I've seen it fifteen times!” the singer enthused, and in fact the nature of his specific interest is not hard to comprehend. Even today, more than sixty years after his death, Hitler still remains the most televised man in the world, with whole banks of cable channels revolving their schedules around him. This is a magnitude of sustained exposure that Jagger could only dream about. To live inside the simulacrum is also to live by it, the transfixion traversing it, and the rigid hierarchy spun by that. Jagger is an intelligent man, and he appreciates his own status. Thus, with the wages of his own rapt attention, he submits to the superior star.

In his breakthrough 1985 novel White Noise, Don DeLillo satirized academia, making his tired hero Jack Gladney a Professor of Hitler Studies at a small liberal arts college. In the grand conservative tradition of gruff common sense, “Hitler Studies! What a ridiculous pseudo-subject!” one initially thinks. And yet, the satire here is really double - on closer inspection, the question reveals itself for a good one. After all, what really is a Hitler? What does it do, what does it want: what really is the scope and source of its power? What follows is a dissection of the concept with needles.

THE FÜHRER IS THE ONE AND ONLY

“The party is Hitler, and Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler,” Rudolf Hess declares, strident behind his podium. This statement, the very axiom of totalitarianism, suggests a situation far stranger than one of simple despotism. It is not just that the Führer is greater than his followers, he is his followers, everything they already are, and could ever wish to become. No deeper identification is necessary, even technically possible: one witnesses that the space between the mass and the man has here been closed down completely.

This suffocating closure expresses itself in the strained relation Triumph of the Will maintains with its viewers. Riefenstahl’s frames follow hot on the heels from each other, and between her long shots of the speaking, senior Nazis, and her quick fire cuts to their silent, handsome supporters, no real possibility of a perspective remains. Instead, one finds oneself compulsively swept away.

In marked contrast to Brechtian theatre, where a minimal alienation is maintained in the spectacle so as to force the audience to form a critical connection towards it, here, even the very idea of such a connection is mercilessly suppressed. Watching Brecht, one is encouraged to ask oneself engaged moral questions like “what would I have done in his situation?” By contrast, watching Riefenstahl, one is encouraged to simply nod along.

In this way, directly positioning itself against critique, Triumph of the Will works to foster a state of anaesthesia, or what Brecht called “sleepwalking.” In the manner of a summer blockbuster, this film asks you not to think about it, instead to simply let it flow over you.

THE FÜHRER IS YOU

As Owen Hatherley also stresses, with Riefenstahl, whatever we might see, the montage ultimately always takes us back to Hitler. Thus the singular importance of the Führer is emphasized. Yet, in fact the precise nature of this importance is surprising.

The fact that the montage always returns to Hitler does not represent a statement of his power, but a statement of his impotence. Like a dog pestering you for food that you do not possess, the montage always returns to Hitler because, remaining unsatisfied, it wants something from him that he cannot give it.

In true Slovenian style, a joke serves to make this last point clearer. A boasting new husband walks into a bar, and announces to the barman, “Last night I didn’t sleep a wink, I was up until morning making love with my wife.” “How many times did you do it?” says the barman. “Eight times in a row,” responds the husband. “You have my sympathies,” concludes the barman, “You could have slept fine if you had only done it properly once.”

Just as the temptation in the face of the pathos of Riefenstahl’s Hitler is to read it as some kind of artistic error, the temptation here is to read the shaming of this figure along the lines of somebody crushed by semantic slipperiness. In fact, this temptation should be resisted both cases.

The interpretation of the joke runs as follows: the husband has sought his own humiliation, or rather, to put it more precisely, has taken an opportunity to manifest it. Only the pathologically guilty start conversations with strangers by declaring the state of their sex life. Indeed, only the pathologically guilty hang around in bars so shortly after getting married for it still to be a novelty.

The pathos of Hitler conforms to a similar logic. The error when dealing with Nazism is to take it at its word, and understand it is an ethos of power. In fact, its real meaning is otherwise, carried beneath the breath of its statement. At the nerve centre of Nazism is a brilliant idealism of power that exists only to shine light on the hysterical, pathetic failure that deep down you are.

In his ceaseless struggle with the montage, Hitler incarnates this failure, and thus we acknowledge him, as one of us, as our legitimate leader. “Let’s observe above all the way he acts while delivering his big speeches that prepare or justify his slaughters,” Brecht noted. “You understand, we have to observe him at that point where he wants to make the public feel with him and say: yes, we would have done the same thing! In short: where he appears as a human being and wants to convince the public that his actions are simply human and reasonable, and thus to give him their blessing.”

THE FÜHRER IS YOUR MOTHER

Returning now to the joke: in effect, what has transpired here is as follows. Before the community of men, as incarnated here in the form of the barman, the husband has made manifest two different things. First, his profound shame for taking up with a woman at all, and deserting the community of men. Second, a latent resentment at the humiliating fact (which all men secretly know full well) that all relations between men are mediated by women, to the extent that no male fraternity is even thinkable otherwise.

This first affect, shame, in effect, serves as his affective passport back into the brotherhood. The barman recognizes it, registers it, and responds in kind. He too feels ashamed, frankly he prefers sleeping to sex with a woman. The pact, then, is resealed without difficulty. Or at least, would be resealed, were it not for the presence of this second affect, resentment. This feeling now suddenly appears, excessive over language, to the point where it threatens to wreck even all implied contracts.

Where has this feeling come from? In fact, the irony here is that it is nothing else but the form of the contract itself, forged, like the ring of the Nibelung, out of a possessive tension. In this context, a loose conversation elsewhere, the real wife of the husband, and the imaginary wife of the barman, both exist only as figures of speech. They are really two different fantasies with nothing to do with each other, two different products and bearers of two different desires. On account of the deceit of language, the flattening aspect of it that reduces two different things to one word, under the name of woman, they here collapse into each other, and form one single, illusory wife, now with one single, contested desire. And yet, given her ghostliness, who really has the right to decide what she wants?

This matter is more than simply particular. The problem is rather extremely generic. All male homosociality is mediated by contesting figures of the woman, each purporting to express what she wants. But the woman does not exist, and so the matter can never be settled. But the matter must be settled, because male fraternity demands it.

Thus the Führer is summoned from the heavens to mediate. His task? In effect, the mediation of the mediation itself. In the pursuit of male tranquillity, dancing for peace, Hitler must not only flatten particular difference, he must flatten the difference as such. This dilemma is serious, and taking every different matter in hand individually will obviously yield no solution to it. The cunning of desire will always conspire to outfox all floundering, retroactive attempts to trap it: difference must not even be allowed to arise in the first place. The sliding of the signifier must be halted at source. One idea of the woman must be sovereign beyond dispute. The endless series of libidinal substitutions must be stopped before it even begins. Desire must be arrested, before it even starts to stir.

This is to say, it must be arrested at some point before the loss of the original object, beyond even desire itself, at the very point of this object. What is it? An object that not is one: nothing less than the blissful lost unity enjoyed by the child with its mother, prior to its cruel cleaving away in consciousness from her.

This is woman as phallus: woman as a dereflexivized, mechanical servicer of demands, singularly untouched by desire, and driven to stifle it. At root composed of two elements, mother and child, assumed once to have been magically whole, self-enclosed and serene, the phallus is an autistic circuit of need. The child that needs, the mother that services needs. There is not an exit.

The model migrates. The need to mediate mediation is still a need, and thus it is clear that unhappy society belongs on the left side of this equation. In the meantime, recognizing our agony, and endeavouring to solve it, the Führer inserts himself onto its right side. He becomes our real mother, a mother more maternal than the mother itself. As for ourselves, we are left in the position of the eternal child. Society, meanwhile, is made fit for male bonding. A perfect contract.

ENJOY YOUR FÜHRER!

At the outset of Triumph of the Will, Hitler descends from the sky, and at the aerodrome, in the streets, the cheering crowd is already there, waiting for him. It would seem that some kind of call has been issued, sinuously put out through the buzzing tissue of this world. And yet who really has summoned whom? And how?

It will be noted that one single, striking schism runs down the middle of this film, along aesthetic lines. A manifest discrepancy in physical attractiveness inheres between the nameless Nazi followers who Riefenstahl shoots as a mass, and the prominent ones whom she frames as individuals. The former appear as identical, unblemished, unblinking flowers of Aryan youth, the latter all look, each in their different ways, as somehow distinctly wrong, weird, even disgusting. Like the seven members of the Council of Anarchists in G.K. Chesterton’s novel The Man Who Was Thursday, each appears to bear “a demoniac detail somewhere... something about him... which was not normal, and which seemed hardly human.” From Hess and his mad, staring eyes, to Goebbels with his bony, death mask-like face, to the prominently pulsing vein in Julius Streicher’s shaven head, up to and including Hitler himself, and his high, wheedling voice, every prominent Nazi appears equipped with their own personal hideous quirk, unique to them alone, whereas their followers remain an essentially homogeneous unity of undifferentiated physical perfection.

The dialectic at work in this disjunction is a curious one, relating back, but now modifying, a point made above. Hitler and his henchman are you, in that they incarnate the worst of you, which is to say, to the extent that they incarnate your enjoyment. What is your enjoyment? In effect, the unique, obscene, inhuman, repellent core of you, mordantly lurking beyond your pleasure principle. As Lacan understands it, your enjoyment is spectacular, to the extent that is always performed before an audience, whether real or imaginary, and ductile, for the reason that it is socially produced, through semiological processes.

In this way, enjoyment, making up the substance of this world, can be seen to have sent for Hitler from heaven. Why might it have done so? According to Lacan, the explanation here runs as follows: from a certain perspective your enjoyment forms the most terrible part of you. It is the thing which is most unique about you, and hence most your own, and yet, it is also the thing which is least under the sway of your power, and hence a constant, painful reminder of your guilty impotent helplessness. Hence your enjoyment pleads to be quelled, sloughed off somehow, and this is effectively what has happened here. The mass have contracted their enjoyment out to the Nazi party. Thus the former has remained beautiful, innocent, pure and homogeneous, while the latter has found themselves, like experimental military mutants in genetic soup, twisted into terrible shapes.

THE FÜHRER EVEN KNOWS WHEN A SINGLE HAIR MOVES ON YOUR HEAD

Throughout much of Triumph of the Will, Hitler moves around spontaneously, delivering speeches, in a manner loosely resembling Christ. This poses a question: Christ, fine, but which one?

Riefenstahl provides a clue here. “[N]ineteen months after the beginning of the German renaissance, Adolf Hitler flew again to Nürnberg,” she announces in her opening title card, drawing attention at once to the fact that the event has already begun. Here, at least, we are not holding our breath awaiting the main attraction of the crucifixion. Furthermore, Riefenstahl describes the event as a renaissance, some kind of rebirth of a prior event. Another way of putting this would be to say second coming. This puts us somewhere in the vicinity of the carnivorous lamb Christ of Revelations. Finally, in using the word beginning, Riefenstahl darkly implies that this is only the beginning. Thus we are given to understand that the climax is still to come.

What might this climax amount to? Perhaps unsurprisingly, the answer Triumph of the Will gives to this question sharply diverges from the millions of burning bodies that history supplied to it. At the heart of this film is really neither a social message, nor a political claim – indeed, not even a spurious one, like the one which forms the core of Mein Kampf, but rather, something closer to a drug experience. Unusually for a documentary film, after her introductory title card, Riefenstahl provides no further establishing context for her narrative. Thus the impression is formed that we are dealing, not so much with an edited series of contiguous scenes, but instead, with one unitary unfolding event. Hitler appears at the aerodrome, in the town, in a wood, the mass simply feels itself pulled towards him, the scenery arranges itself around him. There is no bureaucracy, no boredom, no waiting, no deferral, no plot – rather, just sublime, autopoietic creation.

Unmistakably it is, in a certain way, a little like Woodstock: this happening vision of a life without death, a world without borders and a body with organs. And indeed, perhaps this proximity is why Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea chose to set the denouement of the occult-Fascist plot in their novel The Illuminatus Trilogy at an international music festival. After all, where else do you find a more potent combination of the fey and the fake-redemptive, such as Nazism can clearly be seen to represent here, then in a sea of stoned hippies, doing capoeira, by the dawn’s early light?

THE FÜHRER: WHAT IS HE GOOD FOR

“Sixteen years after the beginning of our suffering, nineteen months after the beginning of the German renaissance, Adolf Hitler flew again to Nürnberg to review the columns of his faithful followers.” So reads the introductory title card with which Riefenstahl opens Triumph of the Will. This text is the single concession that this film makes toward the cause of contextual understanding, and goes some way towards establishing how it depicts reality.
Three elements immediately stand out. Firstly, the fact that time, rather than being given according to an objective chronology, is instead charted against an imaginary index of vitality, ranging from suffering to renaissance. Second, the fact that the city of Nürnberg is here presented as directly militarized, presented as a garrison composed of military columns. Finally, the fact that the primary principle of military organization is posited here as faith.

This film was shot in 1934. The “beginning of our suffering” occurred sixteen years previously. Our suffering, then, does not begin with the beginning of the mechanized slaughter that was the first world war, but rather begins with its end. Is the matter simply that the Great War ended in humiliating defeat for Germany? Or is the objection more radical? Andrei Tarkovsky comments somewhere that it is easier to live in wartime than peacetime. As he understood it, in wartime the spheres of the private and public overlap with each other, rendering social life straightforward and clear, whereas in peacetime they cleave, creating social confusion. It will be noted that a certain irony buries itself in this dictum: it may well be easier to live, but it is also easier to die. And yet, perhaps this is precisely the point.

“What makes life worth living,” Slavoj Zizek notes in the concluding pages of The Puppet and the Dwarf, “is the very excess of life: the awareness that there is something for which we are ready to risk our life.” But what if there is nothing for which we ready to risk our lives? Under such conditions, we would be forced to invent something. This, effectively is the the origin of clinical depression, a simulacrum of truth contrived for depressives to live by, and the abiding function of fascism as well.

The more extreme subversion inheres to the latter case. In accepting the idea that at least some kind of excremental project is necessary, only erroneously taking for his own something so abstract (but not entirely abstract: after all, there are real psychiatrists, just as there really are art critics) the depressive still retains at least the basic form of orthodoxy. By contrast, the fascist renounces orthodoxy entirely by resolving that death constitutes the excess over life: thus he closes a perfect logical circle around himself, and death. “Long live death,” as the Spanish fascists put it.

A kind of spiral effect is produced in both cases: in the former a spiral of ennui, and in the latter, a spiral of murderous violence. One enters into a perpetual present, an entire synthetic environment arranged according to an aesthetic structure. “War and time and being are compounded into one great narcotic experience,” as Michael Hoffman puts it, writing of the proto-fascist poet Ernst Jünger. Meanwhile, writing of the same, Klaus Theweleit quotes Euripides. “A man in ecstasy becomes a violent storm, a raging sea, roaring thunder. He merges with the cosmos, racing toward death’s dark gates like a bullet toward its target.” All anxious matters of intelligence fade into irrelevance. The obscene torture of the cogito finally abates, shrinking to the space of a mutely chaotic equation, ultimately so simple that even a child could grasp it.

The idea of utopia, which began life with Thomas More as a principle of political rationality, finds expression in Triumph of the Will in the terms of a cinematic trajectory. Riefenstahl’s title, in fact chosen by Hitler, is extraordinarily precise in this respect. Literally, what is being depicted here is not the triumph of any particular will, not even that of the Führer himself, but rather nothing less than the triumph of will itself: this fateful stirring of this dramatic, supra-historical, transcendent force, now set to sweep the anxious, neurotic, empirical-transcendental doublet of man into historical oblivion. Such is the propaganda message of this film; disregard it at your peril.

Riefenstahl and the Mountain



by Infinite Thought

Where did Riefenstahl get her ideas from? What precise cinematic affects capture the spirit of the Third Reich, and how and why did Riefenstahl come to express these themes and techniques so well? The pre-Nazi Bergfilmen (mountain film), such as Fanck’s The Holy Mountain (1926), give us some alarming hints. It is impossible not to see the embryonic horrors of Nazism prefigured in the unseemly coalescence of highly advanced cinematic technique with thunderously banal emotional content that makes up the Bergfilmen. We see Riefenstahl herself slipping with ease between acting and directing – from dippy dancing mountain-girl to steely-nerved all-powerful director of the two highly-stylised propaganda films that best document Nazi ambition and cinematic manipulation, Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938).

Much of the dynamism of Riefenstahl’s documentaries, as well as that of the earlier mountain films, depends upon the profound manipulation of contrasts, both visual and sonic: light and shadow, earth and sky, man and heavens, the solitary face and the mass rally, human beauty and inanimate nature, music and blackness. But these pairs are not simply presented as opposites. There is a third element that perhaps best characterises the fascist aesthetic, and that is obfuscation. What takes place at the limits of these stark contrasts, as if to cloak any potential rational absolutism, is the relentless presence of mist, cloud, fog, steam, shimmering light, dust, haze, the fluttering of flags – anything to prevent the emergence of reflexivity or critical resolution. Cinematic totalitarianism, or rather the cinematic attempt to aestheticize totalitarianism, thus precisely depends upon occult confusion and the attempt to make impossible any clarity of thought. We see this everywhere: from the miasma out of which Hitler’s plane descends in Triumph of the Will to the mist that floats across the Olympic rings at the beginning of Olympia; from the steam rising from the cooking in the army barracks to the trails left by the torchlights by skiers in the mountain films and Hitler supporters in Triumph of the Will.



In contrast to the Soviet cinematic output of the 20s, with its relentless attention to process, production and the tracking of movement of people and machines from one point to another, Riefenstahl’s films present scenarios that simply are. The crowds waiting to greet Hitler are simply there, just as the mountain is simply there. What this third element does – this opaque, cloudy dizziness of unreason that smears the edges of presentation in a dream-like manner – is prevent any attempt to track both origins or consequences. There is no point at which the characters of the Bergfilmen or the figures in Triumph of the Will can reach a point of decision because that point of subjective self-assertion has already been filled in by the combination of post-romantic mantras (brotherhood, loyalty, strength, the fatherland) and metaphysical haze – the light-headedness of one who climbs a mountain in a snowstorm to escape the urban quotidian drudgery of the ‘valley-pigs’ (a term used in the mountain films to differentiate the ‘nobility’ of the climbers from the homogeneity of the city-dwellers).



This commitment to presenting extremes in a smothered way, to promote lofty sentiments – love, destiny, infatuation – to absolutes as stirring as they are vague, is Riefenstahl’s and the Bergfilme’s aim. By doing so they summon up a universe that is at once meaningful, intensive and occasionally beautiful – a kind of religion without transcendence, whose Earthly yet mysterious skies and clouds drift through one’s heart with a sublime significance. Taking a cue from Kant’s 1790 definition of the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, one finds the following point:

The beautiful in nature is a question of the form of object, and this consists in limitation, whereas the sublime is to be found in an object even devoid of form, so far as it immediately involves, or else by its presence provokes a representation of limitlessness, yet with a superadded thought of its totality (§23).

The capture of the beautiful in nature (whether it be the rushing rivers and snowy peaks of the Bergfilmen or the bodies of the divers in Olympia) is a representation of pure form, and astonishes before one has a chance to distance oneself from such reactive immediacy. The sublimity of the mountain, on the other hand, symbolises both the limitlessness of ambition and the impossible desire to make such an ambition all-consuming. It is no coincidence that the ‘Holy Mountain’ of the film results in death for all three of the characters (even if Riefenstahl doesn’t die at the end of the film, it is her death-mask that forms the first frame). But the proto-Nazi sublime mistakes, and indeed does so deliberately, the subjective judgement with the object itself. Kant takes care to guard against this temptation:



True sublimity must be sought only in the mind of the judging subject, and not in the object of nature that occasions this attitude by the estimate formed of it. Who would apply the term "sublime" even to shapeless mountain masses towering one above the other in wild disorder, with their pyramids of ice, or to the dark tempestuous ocean, or such like things? But in the contemplation of them, without any regard to their form, the mind abandons itself to the imagination and to a reason placed, though quite apart from any definite end, in conjunction therewith, and merely broadening its view, and it feels itself elevated in its own estimate of itself on finding all the might of imagination still unequal to its ideas (§26).

Unfortunately, we know exactly who would, and did, apply the sublime directly to these ‘shapeless mountain masses’: the vapid enthusiasm of the young mountain climbers and their willingness, indeed desire, to die rather than stay in the world of the everyday, is the ominous precursor of a generation prepared to sacrifice itself in the name of an opaque all-consuming passion. Whereas Kant’s sublime reinforces the subtle self-rule of reason, the Nazi sublime conflates nature with the subject, and the strong mountain-climbing youth with a paradigm of beauty and determination that cannot but exclude vast swathes of humanity.



The ordered human masses of Triumph of the Will are prefigured in the opaque ‘thereness’ of the shapeless mountain masses in the Bergfilme (and one recalls Mallory’s famous response when asked why climb Everest: ‘because it is there’). One can speak here of Riefenstahl’s ‘frozen style’. Even in the midst of exertion, movement, vitality and dynamism, there is a distinct stillness both in her representations of nature and in the statuesque bodies of the gymnasts and blond boys listening impassively to Hitler’s speeches in Triumph of the Will. It is no surprise that Riefenstahl’s still but emotive presentation (as well as the devastating banality of Nazi proclamations and exhortations) has served as a privileged model for contemporary advertising, with its necessarily empty sloganeering and manufactured product fidelity. The pacing of Riefenstahl films, similarly, reflects the combined, repetitive boredom and false excitement of spectacular consumer capitalism – the combination of moments of supreme tedium and utter beauty. This model of aesthetic commodification can in turn be reflected back onto Nazism itself. As Lutz P. Koepnick put it in 'Fascist Aesthetics Revisited': ‘Circulated as one of many other objects of popular desire, the politics of fascism should thus ultimately be understood as a form of commodity aesthetics.’

Youth

Siegfried Kracauer, in his 1947 book From Caligari to Hitler, notes that in the Bergfilme ‘immaturity and mountain enthusiasm were one’. This association of youth and the mountain is crucial. The mountain is the place to test one’s strength, to reach as far up into the clouds as possible. Nature, and the mountain in particular, is simultaneously the object of youth-worship, the place of non-religious, but nevertheless mystical, destiny and key symbol of the sublimation of sexual desire. For later film-makers such as Werner Herzog, who in many ways works with many of the same themes as the Bergfilme, the crucial point of separation comes with undoing of the idea that nature has a privileged relation to youth. In fact, if anything, for Herzog, it has a privileged relation to madness, the outsider, the renegade. Nature for Herzog is also profoundly indifferent to human concerns, and reveals little of one’s ‘destiny’ or role. He states: ‘I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but hostility, chaos and murder’.



For the Bergfilme and Riefenstahl, however, it is the combination of physical exertion and stillness in the face of natural beauty that calms and attempts to discipline, even if it cannot quite entirely eradicate, sexual desire. At every point in The Holy Mountain, in particular, where sexual desire threatens to explode into language or physicality, the characters go skiing or climb mountains, pausing occasionally to admire an Alpine view. Mountain-climbing is pure sublimation that removes sex in order to raise an increasingly fit youth to ever greater emotional and patriotic heights.



When Hitler in Mein Kampf surveys the contemporary cultural world, one of his main complaints, aside from its ‘regression’ and ‘degeneracy’, as we might expect, is of the lack of cultural access permitted to the youth: ‘It was a sad sign of inner decay that the youth could no longer be “sent” into most of these so-called “abodes of art” – a fact that was admitted with shameless frankness by a general display of the penny-arcade warning: “Young people are not admitted!” What, Hitler asks, would the great dramatists have had to say about the exclusion of the young from art galleries and theaters? ‘How Schiller would have flared up, how Goethe would have turned away in indignation!’ If the theaters and art galleries don’t want the youth, then the mountains will welcome them with open (if occasionally deadly) arms – they certainly pleased the most infamous of Goethe’s teen-suicides, Werther, whose immature sorrows and nature-worship precisely circulate around mountains:

Stupendous mountains encompassed me, abysses yawned at my feet, and cataracts fell headlong down before me; impetuous rivers rolled through the plain, and rocks and mountains resounded from afar. In the depths of the earth I saw innumerable powers in motion, and multiplying to infinity; whilst upon its surface, and beneath the heavens, there teemed ten thousand varieties of living creatures.



And, perhaps more revealingly, ‘as I contemplated the mountains which lay stretched out before me, I thought how often they had been the object of my dearest desires’. The fusion of the Nazi sublime with this youthful ‘mountain-lust’ captures a devastatingly strong irrationality that feeds directly into those later presentations of fascism that no longer need to rely upon mountain imagery directly. What Riefenstahl learned above all from the Bergfilme was the supremely dangerous power of lightheadedness.

Tuesday 30 January 2007

Postscript on Riefenstahl

Thanks to everybody who came on Sunday. Any comments, questions, theories, requests or complaints, please leave us a message below. Up next is Vertov plus shorts, screening on the afternoon of Sunday 11th February, with the program this time starting at 3pm. A flyer will follow shortly. In the meantime, below is a picture of a young seal being clubbed to death.

Thursday 18 January 2007

the first screening



[click on images to see details]