Fascinating Fascism

[rich]

essay by Susan Sontag on Leni Riefenstahl (1975)

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1975/feb/06/fascinating-fascism/

lots of Pynchonian echoes


These ideals are vivid and moving to many people, and it is
dishonest—and tautological—to say that one is affected by Triumph of
the Will and Olympiad because they were made by a film maker 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,
Laing’s antipsychiatry, Third World camp-following, and belief in
gurus and the occult. The exaltation of community does not preclude
the search for absolute leadership; on the contrary, it may inevitably
lead to it. (Not surprisingly, a fair number of the young people now
prostrating themselves before gurus and submitting to the most
grotesquely autocratic discipline are former anti-authoritarians and
anti-elitists of the 1960s.) And Riefenstahl’s devotion to the Nuba, a
tribe not ruled by one supreme chief or shaman, does not mean she has
lost her eye for the seducer-performer—even if she has to settle for a
nonpolitician. Since she finished her work on the Nuba some years ago,
one of her main projects has been photographing Mick Jagger.

rich