Toward the end of the film, when Muller asks [Riefenstahl] to define a fascist aesthetic and she replies that she doesn’t even know what the term means, she clearly has the audience on her side. And — notwithstanding all of Susan Sontag’s alluring arguments in the essay “Fascinating Fascism,” one of the better Riefenstahl hatchet jobs — it’s easy to understand her response.
As Brian Winston put it on the BBC program, “I don’t think you can make a moral judgment about Riefenstahl’s work on the basis that it embodies fascist aesthetics, because I don’t think there’s any such thing. I think she stands in the mainstream of Western aesthetics, and I think that Western aesthetics can be, on occasion, fascist. That’s the problem with the whole phenomenon of fascism — that we want somehow to treat it as a virus. It isn’t; it’s part of us. It’s the dark side of the European tradition, and she represents that dark side perfectly.”
An even greater related problem is posed less by the film itself than by contemporary confusion — all of it to the advantage of Riefenstahl’s reputation — about the proper relation of art to politics.
For months we’ve been reading that Riefenstahl is a great artist who has never received her due. This argument completely ignores the facts, to cite only two examples out of dozens, that her Triumph of the Will and Olympia (produced and financed by Goebbels’s ministry of propaganda) have been part of the permanent collection of New York’s Anthology Film Archives for well over a quarter of a century, a distinction not yet accorded to films by Fritz Lang, Kenji Mizoguchi, Michelangelo Antonioni, or Jean-Luc Godard, and that she was one of the first guests of honor to be saluted at the Telluride film festival.
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Toward the end of the film, when Muller asks [Riefenstahl] to define a fascist aesthetic and she...
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