Susan Sontag on Aestheticised Politics

Susan Sontag in “Fascinating Fascism”, NYRB (6 Feb., 1975):

Although Triumph of the Will has no narrative voice it does open with a written text that heralds the rally as the redemptive culmination of German history. But this opening commentary is the least original of the ways in which the film is tendentious. Triumph of the Will represents an already achieved and radical transformation of reality: history become theater. In her book published in 1935, Riefenstahl had told the truth. The Nuremberg Rally “was planned not only as a spectacular mass meeting—but as a spectacular propaganda film […]. The ceremonies and precise plans of the parades, marches, processions, the architecture of the halls and stadium were designed for the convenience of the cameras.” How the Party convention was staged was determined by the decision to produce Triumph of the Will. The event, instead of being an end in itself, served as the set of a film which was then to assume the character of an authentic documentary. Anyone who defends Riefenstahl’s films as documentaries, if documentary is to be distinguished from propaganda, is being ingenuous. In Triumph of the Will, the document (the image) is no longer simply the record of reality; “reality” has been constructed to serve the image.

The ceremonies that are the subject of TW are themselves the “transformation of reality: history become theater [sic]”; “‘reality has been constructed to serve the image.” This is politics as total artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk), or “politics in the grand style”. Aestheticized politics is inauthentic because enacted with its sense-reception in mind, guiding that enactment. It’s misleading; or it contains a lie.

Bear in mind David B. Hinton’s response to Sontag (NYRB, 18 Sept., 1975) re. her claim that “the Party convention was staged was determined by the decision to produce Triumph of the Will”:

Riefenstahl filmed just one Rally in entirety; the buildings were designed to stand for centuries. As can be seen in Speer’s memoirs or in any objective appraisal of Nazi art and architecture, the raison d’être of that architecture existed quite independently of its cinematic possibilities.

And:

Riefenstahl has stated in later interviews that planning for the film did not commence until she arrived in Nuremberg a week before the Rally started.

And on what Sontag seems to wish to pass off as Riefenstahl’s letting something slip in a pre-denazification text (“In her book published in 1935, Riefenstahl had told the truth. The Nuremberg Rally “was planned not only as a spectacular mass meeting—but as a spectacular propaganda film […]. The ceremonies and precise plans of the parades, marches, processions, the architecture of the halls and stadium were designed for the convenience of the cameras”), but which Hinton discovers is an unattributed paraphrase (not the first in Sontag’s essay…) of Kracauer:

Even more astonishing, however, is Ms. Sontag’s use of a purported quote from Riefenstahl’s 1935 book, Hinter den Kulissen des Reichsparteitag Films. Sontag uses the quote in an attempt to use Riefenstahl’s own words to disprove some of her later statements. […] I can personally attest to having studied the book from cover to cover in a vain attempt to find this statement. The quote was familiar, however, and I finally did find it, though not in Riefenstahl’s book. In his famous book, From Caligari to Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer makes this statement (his own, quoting no one): “The Convention was planned not only as a spectacular mass meeting, but as spectacular film propaganda” (Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, Princeton University Press, p. 301).