SOURCE: Schulte-Sasse, Linda. “Leni Riefenstahl's Feature Films and the Question of a Fascist Aesthetic.” Cultural Critique, no. 19 (spring 1991): 123-48.

[In the following essay, Schulte-Sasse examines Riefenstahl's mountain films—Blue Light and Tiefland—in terms of the notion of a “fascist aesthetic.”]

In labeling a text “Nazi” or “fascist,” critics often restrict their criteria (to the extent these are articulated at all) to content-based motifs such as the valorization of a Führer or leader figure, the exaltation of nature, the glorification of the military and of death, or the negative portrayal of “racial” (especially Jewish) groups. Although these motifs clearly pervade National Socialist culture, one can question whether, on the one hand, they are present in all of Nazi culture, and whether, on the other hand, they are unique to that culture. Already in the thirties and forties Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin offered analyses of Nazi culture that went a step further by concentrating on structural as well as thematic tendencies of fascism. Both thinkers address Nazism's attempt to break down the boundaries between the aesthetic and real life and the mobilization of technology for this purpose. Brecht enlists a metaphor of political discourse as theater to describe Nazism's destruction of the public sphere; Benjamin portrays the same process as an “aestheticization of political” life, engineered as spectacle for but also by the masses.¹ National Socialism, like other forms of fascism, is of course far too heterogeneous and inconsistent to be reduced to any single strategy or set of motifs. Nevertheless, Brecht's and Benjamin's theorization of National Socialism points to the impossibility of understanding fascism without addressing its structural tendencies, without examining modes of address in its artistic and “political” texts as well as the institutionalization of these texts. This is not to suggest that predominant textual motifs are not important—only that they are inextricably connected to textual strategies and, in particular, to processes of aestheticization.

Yet rather than offering the consolation of a neat taxonomy separating a “fascist text” from a “non-fascist text”—and thus allowing contemporary critics to place National Socialism at a comfortable distance—a structural approach to the “fascist aesthetic” likewise opens a Pandora's box. The reason is that it automatically raises the same two questions as do content-based definitions, only with greater urgency: First, do the majority of narrative texts produced during the Third Reich qualify as “fascist texts” in any strict sense? Do they, in other words, break down the boundary between the aesthetic and life and thereby lead the spectator into an aestheticized activism? Second, do various contemporary (non-Nazi) phenomena that live off the same tension between reality and the imaginary and likewise attempt to transgress the boundary between the imaginary and the “real” then qualify as fascist? The latter is particularly disconcerting in its implicit suggestion that fascism, if understood in a structural sense, may be alive and well in American political discourse—which is increasingly determined by the dissemination of aestheticized images—and in many other phenomena in contemporary societies currently discussed as features of postmodern societies. Since 1945 the terms “Nazi” and “fascist” have been used so restrictively as to shed little light on Nazism's success in evoking a collective identity in its constituents, or so loosely as to signify a historically useless catchword for whatever its user opposes (and allowing this user to mythify the self as a romanticized opponent of the hegemonic order).

Before offering some tentative answers to these questions in the final section of this essay, I would like to reconsider the notion of fascist aesthetics using the quintessential articulator of the Nazi film aesthetic, Leni Riefenstahl, as my point of departure. I intend to examine, however, not her celebrated propaganda vehicles, but her two feature films, The Blue Light (Das blaue Licht, 1932) and Tiefland (1954), as works that occupy the gray zone between films whose content, production, and distribution history render them clear examples of “Nazi propaganda” and films clearly dissociated from National Socialism or its antimodern precursors. The two films challenge rigid criteria of taxonomization, since neither can be branded a “Nazi” film in a specific chronological sense, nor can they be absolved from such a labeling, because they feature Riefenstahl as director, producer, and acting “star” and because they belong to the suspicious “mountain” film genre that Susan Sontag labels “an anthology of proto-Nazi sentiments” (76).

The process from inception to release (or rerelease) of The Blue Light and Tiefland spans a period from the early thirties to the fifties; whatever their appeal, in each case it pre- and postdated the Nazi regime.²The Blue Light, on which the leftist filmmaker and critic Béla Balázs collaborated,³ originally had its premiere in 1932 and was released a second time after the popular success of Riefenstahl's Olympia in 1938. Since the original film negatives were eventually lost, Riefenstahl gathered outtakes, redubbed the voices, and again released the film in 1952. Tiefland's origin is even more controversial, since it was produced during the war and employed Gypsies held in concentration camps. Riefenstahl originally planned a film version of Eugen d'Albert's 1903 opera of the same title in 1933. Although she began filming in 1940, various circumstances, including political upheaval, demands on her by the NSDAP, and illness, delayed the completion of filming until 1944. She was not able to finish editing Tiefland until after the war and after she had undergone “denazification.” Finally the film was distributed by Allianz in 1954, when it enjoyed “some critical success.”⁴

Public response to the two films has ranged from adulation of Riefenstahl's genius for “sheer pictorial beauty” (34)⁵ to condemnation of the films as transparent expressions of Nazi ideology. This disparity is consistent with the general assessment of Riefenstahl as either a genius victimized by her times or a diabolical manipulator. Perhaps because of this ambivalence she has been the object of a singular fascination among the public and scholars alike, as indicated by the use of such epithets as “legend,” “fallen goddess,” or “deceptive myth” to describe her. The controversy surrounding Riefenstahl can be summarized in two alternative positions: the minimizing of her “Nazi connection” based on an endorsement of the transhistorical sanctity of the artistic sphere,⁶ and, on the other hand, the insistence—articulated most vocally by Siegfried Kracauer and Sontag—that her entire career displays a direct connection to Nazi aesthetics and ideology, including her feature films with their romantic anticapitalism and semiotically charged use of landscape.⁷

For obvious reasons 1933 cannot be treated as a magic year in which all earlier art forms were aborted, and much can be learned by exploring Nazism's indebtedness to generic traditions, both literary and filmic, as Kracauer's and Sontag's critiques suggest. Like Sontag, I consider the exculpation of Riefenstahl as an apolitical artist merely in search of pristine beauty ludicrous. Nevertheless, restricting the issue to the terms of a binary opposition—whatever “side” one chooses—does not bring one much closer to grasping “fascist” textual strategies in a way that transcends an individual case. I prefer to eschew a personalized debate on the exaltation or excoriation of an individual and search for criteria in assessing the films that allow for both historical specificity and problematic continuities. In doing so I will propose an operative distinction between a fascist text and the more general category of a modern⁸ narrative that is informed by a certain type of antimodern nostalgia as a means of addressing whether—despite the thematic and cinematic continuities between Riefenstahl's fiction films and her Nazi propaganda vehicles—the former in fact contains inherently fascist traits. I will argue that while Nazi art and rhetoric are pervaded by a nostalgic longing for an ideal located in a vaguely defined past, this category does not suffice to distinguish it from other artistic forms.

1. JUNTA'S IMPENETRABLE OTHERNESS: THE BLUE LIGHT AS A MODERN TEXT

The Blue Light, the first film that Riefenstahl ever directed, closely adheres to the “mountain” film genre in which she had previously worked as an actress and dancer, most frequently under the directorship of Arnold Fanck. In the film, the mountain girl Junta (Leni Riefenstahl) is considered a witch by the villagers of Santa María in the Italian Dolomites, since she is the only one able to scale Mount Cristallo without falling to her death. The village has already lost numerous young men to the lure of the mysterious blue light which emanates from the mountain with every full moon. The Viennese painter Vigo (Mathias Wiemann) comes to the area and, attracted to Junta, begins living in the primitive mountain retreat she shares with the shepherd boy Guzzi. One evening Vigo follows Junta up the mountain to the source of the light, a crystal grotto. Hoping to secure financial prosperity for Junta and for the impoverished village, he directs the villagers to the grotto, where they mine the crystals. Later, discovering her grotto ravished, Junta falls despondently to her death. The villagers continue living in prosperity and revere her memory.

In a recent essay, “Fatal Attractions,” Eric Rentschler carefully examines the complex history of The Blue Light's various incarnations.⁹ The original 1932 version surrounded Junta's tale with a frame story set in the present, in which the villagers tell her legend to a visiting honeymooning couple. Riefenstahl's reconstruction of the film in 1952 omits the frame. Thus, if one examines the evolution of The Blue Light, one ends up with two stories: one about Junta herself, and one explicitly about the modern world's relationship to her. The frame accompanying the original version creates, as Rentschler says, a tension between a modern present and a past lost to modernity. Although the modern couple is deeply affected by Junta's legend, a distance remains between the couple's present and Junta's nostalgic world. The appearance of the modern honeymooning couple is particularly conclusive, since the elision of the couple's gender distinctions through the aviator glasses and trenchcoats they wear and the woman's position at a car's steering wheel suggests a decadent Weimar culture with its threat to patriarchy, for which Junta's tale serves as “a needed corrective” (Rentschler 63). Yet the scene is more than just a commentary on Weimar decadence; it also provokes a critical commentary on a modern relationship between the imaginary and the real, for the imaginary reconciliation embodied in the story of Junta could hardly survive in the real world of modernity.

The loss of the frame in the 1952 version may deemphasize the distance between the real and the ideal, but need not erase it, since there still remains a disjuncture between Junta's legend and the timeless present to which her legend is addressed. With or without the frame, the film depends on a sense of loss of an Other space that somehow “used to be.” Yet both versions offer the observer (within or outside the text) subjected to modern pressures a compensatory pleasure in savoring that loss. Whereas the 1932 version appears evaluative in its perspective, the later version reflects a tragic, Spenglerian view of the struggle between the elemental and civilization, between a nonalienated union with nature and forms of alienation engendered by exchange value: the demise of Junta's realm appears lamentable but virtually inevitable. It seems the 1952 version cannot decide whether to be an anticapitalist narrative. Crucial to the film's ambivalent position is the sympathetic painter Vigo, who among the film's characters comes closest to providing a figure of spectator identification. He, like the spectator, is an outsider from a secularized world, and with him we explore the enigmas posed by the narrative: Who are the lost boys? Who is Junta? Why do they fear her? When Vigo shifts from observer to agent in the narrative (i.e., when he provides the villagers with the knowledge with which they can demystify nature in the service of instrumentality), he does so with the sincere conviction that the material gain will benefit Junta as well, promising her she will “no longer have to go around in rags and barefoot!” Without the sympathetic Vigo, the weight of negative semantic markers¹⁰ would fall decidedly upon the villagers (i.e., civilization), whose cruelty to Junta is portrayed as a kind of mob behavior. These sadistic tendencies, coupled with the villagers' repression through cultural mores, institutionalized religion, and superstition, colors the spectator's sympathetic response to their fear for their sons' lives. The society seems gleichgeschaltet, with the villagers displaying synchronized movement, as when three blackclad old women turn simultaneously to exchange hostile gazes with Junta. An irony lies in the fact that Vigo, the figure most responsive to the freedom from cultural repression that Junta represents, is simultaneously the figure whose actions destroy nature and Junta with it. Because of Vigo's dominant role, the story fails to provide an unambiguous space (either in the anticapitalist or the nostalgic, modern vein) from which the narrative trajectory can be evaluated. It also provides a commentary on the ambivalent role of the intellectual and the artist as agents in modern societies, since their intentions rarely coincide with the effect of their intervention.

I would like to pursue the question of whether either of these versions is a fascist narrative or in fact merely a modern, romantic narrative characterized by a tension between an instrumental, modern reality and something that is Other—be it nature, woman, or art—and by a nostalgic longing for that Other as a space of reconciliation, a space of redemption lost to modernity. Thinkers from Immanuel Kant to Max Weber to Jürgen Habermas have described modernity as compartmentalized with different realms of praxis, and since the eighteenth century the realm of the aesthetic has been treasured for offering an imaginary space of solace free from commerce, alienation, and the agonia of modern life. A constitutive aspect of fascism, on the other hand, is that it attempts to dissolve the boundary between the institutionally separated spheres of modern reality and to provide a space of reconciliation, albeit a Schein- or illusory reconciliation, within reality. The space of reconciliation otherwise offered by the aesthetic is expanded to penetrate all aspects of life. As Benjamin suggests with his category of the “aestheticization of politics,” the compartmentalization of modernity is broken down, and the aesthetic sphere begins to permeate others, including that of politics. It seems to me that despite Nazism's undeniable exploitation of the structure of modernity (and specifically its exploitation of romantic motifs), The Blue Light in both of its versions exemplifies a modern and not a fascist structure, in which Junta remains an inaccessible Other ultimately lost to Vigo and to the spectator who occupies Vigo's fictional space. In other words, although The Blue Light shares thematic and stylistic traits with many Nazi films (and different artistic forms), it lacks structural elements characteristic of a fascist discourse. While the same can be said of many films produced during the Third Reich, others have at least moments in which the boundaries between the aesthetic and the real begin to dissolve. I will return to this broader discussion in the third section of my essay.

A central example for the preservation of the imaginary as imaginary in the film is the metaphor of the blue light that can never be captured, i.e., made real within modernity, but can only be destroyed by modernity. Underlying the light metaphor are two allusions that support the interpretation of the film as a modern text. It can be read first as a demonic natural force reminiscent of the Tannhäuser legend, in which young men are lured to their deaths in the Venusberg. For the villagers, Junta is nothing less than a demonic and destructive Venus whose eroticism threatens their social order; the innkeeper can be likened to a kind of Eckhart figure attempting to protect his offspring from the lure of dissolution (Entgrenzung). Just as Eichendorff's Marmorbild contrasts Venus with the madonna-like Bianca, Riefenstahl's editing frequently juxtaposes Junta with Lucia, a young woman who represents domesticity and containment of eroticism, suggested by the contrast between the head scarf that tightly binds her hair and Junta's free-flowing hair. Yet the demonization of Junta is restricted to the point of view of the villagers (i.e., society), and the film's exposition strongly aligns the spectator with Junta as the victim of an internally repressed people constantly shown closing windows to shut out the light of the full moon, and thus the danger of eroticism or the dissolution of boundaries. The scene in which Junta is conspicuously left outside while the villagers enter the fortifying vessel of the massive town church illustrates how the community's Christian bonding serves to ostracize those outside the social order.

Second, the blue light, with its obvious allusion to Novalis's blue flower, represents a general romantic longing, or Sehnsucht, linked to woman.¹¹ This Sehnsucht springs from an awareness of lack, creating a desire that eludes fulfillment and in being “mined,” to borrow Rentschler's term, is destroyed. The film displaces Junta, as object of desire, to the space of representation, and thus upholds the gap between the real and the imaginary Other that is constitutive of the modern. As discursive phenomena, Junta and the blue light remain a focal point of nostalgia standing in for a fulfillment, for a presence that can never be achieved. The romantic motif of language within the film augments Junta's inaccessibility. She understands the signs of nature, recoiling from Vigo after “reading” an apparent message in a crystal, but fails to comprehend Vigo's language, just as she utterly lacks comprehension of his “world.” Vigo appears to possess some insight into this modern structure when he remarks that “it couldn't be more beautiful” if they were able to communicate via language.

Stylized poses, filters, shadows, and other cinematic techniques work throughout the film to equate Junta with a Sehnsucht for that which is always already beyond the reach of the pedestrian being. Vision becomes a weapon with which Vigo captures Junta when he paints her, when he watches her sleep, and finally when he finds her corpse: “In a subjective shot that aligns the camera's gaze with that of the onscreen artist, we see how the male look virtually metamorphoses Junta's countenance” (Rentschler, “Fatal Attractions” 62). Rentschler draws parallels between the vampire in Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) and Vigo sucking the lifeblood out of Junta. While this reading is accurate, it should not be overlooked that Vigo's appropriation of Junta is simultaneous with his loss of her, and the final close-up shot of Vigo shows a tear rolling down his cheek. Vigo's role as the textual representative of the viewer's subject-position reinforces the nostalgic, aestheticizing effect of this text—an effect that undermines a purely fascist appropriation of the narrative. (It is interesting in this context that Riefenstahl's defense of her Nazi past consists in likewise restricting herself to the utopian space of the aesthetic. She insists that her art was untouched by any motivation other than the pursuit of “beauty”: “Whatever is purely realistic, slice-of-life, which is average, quotidian, doesn't interest me. … I am fascinated by what is beautiful, strong, healthy, by what is living. I seek harmony” [Sarris 394].)

2. TIEFLAND AND THE BLUE LIGHT: TWO MODERNIST NARRATIVE TRADITIONS

As is implicit in its title, Tiefland has in common with The Blue Light the basic antimodernist constellation of civilization opposing nature. Yet Tiefland shifts the source of narrative conflict and aligns the spectator more decidedly with one set of values: in the film, the shepherd Pedro (Franz Eichberger) comes from the mountains into the lowlands with the skin of a wolf that he killed with his bare hands. He sees the Gypsy girl Martha (Leni Riefenstahl) dancing in the tavern of Roccabruna and falls in love with her. Marquis Don Sebastián (Bernhard Minetti) also sees Martha and proceeds to make her his mistress. Don Sebastián is hated in the entire region for his exploitation of the peasants, whose water source he has rechanneled to supply the cattle he raises. He also has large debts with the mayor and is thus forced to marry the wealthy mayor's daughter. In order to keep Martha at his disposal, he marries her to Pedro. When in the night of both marriages Don Sebastián comes to be with Martha, Pedro kills him exactly as he had killed the wolf. Pedro and Martha return to the mountains.

As a means of contrasting the structure of Tiefland with that of The Blue Light, I would like to draw upon Jürgen Link's analysis of what he calls “the social psychological drama.” This genre, which dates back to the mid-eighteenth century and includes both popular narratives and “high” art, is constituted by varying relationships between two central factors: social class and “natural human qualities” (121-55).¹² Link conceptualizes these two factors as axes on a matrix, with each character in a given drama located somewhere on the matrix according to his or her specific combination of class and character: “aristocracy and evil,” “bourgeoisie and virtue,” etc. He analyzes how in later forms of the social psychological drama the ever increasing dominance of the “natural human” axis at the expense of the social axis coupled with the simplification of the former to a basic plus/minus “heart” scheme has led to a devolution of the genre to kitsch, which fulfills a socially affirmative function in its avoidance of social contradictions. In other words, modern popular narratives tend increasingly to define their characters simply as “good” or “heartless,” neglecting the complicating relations between character and social class addressed by a Schiller or a Lessing.

Tiefland can likewise easily be conceptualized in terms of the axes of social class versus “natural human qualities,” betraying an indebtedness to the paradigm of the bourgeois tragedy and its historical descendents in popular literature. The relationships in Tiefland illustrate how the film reproduces a configuration dating back to the bourgeois tragedy, albeit in reductive, sentimentalized form. The predictable inverse relationship between possession of social power and positive human qualities leads to typical, black-and-white characterizations. The dominance of binary oppositions makes for easy resolution (whether “happy” or “tragic”) of conflict. An element not generally found in the enlightenment tradition is the glamorized portrayal of figures whose enigmatic origins and life-style place them outside the social order. As in the bourgeois tragedy, the forces driving the narrative action forward are located largely on the side of social class, while spectator sympathy or rejection is elicited largely at the “human” level. Each character can be easily located on a basic scale from “good” to “evil,” a constellation carried to an extreme by the verbal motif of the “devil” linked with Don Sebastián and underscored by his physiognomy and behavior (defiance of moral laws). Moreover, social power and “good” human characteristics tend to be in inverse proportion to each other. Tiefland bears out what Link cites as another trend in the devolution of social psychological drama to kitsch: the reduction of unstereotypic combinations of traits that permit the appearance of an ambiguous figure such as Schiller's Lady Milford, who is unchaste, but still “good” (Link 138). Instead, Riefenstahl's film displays the most typical combinations possible: the lecherous, evil aristocrat, the honest miller, the “pure” shepherd, etc. With its traditional binary oppositions, Tiefland is far less ambiguous than The Blue Light in its assignment of value; the former belongs more unabashedly in the tradition of sentimental anticapitalism, linking wealth one-sidedly with materialistic values.

The same matrix does not work as well for The Blue Light. Despite the occasional tendencies of the villagers toward mob behavior, the characters from The Blue Light cannot be relegated to diagonally opposite ends of the matrix as in Tiefland, since the former, with its indebtedness to the romantic tradition, operates with ambiguities rather than binary oppositions. All characters are essentially “good,” although the villagers display narrow-mindedness and sadistic mob behavior, and Vigo unintentionally destroys Junta.

Thus, although the narrative elicits a strong sympathy for the mistreated Junta, no character is depicted as “evil.” Social class as a power factor is virtually absent. It disappears as a narrative factor, except as reflected in the degree to which characters display an “enlightened” attitude (connoting instrumentality, practicality, and progress, as opposed to naïveté and superstition), which implies formal education and exposure to a rationalized, secularized society. Instead, the characters are identified by their place on two central scales: one ranging from “superstition” to “enlightenment”; the other, from “alienation from nature” to “mystical union with nature.” The relationships between the two are arbitrary, for the most “enlightened” figure, the artist Vigo, also has a greater “feeling” for nature than do the superstitious villagers.

Thus, the failure of the narrative to focus on “good” vs. “evil,” but rather on irreconcilable differences, eliminates the possibility of a clear-cut resolution to conflict as in Tiefland; instead, the basic tragic conflict is resolved when one set of values (nature) nostalgically subjugated to another (instrumentality). The film contains a contradictory tension concerning a mystical union with nature and erotic attractiveness that would be impossible in a “social psychological drama” such as Tiefland.

In its valorization of “virtue,” its happy ending, and its triumph of heart over social class, Tiefland adheres more closely to a model—however sentimentalized—of enlightenment literature than to a model of romantic literature, as does The Blue Light with its ambiguities. Its story culminates not in the tragic loss of a utopian space as does the earlier film, but in its fulfillment (happy ending). Nevertheless, since the fulfillment offered by the text is a displacement into the imaginary and since it again relies on the tension between social modernity (inside and outside the text, i.e., including the viewer's modernity) and the mountain sanctuary to which the lovers flee, Tiefland also typifies a modern rather than a fascist narrative. Despite the significant differences between The Blue Light and Tiefland, both exhibit a modern structure in their narrative and cinematic privileging of one spatial sphere, the mountains, and of woman. The special status they assign to the mountains and to woman is analogous to the status of the aesthetic in modern societies as the sphere untouched by banalities and duplicities of everyday life.

Each film involves essentially two narrative spaces with only one figure (Vigo/Martha) capable of traversing several spaces relatively unscathed. The spatial constellation of Tiefland is actually triadic if one considers not only the mountain—lowlands opposition, but also the split within the lowlands between the spaces of aristocratic intrigue, predominantly the Marquis's stone fortress, and the peasant spaces, predominantly the mill. Although bound by social laws and lacking the pristine freedom of the mountains, the latter represents a positive force of community imbued with a closeness to nature; indeed, the mill is the locale in which the eventual union of Martha and Pedro occurs.¹³

The exhilarating effect of Tiefland's mountain scenes, which usually begin with an expansive low-angle, open-air shot of backlit mountains, cumulus clouds, and soaring birds, depends largely on their position in the film's syntax: they are strengthened by their stark deviance from the aura of constraint permeating the lowlands. The scene in which Don Sebastián first appears, for example, stresses visually the literally weighty force of social class. It begins with a long shot of the stone fortress, followed by a cut to the interior. The camera travels in a circular motion around the large room before revealing the Marquis in an oversized chair behind an oversized table. The camera's self-conscious dwelling on the Marquis's massive surroundings points not only to the linkage between the emptiness and coldness of the stone fortress and his character, but to his confinement in his stone prison and aristocratic coding. Throughout the film the castle scenes are marked by a preponderance of barriers: the latticework on the large doors and windows suggests imprisonment; even Martha's four-poster bed is draped by fabric that seems to imprison her while Don Sebastián constantly reminds her of his obsessive power over her. When Don Sebastián seduces Martha, we see only their shadows, dominated by the shadow of a lattice-framed door in the background, suggesting a spider web in which Martha is enmeshed.

Both films enlist the semantic traditions of water and wine in delineating their spatial distinctions. Massive waterfalls feature prominently in the nature scenes, suggesting Freudian connotations of “natural” sexuality and serving as backdrops for the “innocent” eroticism of the Naturkinder Junta and Pedro. In Tiefland water also becomes a significant narrative motif as the natural, God-given life-force of the farmers, withheld unnaturally by the despotic Don Sebastián.¹⁴ The scene in which workers divert the natural flow of the water away from the farmers recalls the picks that decimate Junta's crystal grotto in The Blue Light. No shot in either film clearly reveals the faces of the workers; if visible at all, they are shown from a distance or take the form of shadowy silhouettes. Each scene highlights close-ups of picks and shovels, giving the impression that instruments work independently, and implying an abstract representation of modernization, of instrumental forces at work.

Tiefland self-consciously aligns wine with the maligned wealthy classes and with sexuality. Don Sebastián signals his rejection of the mayor's rich daughter by insisting on drinking water rather than wine with her. His insistence, by contrast, that Martha drink wine with him constitutes his first sexual innuendo in a stylized seduction scene culminating in Martha's knocking over the glasses and spilling the red wine as the Marquis carries her off. The spilled wine becomes a visual metaphor of Martha's violation, representing virgin blood. The shot recalls a similar strategy from The Blue Light, when the plundering of Junta's grotto is followed by a jump cut to a circle of male hands joining in a toast. Again red wine spills conspicuously on the tablecloth below, suggesting at once deflowering and death, as Junta is sacrificed to instrumentality.

The redemptive space that is indistinguishable from woman in The Blue Light is inhabited in Tiefland by a male, Pedro, who shares a number of characteristics with Junta (as well as with the prepubescent shepherd boy Guzzi). Both manifest a mystical union with nature coupled with an absolute oblivion to the “ways of the world.” They also possess an unconscious eroticism that exercises considerable influence over others. In The Blue Light the repressed villagers channel this erotic attraction into a hostility absent in Tiefland, where Pedro is an object of playful female desire, as in the scene when he is positioned conspicuously at the end of a long rectangular table, at a distance from an “audience” of giggling peasant girls leering at him. Significantly, both Junta and Pedro are shown sleeping in strikingly similar poses: their bare chests are highlighted by an almost celestial lighting, their erotic, restless movements suggest an innate sensuality.

Despite his unambiguously male diegetic role as the agent who eventually appropriates Martha, Pedro is in some ways feminized. He is a nurturant figure when he, like Junta, serves milk (providing the third element in the wine-water motif chain), or when he nurses the unconscious Martha, rendering him almost a male counterpart of Klaus Theweleit's “white nurse” (1: 90-199). The softness of his features and curly blond hair suggest femininity, especially in contrast with the sharp. Mephistophelian features of Don Sebastián (cf. also the obvious male sexual overtones in the nickname of “wolf” the peasants give Don Sebastián, as well as his steer, from which, as the story stresses, he does not obtain material gain,¹⁵ versus Pedro's association with the lambs he is forever rescuing). An undifferentiated, not-yet-modernized society can be portrayed as androgynous.

The “wholesome” Pedro nonetheless lacks the qualities of enigmatic otherness that characterize Junta and that are essential to the structure of modernity, for he is too well integrated with the peasants as representatives of “civilization.” His relative social integration makes sense with regard to gender, for it is woman who has been “a receptacle for all kinds of projections, displaced fears and anxieties … brought about by modernization” (Huyssen 52). The role of enigma in Tiefland is again reserved for woman; Martha, like Junta, functions as a disturbance or what Teresa de Lauretis calls a “mythical obstacle” (de Lauretis 103-57). Their murky origins and their lack of “civilized” training place them in similar positions as total outsiders (Junta is called a “witch,” Martha “the stranger”). Just as it remains inexplicable how Junta mastered mountain-climbing, Martha “never learned” to dance but has it “in her blood.” Both exercise a mesmerizing effect on others, on children and adults alike. Moreover, they are the specularized objects on which the films' titillating effects depend. Although Martha is specularized throughout the film, nowhere is this more crucial than in the tavern dance scene, which exhibits ample evidence of how the innocence of Riefenstahl's characters “contrasts with the less than innocent strategies of [her] camera” in depicting woman “as an erotic presence and a seductive force” (Rentschler, “Fatal Attractions” 64).¹⁶ The scene begins as Pedro passes the tavern and peers through the window (traversing with his eyes a barrier to erotic pleasure) at Martha's body, fetishized by a series of shots fragmenting her body parts, which move sensuously with the rhythm of the music. Shots of Martha alternate with shots traveling through the crowd of lustful men, creating a frenzy that ceases only when Don Sebastián enters, closes the door, thus shutting Pedro literally and figuratively “out of the picture,” and appropriates Martha with his masterful gaze. The scene encapsulates the narrative's central events, when Pedro hands over the wolf's skin to Don Sebastián to obtain a “reward,” and when Martha feverishly shoves away a spectator who lunges toward her. But most importantly, it establishes Martha/Riefenstahl as the consummate representation of desire, as much through reaction shots of dazzled men as through her Carmen-like erotic presence.

One could scarcely find in film history a more typical example of the paradigm that Laura Mulvey put forth in 1975, in which the woman acts “as object of the combined gaze of spectator and all the male protagonists in the film … isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualized” (13). Leni Riefenstahl was in the unusual position in film history of playing a dual role as both object of the gaze and controlling eye behind it.¹⁷ Yet, particularly from a feminist vantage point, it is tempting to overstress the notion of a conscious decision behind Riefenstahl's self-fetishization, as I believe Ruby Rich does when she states that Riefenstahl “was granted ‘permission’ by the patriarchy to be privileged in its power in exchange for adopting its values” (208, my emphasis). It seems to me that Rich underestimates a possible slippage between the roles of object and controller, and the fact that the enunciating agency in a film is not totally identifiable with (or controlled by) the director or writer, but is located in a larger ideological apparatus.¹⁸ Moreover, precisely those readings delineating the affinities of Riefenstahl's early and late work to fascist aesthetics imply that she had “adopted” such values well before Hitler seized power. I am suggesting that—her opportunism notwithstanding—Leni Riefenstahl's project may not have been deliberate complicity with the patriarchy “in exchange” for privilege, but that an internalized acceptance of woman's role as object permitted her narcissistically to enjoy fetishizing her own body. John Berger has discussed the split self engendered in women by Western culture as comprising a “female” side that is surveyed by others (analogous to Mulvey's object of the male gaze) and a “male” side that constantly surveys the self being surveyed (analogous to the male looker [45-47])—yet only with the help of relatively recent feminist analysis has the complicitous function of these contradictory roles been articulated. I believe that Leni Riefenstahl's film practice exercises this very dual role and that it does not necessarily “play along with,” but naturalizes and relishes the objectified role of woman in patriarchy.

Through her own fetishizing camera work Riefenstahl/Martha remains, like Junta, an allegory of desire. Although Don Sebastián renders her an object of exchange (first with a Gypsy, then with Pedro), she nonetheless remains an elusive object of desire for him. Just as Junta is appropriated by male vision at the end of The Blue Light, Martha is finally appropriated by Pedro, again in a manner consistent with Mulvey's original paradigm: “[A]s the narrative progresses she falls in love with the main male protagonist and becomes his property, losing her outward glamorous characteristics, her generalized sexuality, her show-girl connotations; her eroticism is subjected to the male star alone” (13). As suggested by Mulvey's description, Martha's “redemption” comes at the expense of her eroticism (at least for the pleasure of the viewer), but likewise at the expense of sexual vitality in general. The exorcism of this vitality is achieved as Pedro kills the “wolf” Don Sebastián (i.e., bestial and merely possessive sexuality) to obtain his “reward” and complete the circular closure of the narrative. The film's final scene is a long, backlit pastoral image of Martha and Pedro walking in the mountains, turning so that they are walking with their backs to the camera, as in the romantic tradition of painting,¹⁹ into a celestial beam of sunlight. The scene despecularizes both figures, who blend into the overwhelming natural background and at the end of the scene are barely distinguishable. As they pass by, their gaze focuses neither on each other nor on the camera, but on space, giving them a glazed, exalted look, a look oblivious to the spectator and to the modern world below.

The trajectory of Tiefland carries Martha from a state of “unnatural” oscillation among spaces to a Heimat, a space of reconciliation where she cannot be contaminated by the alienation of civilized existence, where, indeed, her earlier social stigma (embodied in the villagers' mocking laughter) no longer matters. The unity of redemptive space and woman as the Other of modernity, initially present but lost in The Blue Light, is achieved in the course of Tiefland. Instead of the “real” woman being rendered an icon as when the live Junta becomes ossified in the form of a photograph, in Tiefland the icon of woman fused with nature (as in Pedro's vision of Martha's face projected against the clouds) is rendered “reality” within the text. Yet a consistent alignment of the spectator's position with Pedro (suggested by Mulvey's model) would oversimplify the dynamics of the film, since it finds its satisfying resolution in the distant projection of a unified male and female. The ending sublates gender, as woman's nostalgic function gives way to that of the united couple enshrined in a state of premodern harmony. This is not to say that the film in any way disrupts a patriarchal discourse, but that Pedro's (and the spectator's) desire for Martha gives way to the spectator's desire for the harmony they as a unit represent. The final composition, which shows the couple's backs to the camera, allows them to function as a (united) surrogate viewer for the spectator, who looks into the distance with them. Yet they remain decidedly at a distance inaccessible to the spectator; thus, as in The Blue Light, the space of reconciliation remains imaginary, distant from the “lowlands” of the narrative and of the spectator, which are necessarily characterized by alienation and social divisiveness. Hence the space of solace offered by each film is defined as a geographic one—following the mountain film genre—and as a temporal one. The films' mountain regions preserve an unalienated existence that—as a projected, imaginary state—cannot be located in any specific time or place, but in a distant and imprecise past characterized most crucially by its freedom from the modern pressures against which conservative movements from the mid-nineteenth century through the Third Reich reacted.

3. THE STEP TO A FASCIST AESTHETIC

Is there, as Kracauer and Sontag suggest, a linear route from glaciers to Gleichschaltung; that is, does the fascination with the elemental common to these and other “mountain” films bear a direct relation to Nazi ideology? Of the two films I have discussed, The Blue Light in my view comes closer to a fascist aesthetic precisely in the ambiguity with which it regards the relationship between instrumentality and idealism, between the rational and the sentimental. Through its refusal to negate either position (to relegate either to the “minus heart” side of the matrix), the film flirts with the possibility of transgressing the institutional boundary between the imaginary and the real that I claimed at the beginning of this essay as constitutive of a fascist aesthetic. Or, more precisely, it does not reproduce the split of the real and the imaginary on the diegetic level in order to reconcile this very split at the end, as do popular narratives that are more narrowly modern. By refusing reconciliation on the diegetic level (which would displace the possibility of such a reconciliation into the imaginary), the film seems to insist on a mimetic evaluation of reality, because that which comes close to a unity with nature is doomed to be destroyed. It is Junta's “mors ex machina” (Jürgen Link) that prevents the text from offering a merely imaginary reconciliation of modern tensions, although the ideal thus retreats to a nostalgic distance, remaining, to use Lacan's term, an objet a. This ultimately is a critical commentary on modernity—a commentary that could easily be associated with a search for a “real” redeemer. Tiefland, on the other hand, with its roots in a sentimentalized enlightenment tradition, maintains a greater distance from a fascist aesthetic, since it clearly upholds its separation of the rational and sentimental. Running the risk of sounding as though I wished to impute a certain intention to the film, I would go so far as to suggest that Tiefland reflects the ideology of the newly founded Federal Republic of Germany with its rationalistic orientation. Such a structure depends on the complementary relationship of a rationalized reality and the possibility of an imaginary retreat to sentimentality through art and specifically through narrative. Even with Tiefland's heinous production history, the imaginary reconciliation offered by the film fully accords with the function of the sentimental in a society based on an enlightenment tradition.

I would thus strongly question whether there exists a necessary connection between films of the “mountain” genre and National Socialism—despite the recurrence of these motifs in Nazi art and the fact that in the context of the Third Reich and its precursors the films reinforced a dangerous antimodernism and could thus be mobilized to function as part of a broad propaganda apparatus. The step from The Blue Light or Tiefland to Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens, 1935) with its (in)famous opening scene rendering Hitler a celestial and all-pervasive presence emerging from the clouds is indeed a logical one. The crucial difference is that Triumph of the Will clearly does transgress the boundaries of the imaginary, merging the political and the aesthetic, and permitting the individuals attending the rally and those reliving it through the technological apparatus the experience of a collective decentering (Entgrenzung). National Socialism would, of course, have been unthinkable without all the genres, movements, and images from which it borrowed; it builds on a foundation of modernism and uses nostalgia to “colonize the fantasy life” (Rentschler) of its constituency. But it goes beyond this by trying to introduce the imaginary into the public sphere, by conflating the imaginary with modern reality, as Riefenstahl's narrative films—even The Blue Light—do not. To be sure, The Blue Light exhibits, as Rentschler points out, the “kitsch of death,” which Saul Friedländer considers the bedrock of Nazi aesthetics.²⁰ Yet the “kitsch of death,” while indeed a favorite topos and image in Nazi films, derives from other movements stressing the search for decentering experiences, such as European aestheticism. Examples of a “kitsch of death” predating Nazism are Heinrich Mann's Göttinnen (1903), whose protagonist, Violante d'Assy, dies in a state of intoxication (Rausch) having become a work of art, or the popular nineteenth-century icon of the dead girl from the Seine. Again, National Socialism turns the “kitsch of death” experience into something real, inspiring and organizing people to march intoxicated to their own deaths; it dissolves the distinction between the imaginary and the real, translating the mass ornament into a mass event. Whereas traditionally the instrumental is opposed to decentering experiences, it is here that I see the category of the instrumental as crucial: the mass experience of intoxication can only be orchestrated with careful planning. The transgression of the separate realm of the aesthetic, or, more precisely, the introduction of the aesthetic into reality, requires an actual mediation of the instrumental and decentering experiences in a new mode of the political.

I would like to return to the questions I posed at the outset regarding the degree to which a structural definition of a fascist text overlaps with the historical phenomenon of National Socialism. The first question was whether the majority of “entertaining” film narratives produced during the Third Reich can be considered “fascist texts,” if this is to mean anything more than having been produced under a fascist state. I believe an attempt to suggest that all Nazi films should be “fascist” leads to the dead end of regarding the Nazi takeover in 1933 as a sudden break or historical aberration, as a cultural revolution more radical than has ever occurred in history. It would lead us back to the Hull and Leiser²¹ positions because of which most scholarship on Nazi cinema has advanced considerably. Apart from the fact that propaganda minister Goebbels's film policies favored a high proportion of entertainment films over directly political films, it would have been indeed unique if an entire narrative tradition had been overturned in a mere twelve years.

However, without getting involved in the quagmire of categorizing Nazi films as “P” (politisch = political), “H” (heiter = comedies), or “E” (ernst = serious) as did Gerd Albrecht in the late sixties, I contend that a reasonable percentage of Nazi feature films do have at least moments that transgress the boundaries between the imaginary and real life and aestheticize the political through extradiegetic references. As accessible examples I would cite Request Concert (Wunschkonzert, 1940) with its transcendence of physical space and its spiritual reunification of a dispersed German community through the memory of the 1936 Olympics (which it presents through documentary footage) and through the radio, or The Great Love (Die grosse Liebe, 1942), where the spectacles Zarah Leander orchestrates fulfill a similar function. Although they make no direct reference to events outside of their textual boundaries, any of the “genius” biographic films produced in the early forties could likewise transgress the imaginary, since all construct aestheticized images of Germany's cultural past to create a sense of collective identity in the present, to inspire the spectator to celebrate the consciousness of being “German”—a consciousness that can be carried beyond the theater.²² While the merging of the aesthetic and the “real” in the preceding examples fosters an illusory harmony, the same strategy can function to fortify opposition to an Other, as in Jew Süss (Jud Süss, 1940) with its concluding exhortation, “keep our race pure.” Steve Neale has suggested how the exhortation breaks the boundaries of classical narrative closure and connects the imaginary with the world of the spectator: “[I]t aligns the subject as in a position of struggle vis-à-vis certain of the discourses and practices that have been signified within the text, and signified in such a way as to mark them as existing outside and beyond it” (31). I believe Neale's definition of propaganda can be linked with the Benjaminian analysis of how fascism erases boundaries, in that it posits as fundamental to the propagandist text the attempt to rupture textual boundaries, in contrast to the classical realist text, which marks closure as closure and demarcates “a definite space and distance between the text and the discourses and practices around it. [Propaganda] is … a continual process of marking the discourses and practices signified within the text as existing outside it, and as existing outside it in conflict” (31).

The second “automatic” question was whether the term fascist, if understood in a structural sense, can be extended to include contemporary phenomena that blur the distinction between reality and the imaginary. Such an application is to be sure problematic, given the inflationary and hence trivializing manner in which the term has been wielded, particularly in the sixties and seventies. Again, let me stress that National Socialism represented the intersection of far too many historical, economic, social, and psychological factors to permit a simplistic analogy with any other historical conjuncture. Nevertheless, it is worth considering structural similarities between National Socialism's attempt to aestheticize political life and the tendencies in a wide range of discourses in contemporary societies today to generate a sense of public euphoria and well-being, usually through images and sounds produced by the electronic media. Just as in Triumph of the Will “reality” was staged for the purpose of spectacle, current political acts are likewise staged for aesthetic reproduction, with the difference that today's political spectacles can be conveyed instantaneously.²³ This increasing dependency on spectacle and imaginary dissolution extends from political imagery and televised news to commercials, televised religion, sports events, rock concerts, and music videos. It works to undermine reasonable debate and foster an intermittent state of anesthesia, or what Brecht called “sleepwalking.” Particularly in the cases of political discourse and televised religion, pervasive imagery elides the distinction between public icon and private “friend,” to the effect of affirming faith in a leader figure. Although there could scarcely be two political figures with more different leadership styles than the demagogical hysteric Hitler and the relaxed, intimate, pseudo-pal Ronald Reagan, the similarity of Reagan as an actor and Hitler's training by an actor points to the importance of aesthetic illusion for the success of both men, expressed by Brecht in a reference to Hitler and easily applicable to Reagan (or almost any other modern politician):

Let's observe above all the way he acts while delivering his big speeches that prepare or justify his slaughters. 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. That is very interesting theater!

(563)

A crucial difference is that while modern political leaders, particularly in the United States, reinforce a sense of euphoric membership in a collective (one that is strongly invoked in selective moments such as the seizing of hostages or other acts subsumable under “terrorism”), this collective is paradoxically characterized by an ideology of individualism that generally precludes the kind of unqualified subservience demanded of Hitler's constituents. Moreover, in the United States the aestheticization of politics tends to engender political passivity (reflected in extremely low participation in elections in the U.S.) rather than the activism that characterized National Socialism. Although an allegation that any modern society today repeats the National Socialist experience would be absurd, many societies—and precisely those most technologically advanced—exhibit processes of aestheticization that foster a public so homogenized as to realize the Nazi notion of Gleichschaltung beyond its potential in the 1930s and 1940s. Such a conception of “fascist” tendencies may allow us to address a continuity that is more problematic than ever.

Notes

1. See, for example, Brecht, 501-657, and Benjamin, “Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” 471-508, and “Pariser Brief,” 482-95.

2. Riefenstahl planned both a ballet version and a remake of The Blue Light in England with Pier Angeli and Lawrence in the roles of Junta and Vigo respectively. Neither came about.

3. Riefenstahl expunged his name from the credits in later releases of the film.

4. See Courtade and Cadars, 240-41. For a detailed account of the film's arduous production history, see Hinton, 83-106, Berg-Pan, 163-75, and Riefenstahl, Memoiren, 216-20, 354-71, 515-19. Jean Cocteau prepared French subtitles for the film.

5. Marguerite Tazelaar in the New York Herald Tribune, May 9, 1934; as quoted in Infield, 34.

6. Cf., for example, Kevin Brownlow's comments, as quoted in Rentschler: “Art transcends the artist. … politics and art must never be confused. … these old adages are forgotten instantly when the name of Riefenstahl is raised. And it is our fault. We have ourselves been the victims of insidious propaganda.”

7. See Kracauer and Sontag.

8. I would like to clarify my use of the term “modern,” lest it be confused with “modernist,” a term often used to refer to a type of text whose content and form are conceived in opposition to bourgeois culture. By “modern” I mean instead a narrative structure for which a gap between the real and the imaginary is constitutive. The resultant nostalgic, romantic mood of many modern texts is not characterized by an awareness of and critical reflection on the gap between the aesthetic and reality (thus “romantic” does not refer to early German romanticism, which indeed had a limited awareness of this gap). I, of course, do not mean to classify modern texts as a whole but to point to a recurrent prototype found in high culture and especially prevalent in popular culture.

9. I am indebted to this article for many insights regarding The Blue Light. Indeed, my own essay began in its earliest stage as a conference response to Rentschler's reading of the film.

10. A. J. Greimas's term “semantic markers” has been applied by Jürgen Link and others in charting the structure of a narrative according to the positive and negative traits of its characters. “Plus” and “minus” signs signify possession or lack of qualities: e.g., “plus materialistic” typically combines with “minus heart.”

11. Cf. Rentschler's description of the crystal grotto as “womblike” in “Fatal Attractions” (64).

12. All translations from the Link essay are my own.

13. The peasants in Tiefland take on allegorical dimensions as forces of nature at the film's conclusion. With their black capes flapping ominously in the stormy wind, the village men function like a Greek chorus, observing and prodding Don Sebastián to his fate.

14. Water assumes a different connotation when Martha is first admitted to Don Sebastián's castle, and a subjective shot leads through massive gates to a symmetrically placed fountain, against which she is subsequently positioned. The fountain with its playful waste of water channeled into an ornamental design again serves as a contrast to the “natural” flow of water in the mountains, and also suggests a kind of recreational sexuality, calling to mind the sexual romping of Freder and a playmate around a similar fountain in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927).

15. Indeed, Don Sebastián's obsession with the steers reveals a “sick” egotism (riddled with erotic implications), since his financial destitution is at least in part a result of his failure to permit his serfs the use of water on his drought-stricken farmlands, which would enable them to pay their dues. He puts the peasants in a classic double-bind situation: threatening to drive them off the land if they fail to pay their dues, and withholding the means with which they could do so.

16. To be sure, Junta's gesture of throwing a half-eaten apple at Vigo's feet is a narrative act suggesting the conscious adoption of a role as Eve-like temptress.

17. Perhaps for this reason Riefenstahl has been no less fetishized by some critics than by the camera. Cf., for example, Infield's description of her attending the premiere of Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens, 1935): “Wearing a white fur coat and a low-cut gown that revealed her ample breasts, Riefenstahl smiled and waved to the cheering throng”—this in a book written in 1976 and criticizing Nazism's “antifeminism” (3).

18. See, for example, Silverman, 11.

19. See Rentschler's “Fatal Attractions” for a discussion of Riefenstahl's (and the mountain film's) indebtedness to romantic painting, especially that of Caspar David Friedrich: “Like Friedrich, Riefenstahl transforms landscapes into emotional spaces, granting to exterior nature an interior resonance” (51).

20. Also see Rentschler, “Fatal Attractions,” 59.

21. I am referring to some of the earliest studies on Nazi cinema: Hull and Leiser.

22. I have discussed this aspect of the “genius” film in “National Socialism's Aestheticization of Genius” and in “A Nazi Herstory.”

23. For some interesting analysis of modern political spectacles in the form of “Gesamtkunstwerk,” see Rentschler, “The Use and Abuse of Memory,” or Jochen Schulte-Sasse, “Electronic Media and Cultural Politics.”

Works Cited

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———. “Pariser Brief,” Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 3.

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de Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.

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Neale, Steve. “Propaganda.” Screen 18.3 (1977).

Rentschler, Eric. “Fatal Attractions: The Blue Light.” October 48 (1989): 47-68.

———. “The Use and Abuse of Memory: New German Film and the Discourse of Bitburg.” New German Critique 36 (1985): 67-90.

Rich, Ruby. “Leni Riefenstahl: The Deceptive Myth.” Sexual Stratagems: The World of Women in Film. Ed. Patricia Erens. New York: Horizon, 1979.

Riefenstahl, Leni. Memoiren. Munich: Alfred Knaus, 1987.

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Schulte-Sasse, Linda. “National Socialism's Aestheticization of Genius: The Case of Herbert Maisch's Friedrich Schiller—Triumph eines Genies.” Germanic Review, forthcoming.

———. “A Nazi Herstory: The Paradox of Female Genius in G. W. Pabst's Neuberin Film, Komödianten (1941).” New German Critique 50 (1990): 57-84.

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Theweleit, Klaus. “The White Nurse.” Male Fantasies. Trans. Steven Conway. Vol. 1. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. 90-199.