Eisenstein and Riefenstahl
Hunter Watson
Action!
Nazis and communists alike wanted to 'engineer human souls'. And in
cinema, they found the perfect tool for the job. By Jonathan Jones
Monday March 20, 2006
The Guardian
The heady atmosphere of the film is unexpectedly loving and warm. It
resembles a rock-festival documentary as young people come out of their
tents on the huge campsite where they've been spending the night and
horse around spraying each other with water from open-air communal
taps. Then as the great collective event gathers momentum they head for
the stadium, to stand by torchlight, listening rapt to the headline
act. Leni Riefenstahl's camera moves fluently below and around its
object of desire and by the end of Triumph of the Will you have seen
Adolf Hitler from so many angles, in so many sensitive close-ups, that
you feel you have shared in his nervousness, his exhaustion, his
determination not to let down the crowd.
Article continues
The film glorifies peace. It is a soothing poem to harmony - the Wagner
on the soundtrack is all melting preludes. There was a particular need
for this hypocrisy. Triumph of the Will is the official account of the
1934 Nazi party rally at Nuremberg. That summer, Hitler had eliminated
the leadership of the SA, the street-fighting wing of the Nazi party
that had become an embarrassment. So when he passionately lauds the
party's "old fighters" in Riefenstahl's film he is brazenly denying the
violent reality of his recent purge. That, of course, is the least of
the violence the film glides over.
I had avoided seeing Triumph of the Will for a long time and always
felt a bit nauseated by critics who wrote about its fascinating fascism
in tones like ... well, like my opening paragraphs. Triumph of the Will
is springtime for Hitler - the original "love letter to the Führer".
So I didn't expect what I saw at all. Riefenstahl portrays a
voluntarism, a lack of formality in the Nazi movement: her images of
total order, with endless ranks of identically helmeted troops, are
shown to be an act of collective "will" rather than imposed from above.
That's the myth she creates - and it places the Nazi rally on a line
that leads from the Romantic movement right through to today's mass
events. People enjoy being in crowds, and Triumph of the Will is
probably the best film ever made about that pleasure.
A lot of illusions about our culture are challenged by watching Triumph
of the Will. One of them concerns the modernist heritage. As is well
known, Adolf Hitler, that failed artist, hated modern art. He took
revenge on modernism for all the slights he believed he had suffered
from an art world he could not begin to comprehend as a young man
trying to make a living as a painter of lacklustre scenes in Vienna and
Munich. In 1937, his war on modern art was consummated when the
Degenerate Art exhibition opened in Munich and exposed artists from
Munch to Kirchner to ridicule as deranged purveyors of non-Aryan
ugliness. So modern artists were among Hitler's victims (Kirchner
killed himself). And yet, when you see Riefenstahl's film you realise
that Hitler's nightmare version of the 20th century did not simply
exclude modernism. It proposed an alternative modernism in the arts,
just as it planned a modern society with autobahns, missiles and
extermination.
The reason I feel compelled to tell you about Triumph of the Will is
that it is the most spectacular instance of modernism in cinema. Its
abstract patterns of light and shadow as the sun plays across the
massed ranks of uniformed troops, its enthusiasm for pure architectural
space, its reverence for technology, its aestheticism - "Fascism says:
fiat ars, pereat mundi" (let there be art, and let the world perish),
noted the marxist Walter Benjamin - make it a monument to an extreme
art. A modernism of crowds and power.
If modernism is the art that most truly described the new worlds of the
20th century, then it cannot only be remembered fondly as a series of
hymns to electricity, bicycles and the Eiffel Tower. Modernism was born
in a world of peace and wealth - the Edwardian world - but it came of
age after 1914 in a Europe of tyranny and war. The classic age of
modernism, the period covered by the forthcoming exhibition at the V&A,
is one that historians have called "the age of extremes", "the age of
catastrophe", when Europe became a "dark continent": an era of
unprecedented convulsions that look exciting only when you view them
from a very safe distance.
It's not hard to understand why modern artists were inspired and
provoked so completely to remake the world in their minds when you
consider the casual brutality with which the real, physical, social
world was remade in those days. Revolutions of right and left brought
about the permanent destruction of former ways of life on a daily
basis. Maybe artists could could see the beauty in everything being
"changed utterly" but for the victims of Russia's civil war and famine
and purges and of Hitler's new racial order, there was only terror.
Hitler played the modernist to multitudes: old Jewish communities would
vanish overnight, cities would be cleansed of their ghettos as if by a
racist Le Corbusier.
Cinema was the favourite cultural technique of the totalitarian
modernists. We, of course, would rather remember the anarchy of
Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou. This enduringly
admired and genuinely enjoyable art film is always being shown
somewhere - just this week I stumbled across a little cinema screening
it at Tate Modern. Spectators gasp and wince at its opening image of a
razor blade slicing through an eyeball. But how many have ever seen Un
Chien Andalou? Charlie Chaplin - Buñuel claims in his autobiography My
Last Breath - would screen it to friends. But it never reached the
multitudes touched by Chaplin.
Film is a mass art. The moderns who understood this were not, sad to
say, a handful of surrealist subversives, but the court artists of the
most murderous despots of all time. The true art cinema of the modern
age did not come from avant-garde Paris. It came from Germany and the
former Soviet Union.
To make a modernist cinema that competed with Hollywood (whose studios
were doing huge business by 1914), you needed conditions that just
weren't available to western European artists. Un Chien Andalou is a
cheap film - just 16 minutes of precious celluloid and a handful of
actors. By contrast, Riefenstahl got the opportunity to work with a
cast of thousands. Not even DW Griffith or Cecil B DeMille had filmed
such crowds. The Nuremberg rally was not only the begetter but the
child of cinema. Triumph of the Will echoes the architecture, crowds
and shadows of Fritz Lang's 1926 expressionist masterpiece Metropolis.
Lang, incidentally, had also filmed the Wagnerian saga of Siegfried.
Very similar opportunities to the one that came to Riefenstahl were
available to film-makers in revolutionary Russia. In 1918, Lenin
survived an assassination attempt: to prove he was alive, he had
himself filmed. "For us," he said, "film is the most important of the
arts." And he wasn't speaking as an aesthete. The Soviet artist was to
be an "engineer of human souls" and cinema was the perfect instrument.
And the film-maker by whom it was most brilliantly deployed was Sergei
Eisenstein.
The circumstances in which Eisenstein was able to make Battleship
Potemkin and October were not so different from Riefenstahl's
opportunity to film the Nuremberg rally. In 1925, the USSR celebrated
the 20th anniversary of the 1905 revolution that had marked the
beginning of the end for Tsarism. Eisenstein was commissioned to film
the true story of the mutiny of sailors aboard the battleship Potemkin
in that year. Then, in 1927, he was commissioned to make a film
commemorating the 10th anniversary of the October revolution itself.
These official films display vast human and technical resources that no
intellectual film-maker in the west could dream of controlling.
Eisenstein had access to an entire working battleship. In October he
apparently had the entire city of St Petersburg to play with: the
Soviet capital had moved to Moscow and he was allowed to film inside
the Winter Palace, stormed by the Bolsheviks in 1917, and to use
objects from the Hermitage collections - including the peacock clock
still on display there - as props.
His crowd scenes compete with Riefenstahl's. Battleship Potemkin has
two components. Part of it is a compressed model of the class struggle
inside the metal confines of a warship. But then the mutinous sailors
leave their leader's martyred body on the harbour at Odessa: people
gather to mourn and protest, the crowd gets bigger and bigger. In a
beautiful image, Eisenstein films the queue from above streaming along
a curving sea wall surrounded by black water.
How does Eisenstein compare with Riefenstahl? As artists they are
opposites. She is totally unthinking. He is all head. Where her film
seems to record a spontaneous happening in which thousands of people
just decided one day to assemble in neat lines in military uniforms,
out of sheer love of life and Hitler, he quite explicity organises and
orchestrates his extras: the crowd walking over the sea is a composed
image, too artificial to be accidental, nor does Eisenstein want anyone
to mistake it for accident. His art announces it is art. This is a
peculiar form of propaganda that tells you it is manipulating you.
When a woman screams on the grand stairs that lead down to the harbour
of Odessa and a white line of Tsarist troops start remorselessly
walking down from the top, firing as they go, the massacre is as formal
as a painting. Its iconography is as weighty as Picasso's Guernica. The
Odessa steps sequence is a Massacre of the Innocents: and Eisenstein
makes sure you won't miss the Christian quotation by sending an
innocent in a pram bouncing down the staircase.
Triumph of the Will is a horrible mirror image of modernism - a
modernism from hell. Battleship Potemkin is modernism at its most
conscious: more than anyone else who ever made a film, Eisenstein knows
he is not presenting a photograph of reality. This is why his films
achieve a quality of high modernism unique in cinema: you could show
the massacre of the Odessa steps in the same gallery as Guernica.
Eisenstein wasn't content to make propaganda. He left Russia and, like
Trotsky, went to Mexico. But he returned home in the later 1930s and,
after his stirring patriotic epic Alexander Nevsky, filmed the work
that sets him apart from Riefenstahl. He made Ivan the Terrible - the
biography of a paranoid ruler who systematically murders anyone who
might threaten his power. Stalin recognised the allusion. The second
part of Ivan the Terrible was banned, and Eisenstein died soon
afterwards of a heart attack.
Ivan the Terrible, Part Two, has a fantastic colour scene in which
Ivan's secret police dance in formation at a grotesque banquet; the
madness of a modern absolutist state is conveyed in the ornate ballet
that gets faster and more absurd as they celebrate their brilliant
murders. In the 20th century millions gyrated to the tune of savage
megalomaniacs. Modernism is the art of that era, and artists were
necessarily dragged into the dance. To survey the cinema of modernism
is to recognise its affinity for political extremes, and to realise
that we are the lucky ones, enjoying the cinematic echoes of Metropolis
in the architecture of Tate Modern's turbine hall before going into the
museum cinema to savour those shadows - from a distance.
dwal...@igc.org
point, or even implication, goes *against* what Hunter sub-titles his
post: "Nazis and communists alike wanted to 'engineer human souls'. And
in cinema, they found the perfect tool for the job." That may of been
Johnson's own sub-head, it's hard the to tell the way Hunter posted it.
The review shows that Commuist film maker didn't approach film making
in a 'soul controlling' genre at all. The fact that he made Ivan the
Terrible, part II (now restored I believe) shows that Communist
Eisenstein knew enough about seperating out true communism from
Stalinst totalitarianism. Again, his films were banned in the 1950s
even though he is credited with virtually inventing modern
cinimatography and is considerd by most film historians and critics as
one of the most important figures in film.
David
PS...his "October" had an instroduction written by Trotsky ,which was
cut, obviously, by the Stalinist censors, but which has since be
restored.
dwal...@igc.org
point, or even implication, goes *against* what Hunter sub-titles his
post: "Nazis and communists alike wanted to 'engineer human souls'. And
in cinema, they found the perfect tool for the job." That may of been
Johnson's own sub-head, it's hard the to tell the way Hunter posted it.
The review shows that Commuist film maker didn't approach film making
in a 'soul controlling' genre at all. The fact that he made Ivan the
Terrible, part II (now restored I believe) shows that Communist
Eisenstein knew enough about seperating out true communism from
Stalinst totalitarianism. Again, his films were banned in the 1950s
even though he is credited with virtually inventing modern
cinimatography and is considerd by most film historians and critics as
one of the most important figures in film.
David
PS...his "October" had an introduction written by Trotsky ,which was
Hunter Watson
Accurate but not correct in its conclusions.
However, the
> point, or even implication, goes *against* what Hunter sub-titles his
> post: "Nazis and communists alike wanted to 'engineer human souls'.
And
> in cinema, they found the perfect tool for the job." That may of been
> Johnson's own sub-head, it's hard the to tell the way Hunter posted it.
It's Johnson's, of course. He of the "very accurate review".
>
>
> The review shows that Commuist film maker didn't approach film making
> in a 'soul controlling' genre at all. The fact that he made Ivan the
> Terrible, part II (now restored I believe) shows that Communist
> Eisenstein knew enough about seperating out true communism from
> Stalinst totalitarianism.
An assertion you don't even attempt to demonstrate.
Again, his films were banned in the 1950s
> even though he is credited with virtually inventing modern
> cinimatography and is considerd by most film historians and critics as
> one of the most important figures in film.
What's having been banned got to do with the reviewer's thesis?
>
> David
> PS...his "October" had an instroduction written by Trotsky ,which was
> cut, obviously, by the Stalinist censors, but which has since be
> restored.
Trotsky, the ultimate engineer of human souls. David, you are desperate
to defend the bloodiest ideology in the history of mankind. "Just give
me a chance. I won't make the same mistakes. I won't be driven by the
same imperatives. My generation won't have to spill oceans of blood to
run the experiments. Trust us! Just like Leni did Hitler.
Tom Cod
attempt by German filmakers to come to terms with their own history so
directly. The DVD contains interviews with director and actors.
Fascinating-filmed in Petersburg, Russia (Goebbels responds to the
prospect of a surrender to the Russians, "I made my political career
on driving the Reds out of Berlin and I'm not going to surrender it to
them now!") Previously there had been "The Tin Drum" which deals in
fictional and allegorical form with the "Third Reich" (literally "Third
Empire" the first empire being that of Otto I in the Middle Ages in the
era of the "Holy Roman Empire", second being the Kaiser's German Empire
founded in 1870-1871 on the ruins of the Paris Commune, among other
things. Fuhrer, literally translated meaning "Leader" Thus the poster
slogan, Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer! One People, One Empire, One
Leader! interstingly as far as the Empire part goes, Goering was the
son of the former colonial governor of Namibia; Goering who so bluntly
stated the Nazis aim of taking a "solemn vow" to "totally obliterate
the pacifist parliamentary system" which had become the vehicle of the
"November Criminals" who had surrendered in 1918, giving rise to the
FreiKorps that killed Rosa Luxemburg and from which Hitler and the
Nazis emerged. ("In 1919 I was appointed a political officer by the
General Staff to agitate against Bolshevism and mutiny"-Hitler)
Tin Drum deals with ethnic Germans in Gdansk, formerly Danzig, the
issue of which Hitler and the Nazis focused on to provoke war with
Poland. (Hitler's demagoguery-fed up with Polish terrorism and
threats-reminds me of Bush et al on Iraq-or the Cat to the Mouse-Get
Outta Line One More Time, go ahead and try it!). the family of the
protagonists are easy-going middle class conformist good german types
that aren't excited about getting too involved in politics but find
themselves hectored by a local uniformed Nazi leader who is shouting at
them over a bullhorn along the lines of: "The Leader would rather have
one honest worker like you in the national-patriotic movement than a
hundred fat lazy bourgois!" Then of course there's the happy day when
the Leader himself comes to Danzig in 1939 to address the assembled
masses in the soccer stadium and begins with great satisfaction, "My
fellow Danziggers . . ." This triumphant moment is contrasted with the
terrible denouement in 1945 when the main character's parents are
killed by vengeful Soviet troops in their own home. historical note:
Gdansk was where the Solidarity movement started in 1980.