riefenstahl and eisenstein
tim
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.
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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.