Susan Sontag accuses Riefenstahl of transferring fascist aesthetics to her photographic representation of the Nuba. Leni Riefenstahl’s book The Last of the Nuba (1973) is referred by Sontag as “the fascist version of the old idea of the Noble Savage” (Sontag 1975). Sontag draws clear parallels between the book and famous propagandistic film Triumph of the Will (1935) and emphasizes in particular Riefenstahl’s promotion of physical perfection, physical ordeals of wrestling matches, the victory of the strongest as the unifying symbol of the community, the contrast “between the clean and the impure, the incorruptible and the defiled, the physical and the mental, the joyful and the critical” (Sontag 1975).
Riefenstahl denied any association with fascism and justified the aesthetics of her films by her fascination with the beautiful (“a beauty-freak”, this is how Sontag called Riefenstahl). It is interesting enough that in the introduction to The Last of the Nuba the references to the beauty as the guiding force emerged again. "Her task would be find the Nuba and to make a pictorial record of these people that would be the work of art their beauty and magnificence demanded" or "The athlete's naked body looked as if it were a stature modeled by a sculptor" (Riefenstahl 1995, 10).
But we all know that the idea of beauty is embedded in history and ideology, and that is why when Riefenstahl talks about “the beauty of the human form”, it is the right time to ask what kind of beauty she is having in mind and why this particular kind? It is difficult to image that Riefenstahl could totally get rid of the aesthetics she developed in Triumph of the Will. In this sense the influence of her previous successful film projects is inevitable, and I agree here with Sontag’s criticism.
We can compare The Last of the Nuba with Mead and Bateson’s photographic study of Bali (Bateson 1942) to see an extreme aestheticization in Riefenstahl’s representation. The photographic analysis of Bali is systematic, scrupulous and boring. Having a topic in mind (like children’s feeling of balance), they collected pictures to explore the phenomenon. The aesthetic quality of the pictures had less importance than the record itself. For Mead and Bateson it was important to have the visual records of their observations and insights, they "never asked to take pictures, but just took them as a matter of routine, wearing or carrying the two cameras day in and day out” (Jacknis 1988, 165). The written account of the ethnographic observation is in strong correlation with the visual record. Even though Jacknis insists that Mead and Bateson used photography not as illustration but as a primary recording (as far as I understand Jacknis means simultaneity of observation, field notes writing and visual recording), the book itself brings the sense of illustration – the text illustrates the images, the images illustrate the text.
It is not so easy to find such kind of correlation between comments and pictures in Riefenstahl’s book. The captions strive to describe the culture of the Nuba, while the pictures describe and aestheticize at the same time. For example, the description “The only door is a Mesakin house-compound which reaches all the way to the ground is the main entrance. The wide top allows women with bulky loads to pass through easily” is attached to the following picture:
The truth about The Last of the Nuba is that the project is a complex and multilayered photographic representation that can’t be reduced to the actualization of fascist aesthetics. There is at least one additional meaning in the compound of Nuba pictures – it is a classic ethnographic endeavor. What makes these pictures ethnographic per se? First of all, the very desire to travel somewhere else, far away from the researcher’s own society. Malinowski’s ideal of ethnographic fieldwork formulated by him in the beginning of the 20th century is persistent even till present days, not talking about the time of Riefenstahl’s travel. There is a certain idea of a field as “the place where the distinctive work of the ‘fieldwork’ may be done, that taken-for-granted space in which an ‘Other’ culture or society lies waiting to be observed and written”, “the mysterious space” (Gupta and Ferguson 1997, 2). Edwards describes it as “the fundamental tourist desire for ‘authenticity’ of experience which is couched firmly in the ‘authenticity’ of that observed” (Edwards 1997, 60). The tourist’s attitudes are similar here to ones of an anthropologist. The move to “somewhere”, to culturally and spacially distant and different place, is, according to Edwards, a “form of ritual journey” (62). It is, thus, not just a rhetorical stance when The Last of the Nuba is opened with the words, “"Unapologetically romantic, unashamedly obeisant towards the beauty of the human form, she held to her own vision of an ancient and uncorrupted Africa that neither White nor Arab intruder had yet despoiled" (Riefenstahl 1995, 10).
Secondly, the ethnographic ambition is to understand a culture as a whole, as a totality. That is why the reports (both by Riefenstahl and Mead and Bateson) are not limited to an aspect or a focused research problem. Instead they tend to describe the grand topics of life and death, love and war.
Bateson, Gregory. 1942. Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis. Special Publications of the New York Academy of Sciences, v. 2. New York: The New York academy of sciences.
Edwards, E. 1997. Beyond the Boundary: a consideration of the expressive in photography and anthropology. In Banks, M., and H. Morphy. eds. Rethinking visual anthropology. Pp. 53-80. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson. 1997. Discipline and Practice: "The Field” as Site, Method, and Location in Anthropology. In A. Gupta and J. Ferguson eds. Anthropological Locations Berkeley: University of California Press Pp: 1-46.
Jacknis, Ira. 1988. “Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in Bali: Their Use of Photography and Film.” Cultural Anthropology 3 (2): 160–77. Riefenstahl, Leni. 1995. The Last of the Nuba. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Sontag, Susan. 1975. “Fascinating Fascism.” The New York Review of Books, February 6. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1975/feb/06/fascinating-fascism/.
Riefenstahl denied any association with fascism and justified the aesthetics of her films by her fascination with the beautiful (“a beauty-freak”, this is how Sontag called Riefenstahl). It is interesting enough that in the introduction to The Last of the Nuba the references to the beauty as the guiding force emerged again. "Her task would be find the Nuba and to make a pictorial record of these people that would be the work of art their beauty and magnificence demanded" or "The athlete's naked body looked as if it were a stature modeled by a sculptor" (Riefenstahl 1995, 10).
But we all know that the idea of beauty is embedded in history and ideology, and that is why when Riefenstahl talks about “the beauty of the human form”, it is the right time to ask what kind of beauty she is having in mind and why this particular kind? It is difficult to image that Riefenstahl could totally get rid of the aesthetics she developed in Triumph of the Will. In this sense the influence of her previous successful film projects is inevitable, and I agree here with Sontag’s criticism.
We can compare The Last of the Nuba with Mead and Bateson’s photographic study of Bali (Bateson 1942) to see an extreme aestheticization in Riefenstahl’s representation. The photographic analysis of Bali is systematic, scrupulous and boring. Having a topic in mind (like children’s feeling of balance), they collected pictures to explore the phenomenon. The aesthetic quality of the pictures had less importance than the record itself. For Mead and Bateson it was important to have the visual records of their observations and insights, they "never asked to take pictures, but just took them as a matter of routine, wearing or carrying the two cameras day in and day out” (Jacknis 1988, 165). The written account of the ethnographic observation is in strong correlation with the visual record. Even though Jacknis insists that Mead and Bateson used photography not as illustration but as a primary recording (as far as I understand Jacknis means simultaneity of observation, field notes writing and visual recording), the book itself brings the sense of illustration – the text illustrates the images, the images illustrate the text.
It is not so easy to find such kind of correlation between comments and pictures in Riefenstahl’s book. The captions strive to describe the culture of the Nuba, while the pictures describe and aestheticize at the same time. For example, the description “The only door is a Mesakin house-compound which reaches all the way to the ground is the main entrance. The wide top allows women with bulky loads to pass through easily” is attached to the following picture:
The truth about The Last of the Nuba is that the project is a complex and multilayered photographic representation that can’t be reduced to the actualization of fascist aesthetics. There is at least one additional meaning in the compound of Nuba pictures – it is a classic ethnographic endeavor. What makes these pictures ethnographic per se? First of all, the very desire to travel somewhere else, far away from the researcher’s own society. Malinowski’s ideal of ethnographic fieldwork formulated by him in the beginning of the 20th century is persistent even till present days, not talking about the time of Riefenstahl’s travel. There is a certain idea of a field as “the place where the distinctive work of the ‘fieldwork’ may be done, that taken-for-granted space in which an ‘Other’ culture or society lies waiting to be observed and written”, “the mysterious space” (Gupta and Ferguson 1997, 2). Edwards describes it as “the fundamental tourist desire for ‘authenticity’ of experience which is couched firmly in the ‘authenticity’ of that observed” (Edwards 1997, 60). The tourist’s attitudes are similar here to ones of an anthropologist. The move to “somewhere”, to culturally and spacially distant and different place, is, according to Edwards, a “form of ritual journey” (62). It is, thus, not just a rhetorical stance when The Last of the Nuba is opened with the words, “"Unapologetically romantic, unashamedly obeisant towards the beauty of the human form, she held to her own vision of an ancient and uncorrupted Africa that neither White nor Arab intruder had yet despoiled" (Riefenstahl 1995, 10).
Secondly, the ethnographic ambition is to understand a culture as a whole, as a totality. That is why the reports (both by Riefenstahl and Mead and Bateson) are not limited to an aspect or a focused research problem. Instead they tend to describe the grand topics of life and death, love and war.
Bateson, Gregory. 1942. Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis. Special Publications of the New York Academy of Sciences, v. 2. New York: The New York academy of sciences.
Edwards, E. 1997. Beyond the Boundary: a consideration of the expressive in photography and anthropology. In Banks, M., and H. Morphy. eds. Rethinking visual anthropology. Pp. 53-80. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson. 1997. Discipline and Practice: "The Field” as Site, Method, and Location in Anthropology. In A. Gupta and J. Ferguson eds. Anthropological Locations Berkeley: University of California Press Pp: 1-46.
Jacknis, Ira. 1988. “Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in Bali: Their Use of Photography and Film.” Cultural Anthropology 3 (2): 160–77. Riefenstahl, Leni. 1995. The Last of the Nuba. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Sontag, Susan. 1975. “Fascinating Fascism.” The New York Review of Books, February 6. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1975/feb/06/fascinating-fascism/.
No comments:
Post a Comment