July 5, 2012, by Stephen Mumford
Riefenstahl’s Olympia
Can art be beautiful even though it’s wrong or would its wrongness destroy its beauty? This rather abstract question of contemporary aesthetics is made concrete in the example of filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s work. Riefenstahl was revolutionary, pioneering in the 1930s a number of cinematographic innovations. She used unusual angles on her subjects; she distorted the perspective and deployed moving cameras. There were extreme close-ups and slow motion sequences. Such techniques are now taken for granted but if one compares Riefenstahl’s films with earlier cinema one gets a sense of the giant leaps she took forward. Her most famous works are supposedly documentaries but it is clear that she set out to tell a story and often to illustrate it as gloriously and dramatically as possible.
Nevertheless, it is possible to argue that Riefenstahl’s work was flawed as art. Her two great 1930s films were used in promotion of Nazism and its ideology. Triumph of the Will (1935), for example, documented and glamorised the 1934 Nuremberg party congress with a quasi-messianic depiction of Hitler. Olympia (1938) gave us the story of the 1936 Olympics but woven within a subtle narrative that was recognizably National Socialist. There is little doubt that the film was to be used as propaganda but could we also say that it is beautiful propaganda?
The question of aesthetics is whether an ethical flaw also becomes an aesthetic one? The problem could be distilled into the object of the Nazi swastika flag itself. Might this design be considered aesthetically positive by someone who has no knowledge of its evil associations? Could we say that the red background and black cross on a while circle has positive aesthetic value despite the use to which it was put? Or does history negate any aesthetic of the design?
Cinema-goers of the Midlands get a chance to wrestle with these questions later this month. The International Olympic Committee have granted Nottingham’s Broadway cinema a rare public viewing of Riefenstahl’s Olympia. On the surface, the film is in praise of athletic beauty. It was a watershed in the history of sports cinema and, indeed, in the cinematic depiction of the human body. Viewers will also become aware, however, of several ideological undertones, which at times can make for uncomfortable viewing. Perhaps this latter point is what makes Riefenstahl’s films fail as art. Despite images that would in another context appeal to us, their ethically dubious use removes from us the license to aesthetically enjoy. A sophisticated viewer, however, might still be able to abstract the art from the propaganda.
The two parts of Olympia will be shown with scene-setting introductions on consecutive nights: Part 1, Festival of Nations, on July 17at 6.00 and Part 2, Festival of Beauty, at the same time on July 18. The showing inaugurates the new Café Philosophique, a series of events in partnership between the Broadway Cinema and the University of Nottingham.
Full details of the showing and ticket information can be found at http://www.broadway.org.uk/events/film_cafe_philosophique_presents_olympia
As I tried to say on twitter, I think it depends upon how much of its wrong content goes into constituting a piece of “wrong” art’s existence as that work. The wrong part can’t be beautiful, I don’t think. So the question is: what’s left? Something, surely. Something that, if it has aesthetic value (beautiful or not), renders the work a work of art and not *mere* propaganda, we might say. But it wouldn’t be the actual whole work that was beautiful, then; it would only be its aesthetic element qua analytic abstraction.
I’m sure something can be be beautiful “even though it’s morally repugnant” – but only if you’re not aware of the offending factor, ie when the thought process rather than purely the aesthetics kick in.
I think this is about how we engage with the relationship between artwork and context. Riefenstahl’s film isn’t Nazi in and of itself, but can be understood to promote the values of Nazism if read in light of the context of its production. No surprise there. Of course, we can’t ignore this context if we’re trying to understand historical meaning, but this isn’t the same as aesthetic value. The anxieties surrounding this question are often to do with a confusion of aesthetic appreciation and political endorsement. These anxieties are soothed by aesthetically displeasing artworks produced within an ethically flawed context, which can safely be dismissed as ugly propaganda. As the post highlights, it’s when aesthetic and ethical flaws part company that we feel troubled. Contemporary exhibitions of artworks produced within ethically flawed contexts have often met with similar concern. An exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute in 2001 sought to challenge this by exhibiting figurative sculpture produced in Third Reich Germany, including the work of artists who were embraced by the regime as well as those alienated by it. In refusing to segregate the work of artists who supported the regime from the work of those who opposed it, curators sought to foreground aesthetic qualities: http://ow.ly/c4UCT
I think I didn’t express clearly enough the point that I was trying to make. Great works of art are not just works of art. They are this work of art, or that work of art. What gives them their identity as real, actual entities of that kind is not simply their aesthetic quality, their counting as art; it’s also their meanings, their content. There is no such thing as a great work of art that has only aesthetic value, and no content, no meaning.
And the nature (the genesis, “meaning” or sense & aesthetic value, let’s say) of those meanings, i.e. of the content of a work of art, is itself a tricky thing. It doesn’t seem correct to say that the nature is entirely given by context, such that in themselves great works of art are akin to Rorschach blots in terms of their meaningful content. Certainly, it seems to me, art that is made from words is not like that. But I don’t think that art that is made from images or sounds or even shapes is like that either. Neither, however, would it be right to say that meanings can’t be added or subtracted, via context.
A work of great art that happens to be made by a Nazi is a different thing, I think, than a work of great art the inherent truth-claim of which is false. Given my belief that meanings that fail morally fail aesthetically, I took the question to be this: what can we say, aesthetically, of a work of art that exhibits a form-content contradiction in terms of its aesthetic value, i.e., what do we say of a work of art whose intended meaning fails as art? If we want to say that that film is simply a work of art that happens to be made by a Nazi, with no inherently problematic content, then it’s not interesting enough as an example.
Truth-claim regarding a normative fact, I meant.
‘There is no such thing as a great work of art that has only aesthetic value, and no content, no meaning.’
This down-playing of the aesthetic as a realm without the capacity to generate its own truths is problematic, and probably untenable.
Other problems also. You sound like you’re trying to be Badiou
That may have been a bit harsh. I apologise.