Chapter Four: Aesthetics

What is a political image? We are all familiar with the idea of images designed to persuade us to act, vote, and behave in particular ways that we might describe as political: billboards and ads on social media for political candidates, paintings and murals that express political ideals or protest injustice or memorialize people who died, and photographs and videos of political events, like political rallies or police brutality. But how can an image be political without seeming to depict anything political at all?

“The German Student”, Nazi Propaganda circa 1936, encouraging students to support the Nazi party.

Leni Riefenstahl was one of the most important filmmakers of the early twentieth century, but not necessarily for good reasons. Riefenstahl’s career began in Germany, where she made successful films throughout the early 1930s to great acclaim and pioneering success, especially as one of the earliest female filmmakers. Her career was greatly accelerated by the rise of the Nazis and her friendship with Adolf Hitler: as a filmmaker, Riefenstahl made one of the most famous films of the twentieth century, The Triumph of the Will, in collaboration with Hitler and the Nazi party itself, depicting an epic and calculatedly cinematic Nazi political rally and military parade at Nuremberg in 1935 (the same year as Modern Times and Benjamin’s essay).

Alongside romanticizing military power and an almost godlike leader, the film (freely available online) uses footage taken from a plane that demonstrates the order and unity of the military forces, their arrangement in straight lines, and the ecstatic admiration of the crowd, with a particular focus on excited women. The images that the film constructs – through framing, lighting, and arrangement within the context of the film – are political images even ignoring the politics they depict, because they match and contribute to what we’ll call the political aesthetic of fascism.

“Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-04062A” by Georg Pahl is licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Aesthetics of Fascism

Let’s break that phrase down.

Fascism is a political system structured around a single leader who is given great power to dictate the actions of the government and the military without having to go through voting or regulatory processes with lower levels of the government in the way that democracy is supposed to. As a political system it took hold in various forms in the twentieth century across several European countries and elsewhere. The worst outcomes of fascism are most obviously and infamously demonstrated by the actions of the Nazi party and the genocide of Jews, homosexuals, communists, and myriad other groups in the Holocaust.

One of the most effective strategies that led to the success of the Nazis was their control over the politics of non-political images. By flooding German culture with images that shared an underlying political logic, the Nazis successfully used images to manipulate the politics and imaginations of the populace. Later, when the Nazis were in government, there would be a whole ministry devoted to propaganda, and their successful installation of a fascist ruler is in part due to this successful creation and proliferation of a political aesthetic that affected the way people thought without constantly having to always spell out their politics explicitly.

Though the term aesthetic is used in a myriad of ways and contexts nowadays, in art criticism something’s aesthetic generally means a description of the logic of how it looks. It’s about what draws together a range of components into a single “logic”. Imagine a furnished room in a house someone has designed carefully: what shared features do all of the pieces of furniture have? What are all those straight lines or soft curves trying to convey or make you feel? We can call that the room’s aesthetic. So the “political aesthetic of fascism” is a way of describing the political implications of the way things look under fascism (hint: lots of straight lines), even when they don’t seem to be explicitly political.

Riefenstahl and Sontag: Beginnings and Endings

So how do Riefenstahl’s aesthetic choices reflect fascist politics?

Riefenstahl’s early work played a part in the extensive network of images that were shaping the imaginations of the voting population in 1930s Germany. Images of blond-haired and blue-eyed physically fit and strong young men wrestling or playing sports were circulated widely in Nazi propaganda, a visual motif that represented the archetype of the “Aryan” ideal, and regularly show up in Riefenstahl’s work. Their racist counterparts were antisemitic cartoons designed to turn people against the Jewish population in Germany. We all now know in retrospect that these were political images, even if they weren’t explicitly suggesting people do anything political, but at the time they may have seemed as innocuous as a leaflet for the girl scouts or a cartoon in the New Yorker does to us now.

The American writer Susan Sontag wrote about Riefenstahl in a famous essay called “Fascinating Fascism”, which takes a critical look at Riefenstahl’s work from a post-war perspective. Sontag explains that the fascist aesthetic – the things the Nazis valued artistically and architecturally – was already prominent in Riefenstahl’s films before the Nazi party even came to power. So while Riefenstahl’s film The Triumph of the Will demonstrates an obsession with physical control, power, and domination, her earlier films also romanticize similar aesthetic principles but in different ways – often through mountain climbing or feats of physical strength or courage. But could films about courageous mountaineers like Storm Over Mont Blanc (acted in by Riefenstahl and directed by Arnold Fanck) or Riefenstahl’s mystic mountain in The Blue Light really have somehow led to people voting for fascist ideas?

To be convinced of this argument, turn to Sontag’s engaging essay itself. Notice in particular the interesting moment in the essay when Sontag goes further than just showing that Riefenstahl’s early work exhibited the seed of fascist aesthetic principles. Sontag also demonstrates that long after the Second World War was over and the Nazis denounced, Riefenstahl’s photography was no less fascist than her early films or her Nazi propaganda. This is a key transition in the essay, away from a focus on Riefenstahl’s creation of images designed to empower a political group, towards images that don’t seem to have a political purpose but still have some “political” aspect, in this later case presumably unintentionally.

This unintentionality is perhaps the most interesting part of Sontag’s argument. Sontag’s essay looks at Riefenstahl’s book The Last of the Nuba, a book of her photography released in 1976. On the surface the images may appear to be beautiful and striking photographs of a community of Sudanese tribespeople, and certainly it seems that Riefenstahl thought that’s all they were. But with the help of Sontag, you can look at the images of the Nuba tribe and see the ways that the aesthetic logic behind the way things have been photographed and organized has been derived from fascist ideas.

The Last of the Nuba was a bestseller in America. Looking across the many photographs after reading Sontag’s essay, you might even start to see similarities between the contents of the book and the Triumph of the Will. Riefenstahl, even thirty years after the war and having acknowledged the evils of fascism, the Nazi party, and the Holocaust, was still producing images driven by a fascist aesthetic logic. This is an important realization: a political aesthetic can be present whether you want it to be or not.

Sontag spends her essay making these points that are compressed here into a couple of pages; for a proper understanding of Sontag’s argument, turn to the essay itself.

Benjamin on Fascism

Walter Benjamin would say that giving politics an aesthetics – giving it a kind of fashion or look – is inherent to fascism. It replaces actually giving the masses better lives with letting them “express themselves” and be part of a group. He ends The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by saying

Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses while leaving intact the property relations which they strive to abolish. It sees its salvation in granting expression to the masses – but on no account granting them rights. The masses have a right to changed property relations; fascism seeks to give them expression in keeping these relations unchanged. The logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life. (41)

This is a complex way of saying that fascism gives people a fantasy world to live in, rather than the better lives they crave.

So is it important to be able to identify the aesthetic logic of something? In a world that increasingly communicates visually and through images, being able to understand the logic behind the way things appear in the world around you is an exceptionally powerful tool – especially if you make images yourself. This is the political power of “visual literacy”. The importance of doing the kind of work Sontag does, connecting the aesthetics of the past to the present, should be clear when thinking about identifying and preventing the repetition of such dire history. And when you begin to think about ways your attention to the way the world looks can shape what you create, these skills can become a tool, as we’ll see in the next chapter on “Branding”.

Works Cited and Further Reading

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility." The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Belknap of Harvard U, 2008. 19-42. Print.

Fanck, Arnold, dir. Storm Over Mont Blanc. Aafa-Film AG, 1930. Film.

Hohlwein, Ludwig. “Der deutsche Student kämpft für Führer und Volk in der Mannschaft des NSD-Studentenbundes”. 1936.

Janell Hobson. “The Nubian Body, African Aesthetics, and Cultural Imagination”. African American Intellectual History Society, 15 February 2018.

Riefenstahl, Leni, dir. The Blue Light. 1932. Film.

Riefenstahl, Leni, dir. The Triumph of the Will. Reichsparteitag-Film, 1935. Film.

Riefenstahl, Leni. The Last of the Nuba. Harper and Row, 1973.

Sartwell, Crispin. “Red, Gold, Black, and Green: Black Nationalist Aesthetics.” Contemporary Aesthetics, University of Michigan Library, 2009.

Sontag, Susan. “Fascinating Fascism.” Under the Sign of Saturn. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1980.