Riefenstahl and the Mountain

by Infinite Thought

http://kinofist.blogspot.com/2007/01/riefenstahl-and-mountain.html

Where did Riefenstahl get her ideas from? What precise cinematic affects capture the
spirit of the Third Reich, and how and why did Riefenstahl come to express these
themes and techniques so well? The pre-Nazi Bergfilmen (mountain film), such as
Fanck’s The Holy Mountain (1926), give us some alarming hints. It is impossible not to
see the embryonic horrors of Nazism prefigured in the unseemly coalescence of highly
advanced cinematic technique with thunderously banal emotional content that makes
up the Bergfilmen. We see Riefenstahl herself slipping with ease between acting and
directing – from dippy dancing mountain-girl to steely-nerved all-powerful director of
the two highly-stylised propaganda films that best document Nazi ambition and
cinematic manipulation, Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938).

Much of the dynamism of Riefenstahl’s documentaries, as well as that of the earlier

mountain films, depends upon the profound manipulation of contrasts, both visual and
sonic: light and shadow, earth and sky, man and heavens, the solitary face and the
mass rally, human beauty and inanimate nature, music and blackness. But these pairs
are not simply presented as opposites. There is a third element that perhaps best
characterises the fascist aesthetic, and that is obfuscation. What takes place at the
limits of these stark contrasts, as if to cloak any potential rational absolutism, is the
relentless presence of mist, cloud, fog, steam, shimmering light, dust, haze, the
fluttering of flags – anything to prevent the emergence of reflexivity or critical
resolution. Cinematic totalitarianism, or rather the cinematic attempt to aestheticize
totalitarianism, thus precisely depends upon occult confusion and the attempt to
make impossible any clarity of thought. We see this everywhere: from the miasma out
of which Hitler’s plane descends in Triumph of the Will to the mist that floats across
the Olympic rings at the beginning of Olympia; from the steam rising from the cooking
in the army barracks to the trails left by the torchlights by skiers in the mountain
films and Hitler supporters in Triumph of the Will.

In contrast to the Soviet cinematic output of the 20s, with its relentless attention to
process, production and the tracking of movement of people and machines from one
point to another, Riefenstahl’s films present scenarios that simply are. The crowds
waiting to greet Hitler are simply there, just as the mountain is simply there. What
this third element does – this opaque, cloudy dizziness of unreason that smears the
edges of presentation in a dream-like manner – is prevent any attempt to track both
origins or consequences. There is no point at which the characters of the Bergfilmen
or the figures in Triumph of the Will can reach a point of decision because that point
of subjective self-assertion has already been filled in by the combination of post-
romantic mantras (brotherhood, loyalty, strength, the fatherland) and metaphysical
haze – the light-headedness of one who climbs a mountain in a snowstorm to escape
the urban quotidian drudgery of the ‘valley-pigs’ (a term used in the mountain films
to differentiate the ‘nobility’ of the climbers from the homogeneity of the city-
dwellers).

This commitment to presenting extremes in a smothered way, to promote lofty

sentiments – love, destiny, infatuation – to absolutes as stirring as they are vague, is
Riefenstahl’s and the Bergfilme’s aim. By doing so they summon up a universe that is
at once meaningful, intensive and occasionally beautiful – a kind of religion without
transcendence, whose Earthly yet mysterious skies and clouds drift through one’s
heart with a sublime significance. Taking a cue from Kant’s 1790 definition of the
distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, one finds the following point:

The beautiful in nature is a question of the form of object, and this consists in
limitation, whereas the sublime is to be found in an object even devoid of form, so
far as it immediately involves, or else by its presence provokes a representation of
limitlessness, yet with a superadded thought of its totality (§23).

The capture of the beautiful in nature (whether it be the rushing rivers and snowy
peaks of the Bergfilmen or the bodies of the divers in Olympia) is a representation of
pure form, and astonishes before one has a chance to distance oneself from such
reactive immediacy. The sublimity of the mountain, on the other hand, symbolises
both the limitlessness of ambition and the impossible desire to make such an ambition
all-consuming. It is no coincidence that the ‘Holy Mountain’ of the film results in
death for all three of the characters (even if Riefenstahl doesn’t die at the end of the
film, it is her death-mask that forms the first frame). But the proto-Nazi sublime
mistakes, and indeed does so deliberately, the subjective judgement with the object
itself. Kant takes care to guard against this temptation:

True sublimity must be sought only in the mind of the judging subject, and not in the
object of nature that occasions this attitude by the estimate formed of it. Who would
apply the term "sublime" even to shapeless mountain masses towering one above the
other in wild disorder, with their pyramids of ice, or to the dark tempestuous ocean,
or such like things? But in the contemplation of them, without any regard to their
form, the mind abandons itself to the imagination and to a reason placed, though
quite apart from any definite end, in conjunction therewith, and merely broadening
its view, and it feels itself elevated in its own estimate of itself on finding all the
might of imagination still unequal to its ideas (§26).

Unfortunately, we know exactly who would, and did, apply the sublime directly to
these ‘shapeless mountain masses’: the vapid enthusiasm of the young mountain
climbers and their willingness, indeed desire, to die rather than stay in the world of
the everyday, is the ominous precursor of a generation prepared to sacrifice itself in
the name of an opaque all-consuming passion. Whereas Kant’s sublime reinforces the
subtle self-rule of reason, the Nazi sublime conflates nature with the subject, and the
strong mountain-climbing youth with a paradigm of beauty and determination that
cannot but exclude vast swathes of humanity.
The ordered human masses of Triumph of the Will are prefigured in the opaque
‘thereness’ of the shapeless mountain masses in the Bergfilme (and one recalls
Mallory’s famous response when asked why climb Everest: ‘because it is there’). One
can speak here of Riefenstahl’s ‘frozen style’. Even in the midst of exertion,
movement, vitality and dynamism, there is a distinct stillness both in her
representations of nature and in the statuesque bodies of the gymnasts and blond
boys listening impassively to Hitler’s speeches in Triumph of the Will. It is no surprise
that Riefenstahl’s still but emotive presentation (as well as the devastating banality
of Nazi proclamations and exhortations) has served as a privileged model for
contemporary advertising, with its necessarily empty sloganeering and manufactured
product fidelity. The pacing of Riefenstahl films, similarly, reflects the combined,
repetitive boredom and false excitement of spectacular consumer capitalism – the
combination of moments of supreme tedium and utter beauty. This model of aesthetic
commodification can in turn be reflected back onto Nazism itself. As Lutz P. Koepnick
put it in 'Fascist Aesthetics Revisited': ‘Circulated as one of many other objects of
popular desire, the politics of fascism should thus ultimately be understood as a form
of commodity aesthetics.’

Youth

Siegfried Kracauer, in his 1947 book From Caligari to Hitler, notes that in the
Bergfilme ‘immaturity and mountain enthusiasm were one’. This association of youth
and the mountain is crucial. The mountain is the place to test one’s strength, to reach
as far up into the clouds as possible. Nature, and the mountain in particular, is
simultaneously the object of youth-worship, the place of non-religious, but
nevertheless mystical, destiny and key symbol of the sublimation of sexual desire. For
later film-makers such as Werner Herzog, who in many ways works with many of the
same themes as the Bergfilme, the crucial point of separation comes with undoing of
the idea that nature has a privileged relation to youth. In fact, if anything, for
Herzog, it has a privileged relation to madness, the outsider, the renegade. Nature for
Herzog is also profoundly indifferent to human concerns, and reveals little of one’s
‘destiny’ or role. He states: ‘I believe the common character of the universe is not
harmony, but hostility, chaos and murder’.

For the Bergfilme and Riefenstahl, however, it is the combination of physical exertion
and stillness in the face of natural beauty that calms and attempts to discipline, even
if it cannot quite entirely eradicate, sexual desire. At every point in The Holy
Mountain, in particular, where sexual desire threatens to explode into language or
physicality, the characters go skiing or climb mountains, pausing occasionally to
admire an Alpine view. Mountain-climbing is pure sublimation that removes sex in
order to raise an increasingly fit youth to ever greater emotional and patriotic
heights.
When Hitler in Mein Kampf surveys the contemporary cultural world, one of his main
complaints, aside from its ‘regression’ and ‘degeneracy’, as we might expect, is of
the lack of cultural access permitted to the youth: ‘It was a sad sign of inner decay
that the youth could no longer be “sent” into most of these so-called “abodes of art”
– a fact that was admitted with shameless frankness by a general display of the
penny-arcade warning: “Young people are not admitted!” What, Hitler asks, would
the great dramatists have had to say about the exclusion of the young from art
galleries and theaters? ‘How Schiller would have flared up, how Goethe would have
turned away in indignation!’ If the theaters and art galleries don’t want the youth,
then the mountains will welcome them with open (if occasionally deadly) arms – they
certainly pleased the most infamous of Goethe’s teen-suicides, Werther, whose
immature sorrows and nature-worship precisely circulate around mountains:

Stupendous mountains encompassed me, abysses yawned at my feet, and cataracts

fell headlong down before me; impetuous rivers rolled through the plain, and rocks
and mountains resounded from afar. In the depths of the earth I saw innumerable
powers in motion, and multiplying to infinity; whilst upon its surface, and beneath the
heavens, there teemed ten thousand varieties of living creatures.
And, perhaps more revealingly, ‘as I contemplated the mountains which lay stretched
out before me, I thought how often they had been the object of my dearest desires’.
The fusion of the Nazi sublime with this youthful ‘mountain-lust’ captures a
devastatingly strong irrationality that feeds directly into those later presentations of
fascism that no longer need to rely upon mountain imagery directly. What Riefenstahl
learned above all from the Bergfilme was the supremely dangerous power of
lightheadedness.
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4 COMMENTS:

Matt said...

Interesting post, IT. You really paint a damning picture of 'the sublime' as
converted by the onto-Nazi aesthetic. As mostly an aside I'm left wondering
where Tarkovsky, with all those misty, mossy forest, or epic snow scenes, fits it?
And is there any sense in speaking of a more broadly historical aesthetics of
experience, or anything in the sublime (or even epic) still worth rescuing?

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Matt said...
 Reading back over, maybe this answers one of those:

"In contrast to the Soviet cinematic output of the 20s, with its relentless
attention to process, production and the tracking of movement of people and
machines from one point to another, Riefenstahl’s films present scenarios that
simply are. The crowds waiting to greet Hitler are simply there, just as the
mountain is simply there."

Herzog's conception of nature, on the other hand, or at least that expressed by

his films, does seem to vary (from Fitzcarraldo to, say, Grizzly Man).

I think I find the latter far more stunningly dogmatic.

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it said...

What I was trying to get at, I suppose, was a deliberate misuse of the sublime
in the mountain film/Riefenstahl's aesthetic project.

It seems clear that Kant is already afraid of a dubious overly-ecstatic take-up

of the sublime even by the 1790s - the function of the sublime in the Critique
of Judgement is, for the most part, one of consolidation - rehabilitation and
reaffirmation of the power of reason in the internal recognition of its potential
disintegration, not a proto-Romantic big-up for the imagination or anything.

All of which is not to say that the sublime/nature/mist are inherently dodgy, of
course, more that a certain subjective internalisation of these things might be
- Lyotard's analysis of Barnett Newman's 'sublime' seems to escape this problem,
perhaps.

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Matt said...
Right; thanks. Internalization is an interesting way of putting it; surely apt in
this case. In another light, the sublime may function as a sort of window/mirror
to an 'outside,' I suppose. Thanks for graciously recognizing the status of my
remarks as "an aside," btw.

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