Notes on Sontag by Phillip Lopate;

Author:Phillip Lopate;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

“Fascinating Fascism” appeared in 1974, when Sontag had already begun the essays which would comprise On Photography, and both texts worry the morality of photographed images and demonstrate a prosecutorial tone. “Fascinating Fascism” literally uses the device “Exhibit A,” “Exhibit B” to structure her indictment, like a district attorney. The essay’s power derives in large measure from the controlled fury underneath its calm laying-out of facts and exhibits. Of course there are glints of unfair argumentation here and there, such as when Sontag makes the intuitively plausible (but finally overreaching) inference that Riefenstahl’s lavishly captured athletic bodies in motion in Olympia are but another expression of Fascism, or that her loving portraits of the Nuba tribesman are also Fascist and racist at their core. Still, we are with Sontag, 99 percent of us, urging her on, because this time she is attacking Nazis, and so a little unfairness never hurts. We hold our breaths as we watch Sontag go to it, with a rhetorical power rare in this day and age. Not only does Sontag take on Riefenstahl and her defenders, her own friends at the Telluride and New York Film Festivals, and fellow feminists, she also takes on herself, or her past views, with gritty determination.

In the 1965 essay “On Style” she had written:

To call Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will and The Olympiad masterpieces is not to gloss over Nazi propaganda with aesthetic lenience. The Nazi propaganda is there. But something else is there, too, which we reject at our loss. Because they project the complex movements of intelligence and grace and sensuousness, these two films of Riefenstahl (unique among Nazi artists) transcend the categories of propaganda or even reportage. And we find ourselves—to be sure, rather uncomfortably—seeing ‘Hitler’ and not Hitler, the ‘1936 Olympics’ and not the 1936 Olympics. Through Riefenstahl’s genius as a film-maker, the content has—let us even assume, against her intentions—come to play a purely formal role. (ai, 25–26)

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