Art.. Storytelling.. Fascism

[Jan Klimkowski]

Leni Riefenstahl always claimed she was an artist, not a fascist.

Leni said her loyalty was to the artistic form. Not to a political cause.

Here are the opening scenes of the notorious Triumph of the Will.

This is 1934-5.

The filmic storytelling, the understanding of film grammar and its use to deliver drama and message is startling.



Leni was a great filmmaker.

Writer Budd Schulberg, assigned by the US Navy to the OSS for intelligence work while attached to John Ford's documentary unit, was ordered to arrest Riefenstahl at her chalet in Kitzbühel, Austria, ostensibly to have her identify the faces of Nazi war criminals in German film footage captured by the Allied troops. Riefenstahl claimed she was not aware of the nature of the internment camps. According to Schulberg, "She gave me the usual song and dance. She said, Of course, you know, I'm really so misunderstood. I'm not political.'" However, when Riefenstahl later claimed she had been forced to follow Goebbels' orders under threat of being sent to a concentration camp, Schulberg asked her why she should have been afraid if she did not know concentration camps existed. When shown photographs of the camps, Riefenstahl reportedly reacted with horror and tears.

I started this thread not to debate whether Riefenstahl was a Nazi or not.

Riefenstahl's work clearly served the cause of fascism.

Her films helped create, promote and spread the Nazi brand.

I started this thread because Riefenstahl was a great filmmaker, a pioneer of filmic storytelling.

Her loyalty was to the filming, framing, gathering of composed and uncomposed image, and the editing of image and sound to tell a story.

If instead of being born in Berlin in 1902, she had been born in Moscow on the very same day, I suspect Leni could have been the great filmmaker of Soviet Communism.

If she had been born in London, she may have beome the cinematic chronicler of the pomp of Empire and its slow decline.

Filmmaking is an expensive business. Someone has to pay the bills.

My point is that her loyalty was to filmmaking.

This is Leni Riefenstahl's genius and her fatal, poisonous, flaw.

[Jan Klimkowski]

I posted this elsewhere:

The primary loyalty of Ridley Scott, like his now deceased brother Tony, is to cinematic story telling.

Not to historical truth.

This is a fundamental distinction.

Top Gun is a pile of fascist ordure.

Man On Fire is a searing insight into the soul of a killer for hire.

Bladerunner is tears in rain.

Black Hawk Down is racist tosh.

"Killing Kennedy" will be a cinematically breathtaking lie.

[Magda Hassan]

A letter to Kathryn Bigelow on Zero Dark Thirty's apology for torture

By peddling the lie that CIA detentions led to Bin Laden's killing, you have become a Leni Riefenstahl-like propagandist of torture

• • guardian.co.uk, Friday 4 January 2013 17.40 GMT
    
  • Jump to comments (729)
    

Director Kathryn Bigelow holds her 2010 Academy Award for The Hurt Locker. Photograph: Paul Buck/EPA

Dear Kathryn Bigelow,

[B][B]The Hurt Locker was a beautiful, brave film; many young women in film were inspired as they watched you become the first woman ever to win an Oscar for directing. But with Zero Dark Thirty, you have attained a different kind of distinction.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Your film Zero Dark Thirty is a huge hit here. But in falsely justifying, in scene after scene, the torture of detainees in "the global war on terror", Zero Dark Thirty is a gorgeously-shot, two-hour ad for keeping intelligence agents who committed crimes against Guantánamo prisoners out of jail. It makes heroes and heroines out of people who committed violent crimes against other people based on their race something that has historical precedent.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Your film claims, in many scenes, that CIA torture was redeemed by the "information" it "secured", information that, according to your script, led to Bin Laden's capture. This narrative is a form of manufacture of innocence to mask a great crime: what your script blithely calls "the detainee program".[/B][/B]
[B][B]What led to this amoral compromising of your film-making?[/B][/B]
[B][B]Could some of the seduction be financing? It is very hard to get a film without a pro-military message, such as The Hurt Locker, funded and financed. But according to sources in the film industry, the more pro-military your message is, the more kinds of help you currently can get: from personnel, to sets, to technology a point I made in my argument about the recent militarized Katy Perry video.[/B][/B]
[B][B]It seems implausible that scenes such as those involving two top-secret, futuristic helicopters could be made without Pentagon help, for example. If the film received that kind of undisclosed, in-kind support from the defense department, then that would free up million of dollars for the gigantic ad campaign that a film like this needs to compete to win audience.[/B][/B]
[B][B]This also sets a dangerous precedent: we can be sure, with the"propaganda amendment" of the 2013 NDAA, just signed into law by the president, that the future will hold much more overt corruption of Hollywood and the rest of US pop culture. This amendment legalizes something that has been illegal for decades: the direct funding of pro-government or pro-military messaging in media, without disclosure, aimed at American citizens.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Then, there is the James Frey factor. You claim that your film is "based on real events", and in interviews, you insist that it is a mixture of fact and fiction, "part documentary". "Real", "true", and even "documentary", are big and important words. By claiming such terms, you generate media and sales traction on a mendacious basis. There are filmmakers who work very hard to produce films that are actually "based on real events": they are called documentarians. Alex Gibney, in Taxi to the Dark Side, and Rory Kennedy, in Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, have both produced true and sourceable documentary films about what your script blithely calls "the detainee program" that is, the regime of torture to generate false confessions at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib which your script claims led straight to Bin Laden.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Fine, fellow reporter: produce your sources. Provide your evidence that torture produced lifesaving or any worthwhile intelligence.[/B][/B]
[B][B]But you can't present evidence for this claim. Because it does not exist.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Five decades of research, cited in the 2008 documentary The End of America, confirm that torture does not work. Robert Fisk provides another summary of that categorical conclusion. And this 2011 account from Human Rights First rebuts the very premise of Zero Dark Thirty.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Your actors complain about detainees' representation by lawyers suggesting that these do-gooders in suits endanger the rest of us. I have been to see your "detainee program" firsthand. The prisoners, whom your film describes as being "lawyered up", meet with those lawyers in rooms that are wired for sound; yet, those lawyers can't tell the world what happened to their clients because the descriptions of the very torture these men endured are classified.[/B][/B]
[B][B]I have seen the room where the military tribunal takes the "testimony" from people swept up in a program that gave $5,000 bounties to desperately poor Afghanis to incentivize their turning-in innocent neighbors. The chairs have shackles to the floor, and are placed in twos, so that one prisoner can be threatened to make him falsely condemn the second.[/B][/B]
[B][B]I have seen the expensive video system in the courtroom where though Guantánamo spokesmen have told the world's press since its opening that witnesses' accounts are brought in "whenever reasonable" themonitor on the system has never been turned on once: a monitor that could actually let someone in Pakistan testify to say, "hey, that is the wrong guy". (By the way, you left out the scene where the CIA dude sodomizes the wrong guy: Khaled el-Masri, "the German citizen unfortunate enough to have a similar name to a militant named Khaled al-Masri.")[/B][/B]
[B][B]In a time of darkness in America, you are being feted by Hollywood, and hailed by major media. But to me, the path your career has now taken reminds of no one so much as that other female film pioneer who became, eventually, an apologist for evil: Leni Riefenstahl. Riefenstahl's 1935 Triumph of the Will, which glorified Nazi military power, was a massive hit in Germany. Riefenstahl was the first female film director to be hailed worldwide.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Leni Riefenstahl directing her crew at the Nazi part rally in Nuremberg, 1934, for her film Triumph of the Will. Photograph: Friedrich Rohrmann/EPAIt may seem extreme to make comparison with this other great, but profoundly compromised film-maker, but there are real echoes. When Riefenstahl began to glamorize the National Socialists, in the early 1930s, the Nazis' worst atrocities had not yet begun; yet abusive detention camps had already been opened to house political dissidents beyond the rule of law the equivalent of today's Guantánamo, Bagram base, and other unnameable CIA "black sites". And Riefenstahl was lionised by the German elites and acclaimed for her propaganda on behalf of Hitler's regime.
But the world changed. The ugliness of what she did could not, over time, be hidden. Americans, too, will wake up and see through Zero Dark Thirty's apologia for the regime's standard lies that this brutality is somehow necessary. When that happens, the same community that now applauds you will recoil.
Like Riefenstahl, you are a great artist. But now you will be remembered forever as torture's handmaiden.
[/B][/B]

[Magda Hassan]

And here is a refutation of Wolf's critique and a defense of Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty.

It takes a certain audacity to exploit the memory of the holocaust while at the same time disregarding those both lost and surviving 9/11 in the way that Naomi Wolf did in her January 4 Guardian column, just to slap Kathryn Bigelow for her frank depiction of torture in Zero Dark Thirty.When Wolf locates Bigelow alongside Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl on the wrong side of history, she may or may not be intentionally evoking memory of Susan Sontag's famous 1974 essay, "Fascinating Fascism", which critiques Riefenstahl and her film Triumph of the Will -- the cinematic masterpiece released to the world in 1935 as a paean to Hitler and his National Socialists and led to the catastrophic events we know too well.

But Wolf is no Sontag in her powers of moral reflection, otherwise she would realize that Bigelow has made torture and other Abu Ghraib humiliations properly tangible for the millions who, prior to her film, held no more than some shadowy image of a detainee swallowing water upon hearing the word 'waterboarding.' In place of inadequate and ineffectual words, Bigelow has burned the imagery of torture into our brains.
This is a good thing. We require such imagery to make moral decisions about torture. The result of Wolf's thoughtlessness is that she has made herself seem all-to-eager to win sympathy for her views by reaching for flaming rhetoric and analogies that, despite their grossly disproportionate comparisons, incense readers to abandon all reason long enough to inflict damage on the undeserving. In another era we would call that lighting the fires of a witch burning. But because so many witches were women who were victims of both ideological and sexual tyranny, we feminists shy away from the analogy. We shouldn't in this case. For just as so many of the witches persecuted in history were innocent of the charges leveled against them, so is Kathryn Bigelow.
The comparison to Leni Riefenstahl's films is heinous and manipulative. Riefenstahl's aesthetic formalism -- the use of low angle shots to elevate the stature of Hitler; the sweeping pans of the assembled Nazi troops saluting their fuehrer -- so awed viewers, and so formidably shaped public opinion, as to delude an entire nation into entrusting their lives and power to a psychopath. Can such an obscene and absurd analogy realistically be thrust on Bigelow for having done no more than allowing each of us to see and decide for ourselves what the U.S. did during the early years of the War on Terror? In contrast to Riefenstahl's orchestrated exaltation inspiring Germans to imagine the glories of a master race, Bigelow existentially films the degradations that scar humankind. Most strategic of all, Bigelow has provided the space for the public dissent against torture now filling the media, the public consciousness, and the halls of Washington in a way that Wolf, and even the formidable Sontag, never could. I ask Ms. Wolf, where is the manipulation here? I saw none in Zero Dark Thirty, but I see plenty of it in your rhetoric.
Above all, Wolf has disrespected the memory of the 9/11 dead and their survivors by offering us, in place of deep reflection, distortions of Bigelow's film that trigger knee-jerk reactions by summoning to mind the iconography of genocide and ineptly grafting it onto a present to which it bares little resemblance -- except ironically to the terrorists and their brand of fascism. In short, Wolf is comparing the death and terror inflicted on tens of millions with the torture that was inflicted on hundreds known or suspected to be plotting untold numbers of deaths by terror. This is not the scale of a fair moral mindedness that Wolf aspires to. It is grandstanding on graves.
I ask all readers to consider that while Riefenstahl hid the terror behind the artifice of aesthetic beauty and a false rationalism, Bigelow displays the terror front and center for us all to see and judge for ourselves. And the attempt to make the two filmmakers seem the same is no more than an exploitative and rhetorical ploy meant to further enflame opponents of the film while reprising for Ms. Wolf some semblance of the esteem that once was legitimately hers.
It might help us to better understand Zero Dark Thirty if we also know that Bigelow was trained as a semiotician -- someone who studies the signs and codes that pictures and films convey about the social codes -- fraternal, sexual, familial, professional, religious, political -- that inform us unconsciously, and determine how we should or shouldn't behave in a given social enclave. What this all means is that Bigelow has a heightened sense of the messages we humans both send to one another and receive unconsciously, about what is and isn't sanctioned by the social environment we enter -- in life and in the art and entertainment representing it.
In her films, the more subtle messages that Bigelow sends to the viewer operate beneath the radar of the story we are engaged with on the screen. What is often called by writers as the subtext of the film. The problem is, that subtext, especially in commercial Hollywood films, for reasons of the film having to connect with a broad audience, is often so discreet, it is received and interpreted by different people in vastly different ways. Hence I receive from Bigelow the intent to reveal to the public the torture covertly legitimized by the CIA and the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld chain of command, while Wolf reads the same scenes as an apology for torture.
The important thing to keep in mind about Wolf's rash comparison of Bigelow with Riefenstahl is that Bigelow shows us the codes operating within the enclaves of power. Riefenstahl hid the codes of power beneath a veneer of artifice meant to dazzle the viewer.
SPOILER ALERT: At the end of my screening, I didn't feel dazzled. I didn't see anyone emerging from the theater appearing dazzled. Despite my admiration for Zero Dark Thirty, I personally felt emptied of emotion at its end. So it seems did the audience around me. No doubt one of the reasons is that we mirrored the sentiments of agent Maya (Jessica Chastain) at the end of the film as she flies from Afghanistan back to the U.S. The reading of emotional emptiness in such a scene tells us that the culmination of ten years of Osama bin Laden's pursuit has yielded no joyous gratification -- whether it was for Maya -- and for us cathartically living through her experience -- a mission of revenge or of justice.
How could Bigelow have filmed such an ending if she were an apologist for torture?

To read more by G. Roger Denson about Zero Dark Thirty, the director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, the social and political responsibility of artists, and the controversy over why so few outside the U.S. government bore witness to the remains of Osama bin Laden, see his post, Zero Dark Thirty: Why the Film's Makers Should Be Defended and What Deeper bin Laden Controversy Has Been Stirred.
To read public statements made by the Bush and Obama administrations, CIA and Congressional officials between 2008-2011, see his post, "Zero Dark Thirty Account of Torture Verified by Media Record of Legislators and CIA Officials."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/g-roger-de...16487.html

[Jan Klimkowski]

The pompously named G. Roger Denson, postmodern deconstructionist and occasional Derridean disciple, aka wanker, defends Bigelow as a "semiotician" and opines (interestingly using the dynamics of NLP):

The important thing to keep in mind about Wolf's rash comparison of Bigelow with Riefenstahl is that Bigelow shows us the codes operating within the enclaves of power. Riefenstahl hid the codes of power beneath a veneer of artifice meant to dazzle the viewer.

Rubbish.

Riefenstahl's films are all about the Codes of Power.

Or they about nothing.

The Triumph of the Will is about the cinematic capture and communication of the idea of The Collective Will Triumphing Under The Dear Leader.

Riefenstahl chipped away at the celluloid and revealed the archetypal form of Fascism, because she was an artist.

She could equally have chipped away and revealed the archetypal form of Communism, because she was amoral.

[Magda Hassan]

:pointlaugh::pointlaugh::pointlaugh: Couldn't have said it better myself!

The pompously named G. Roger Denson, postmodern deconstructionist and occasional Derridean disciple, aka wanker.....

And I think Wolf's critique stands up perfectly well. In fact I think she is far to generous of Bigelow's previous work 'The Hurt Locker' which I think is also fascist pap.

[Magda Hassan]

Empire examines the symbiotic relationship between the movie industry and the military-industrial complex.

War is hell, but for Hollywood it provides the perfect dramatic setting against which courageous heroes win the hearts and minds of the public. The Pentagon recognises the power of these celluloid dreams and encourages Hollywood to create heroic myths; to rewrite history and provide willing young patriots for its wars. In return, Hollywood receives access to billions of dollars worth of military kit, from helicopters to aircraft carriers. So is it a case of art imitating life, or a sinister force using art to influence life and death and the public perception of both?

Guests:
Oliver Stone: eight times Academy Award-winning filmmaker
Michael Moore: Academy Award-winning filmmaker
Christopher Hedges: author and the former Middle East bureau chief of the New York Times

Interviewees:
Phil Strub: US Department of Defense Film Liaison Unit
Julian Barnes: Pentagon correspondent, LA Times
David Robb: author of Operation Hollywood
Prof Klaus Dodds: the author of Screening Terror;
Matthew Alford: the author of Reel Power
Prof Melani McAlister: the author of Culture, Media, and US Interests in the Middle East

[Peter Lemkin]

Riefenstahl was certainly a master filmmaker and myth-maker extraordinaire; but she was no fool, and IMHO knew exactly who and what she was serving with her famous film. She apparently was not coerced to make the film, but did so quite willingly. and with great effort - and one must admit, effect. She put her artistic genius to work for evil. and that must have been as clear at the time, as it is today. Great filmmaker stylistically, yes. On the right side of morality and history, no. Whether or not she was a 'Nazi', she furthered their cause dramatically. She couldn't have made such a film had she not been rather enamored of the events of Nazism happening around her. I'd judge her a fascist with its top-down rule philosophy [among other things such as militarism, regimentation, deference to an absolute ruler, etc.]. Her film clearly celebrated to the nth degree the top-down as good, and the bottom-up [democracy] as something to be avoided, if not crushed under hobnail boots.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Empire examines the symbiotic relationship between the movie industry and the military-industrial complex.



Guests:
Oliver Stone: eight times Academy Award-winning filmmaker
Michael Moore: Academy Award-winning filmmaker
Christopher Hedges: author and the former Middle East bureau chief of the New York Times

Magda - thanks for posting that documentary.

It's well worth an hour of one's life.

The denial of access to military hardware (eg Full Metal Jacket, Platoon) is well known, but there are lots of very good examples of how the military-industrial-intelligence-complex has even ensured that scripts are changed, post shoot, in the cutting room.

Charlie Wilson's War (suppression of link between anti-Soviet mujahadeen and Al Qaeda), De Palma's Redaction (destroyed and reviled by O'Reilly/Fox etc), Rendition (message totally blurred into Benthamite hypothetical garbage), Windtalkers (the military order to execute Navajos if "the Code" was compromised was removed from the final version).

Moore, Stone and Hedges give some famous films a good and deserved kicking: eg Top Gun (a Pentagon wet dream), Black Hawk Down (disgusting) and Hurt Locker (war porn).

Operation Hollywood is Operation Mockingbird on steroids.

However, having acknowledged all that, this is not the central point I'm making in this thread.

My point is that the loyalties of a Leni Riefensthal or one of the Scott brothers are not to historical truth. Their loyalty is to cinematic storytelling.

Ridley Scott can choose to film the banal racist gorefest script of Black Hawk Down and the profoundly insightful tale of Bladerunner, with a master's filmic eye. And see no contradiction.

Which is why he is the perfect director for O'Reilly's anti-truth.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Why has such a film been made now?

A good question.

Zero Dark Thirty: Hollywood's gift to American power

Many have pointed out that Kathryn Bigelow's film endorses torture. But why has such a film been made now?


Slavoj Žižek
The Guardian, Friday 25 January 2013 16.00 GMT
Jump to comments (169)

Kathryn Bigelow Zero Dark Thirty film set
Kathryn Biglow (right) directing Zero Dark Thirty. 'The most obscene defence of the film is the claim that Bigelow rejects cheap moralism and soberly presents the reality of the anti-terrorist struggle.'

Here is how, in a letter to the LA Times, Kathryn Bigelow justified Zero Dark Thirty's depicting of the torture methods used by government agents to catch and kill Osama bin Laden:

Zero Dark Thirty
Production year: 2012
Country: USA
Cert (UK): 15
Runtime: 157 mins
Directors: Kathryn Bigelow
Cast: Chris Pratt, Edgar Ramirez, James Gandolfini, Jason Clarke, Jennifer Ehle, Jessica Chastain, Joel Edgerton, Kyle Chandler, Mark Strong
More on this film

"Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time."

Really? One doesn't need to be a moralist, or naive about the urgencies of fighting terrorist attacks, to think that torturing a human being is in itself something so profoundly shattering that to depict it neutrally ie to neutralise this shattering dimension is already a kind of endorsement.

Imagine a documentary that depicted the Holocaust in a cool, disinterested way as a big industrial-logistic operation, focusing on the technical problems involved (transport, disposal of the bodies, preventing panic among the prisoners to be gassed). Such a film would either embody a deeply immoral fascination with its topic, or it would count on the obscene neutrality of its style to engender dismay and horror in spectators. Where is Bigelow here?

Without a shadow of a doubt, she is on the side of the normalisation of torture. When Maya, the film's heroine, first witnesses waterboarding, she is a little shocked, but she quickly learns the ropes; later in the film she coldly blackmails a high-level Arab prisoner with, "If you don't talk to us, we will deliver you to Israel". Her fanatical pursuit of Bin Laden helps to neutralise ordinary moral qualms. Much more ominous is her partner, a young, bearded CIA agent who masters perfectly the art of passing glibly from torture to friendliness once the victim is broken (lighting his cigarette and sharing jokes). There is something deeply disturbing in how, later, he changes from a torturer in jeans to a well-dressed Washington bureaucrat. This is normalisation at its purest and most efficient there is a little unease, more about the hurt sensitivity than about ethics, but the job has to be done. This awareness of the torturer's hurt sensitivity as the (main) human cost of torture ensures that the film is not cheap rightwing propaganda: the psychological complexity is depicted so that liberals can enjoy the film without feeling guilty. This is why Zero Dark Thirty is much worse than 24, where at least Jack Bauer breaks down at the series finale.

The debate about whether waterboarding is torture or not should be dropped as an obvious nonsense: why, if not by causing pain and fear of death, does waterboarding make hardened terrorist-suspects talk? The replacement of the word "torture" with "enhanced interrogation technique" is an extension of politically correct logic: brutal violence practised by the state is made publicly acceptable when language is changed.

The most obscene defence of the film is the claim that Bigelow rejects cheap moralism and soberly presents the reality of the anti-terrorist struggle, raising difficult questions and thus compelling us to think (plus, some critics add, she "deconstructs" feminine cliches Maya displays no sentimentality, she is tough and dedicated to her task like men). But with torture, one should not "think". A parallel with rape imposes itself here: what if a film were to show a brutal rape in the same neutral way, claiming that one should avoid cheap moralism and start to think about rape in all its complexity? Our guts tell us that there is something terribly wrong here; I would like to live in a society where rape is simply considered unacceptable, so that anyone who argues for it appears an eccentric idiot, not in a society where one has to argue against it. The same goes for torture: a sign of ethical progress is the fact that torture is "dogmatically" rejected as repulsive, without any need for argument.

So what about the "realist" argument: torture has always existed, so is it not better to at least talk publicly about it? This, exactly, is the problem. If torture was always going on, why are those in power now telling us openly about it? There is only one answer: to normalise it, to lower our ethical standards.

Torture saves lives? Maybe, but for sure it loses souls and its most obscene justification is to claim that a true hero is ready to forsake his or her soul to save the lives of his or her countrymen. The normalisation of torture in Zero Dark Thirty is a sign of the moral vacuum we are gradually approaching. If there is any doubt about this, try to imagine a major Hollywood film depicting torture in a similar way 20 years ago. It is unthinkable.