Leni Riefenstahl resurrects every time a big artist anywhere aligns with regimes of systematic, large-scale brutality.
She was the filmmaker who defined the fascist aesthetics Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. Her definition was modern, grand, Brutalist. Filming the 1937 Olympics, the athletes were sculpture, their bodies, granite: divinities without personalities. The sports arenas were monumental curves in black and white.
Since post WW2, Riefenstahl became the artist to study whenever a row arises around art and its possible alliances with murderous governments. It’s a fevered debate every time.
Can Riefenstahl’s genius — of this, no doubt — be separated from her person as Hitler’s awe-inspiring aesthetics maker? Observe, please, that it is no less than a full aesthetics that she provided Hitler, not merely single, excellent films.
She also shared Hitler’s Nazi vision of über grandness. In her work, fascism and aesthetics fused. (Reminds us that fascism always appropriates aesthetics-creation.)
Riefenstahl was dissected and anatomized since her most powerful days. She was heralded and excused. Her work was rationalized as much as it was vilified. And, 70 years later, very few could withhold awe for her work. She lived to be a hundred and in her later years, photographed the African Nuba people, in her lens transformed into monuments. Neither the topic nor her age mitigated criticism against her.
The American critic Susan Sontag famously recanted an early positive view of the filmmaker, to say that her talents are impossible to separate from the politics she served.
ARTIST OF THE TOKHANG REIGN
A furore recently erupted around the singer-songwriter, Joey Ayala, who threw in his lot with Rodrigo Duterte, the only Philippine President to foreground violent, out-in-the-open death as instrument of state. Duterte differs from all other Philippine presidents, including the extraordinarily corrupt ones, in his brutal rhetoric matching actual, enacted savagery.
Ayala asserted belief in upending an unequal social order via Duterte-esque barbarism. No one disagrees with him about inequity in the Philippines, the despoilation of the environment, and the corruption of political process — the themes of Ayala’s songs.
The artist, like Duterte born and raised in the southern Philippine city of Davao — a city with a frontier ethos in a Mindanao that was only exploited in the 20th century — gets it that this president’s gangland style is regarded as authentic and effective. Some Filipinos get it that Ayala’s faith is vested in a Davao subculture that accepts violence for a supposedly greater end.
But for Ayala’s confreres in the activist-artist worlds, his continuing support of Duterte, past this man’s rendering to the International Criminal Court at The Hague, and the enduring wail of victim families transformed into legal strategies against human rights abuse, Ayala is a traitor.
Mainstream Filipino artists who behave apolitically are also appalled, however confusing their moral compass is.
The center of gravity, at present, is antipathy for Ayala. This is this column’s sentiments as well.
THE ARTIST AND FRANCOIST SPAIN
Salvador Dali, a Spanish Marquess, admired and allied himself with the fascist Francisco Franco, styled as the Generalissimo of Spain, and officially called caudillo. The Surrealist was also fascinated by Hitler (a figure cited by Duterte on a number of occasions) and had an enduring attraction to fascism.
Recent studies have analyzed this pull on him of fascism. One author proposes “that he critiqued Hitler both before and during WW2, but at the same time had sympathies with fascist ideologies.” So: it’s complicated.
But to the regular anti-despot, it is simple enough.
Dali in a lecture in 1951 declared: “Before Franco,… every politician and every new government only increased the confusion, the lies and disorder of Spain. Franco broke violently with this false tradition, imposing clarity, truth and order in the country at a time when the world was experiencing its period of greatest anarchy.”
This is a fascist screed. The strong man at the top performs as epitome of truth and order during turmoil. The violence is thus rationalized. Duterte of the Philippines certainly acted out this role and Ayala thinks this is authenticity.
In Dali’s Spain, Franco was supported by both Hitler and Italy’s Mussolini as he created a one-party political firmament and presided over forced labor and concentration camps. Some 350,000 deaths during the Spanish “White Terror” are attributed to Franco.
THE ARTIST AND RECKONING
This is not to suggest elevating Ayala to the ranks of Dali and Riefenstahl. Neither to the stratospheric heights of their skills nor of that other skill: using ambiguity to make their relationships to murderous regimes hard to read. Ayala is an easy read.
Comparison is needless, because there’s hardly any point in ranking talent in the darkness of holocausts of various sorts. But even superficially, nothing’s gained from relativizing either horror or collusion. For example, Ayala cannot even be compared to the Trump-loving trio Jon Voight, Mel Gibson, and Sylvestre Stallone — whom the American dictator anointed his “Special Ambassadors” to Hollywood — in that these men live lives as symbols of machismo. Oozing masculinity is a necessary aspect of fascism, not quite the sword Ayala falls on.
Rather, it is the big reveal — the peeling off of masks — that proves useful to the ethicist and critic, to his peers and followers.
Ayala seemed to have had a different set of beliefs and performance style from before his embrace of Duterte. He was the activist singer, bard of environmentalism and indigenous people’s rights, defender of human rights. He made himself out to be an icon of democratic values.
His reveal of a self lurking beneath the well-performed idealist, who would have always been an apologist for tyranny — is outrageous only to those who sainted him.
To the skeptic, it does not seem that Ayala pivoted from one ideological footing to another. The truer self under the camouflage was and is certainly now detectible in his persona as troubadour; his recreation of the enchanting Pied Piper; his career moves to be artist damn-the-politics; his Davao-centricity glossing over the scent of corpses.
And now, the nearly 30,000 deaths in the wake of the Duterte presidency are Ayala’s to answer for, as much as the actual perpetrators. For him, there’s no art to retreat into.
Marian Pastor Roces is an independent curator and critic of institutions. Her body of work addresses the intersection of culture and politics.
