Art and terrible things

eni Riefenstahl resur- | rects every time a big artist anywhere aligns with regimes of systematic, largescale brutality.

- GEOLOGICS MARIAN PASTOR ROCES

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 aweinspiring 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 iiber 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.