Week 3 Blog Posts - Khalil Siddeeq

This week's readings provided a useful historical context and background for the release of Triumph of the Will which we screened last Tuesday. Watching the movie brought about complex feelings thinking about what came afterward, especially seeing the tens of thousands of cheering and adoring fans of the Nazi party and Hitler in particular. But the readings make it clear there is more to the story than simply what was deliberately curated in the film to evoke certain reactions in 1934. More specifically, the mood in Germany at and following the time is not entirely representative of the feelings the film seeks to evoke. I found particular kinship with the ways in which work was lauded by the Nazi regime in 30s and 40s. There are ways in which the Nazi party sought to cultivate a level of equity and equality among German working class citizens (so long as they weren't Jews) but never to the extent of actually smoothening out the real economic differences that made up their class society. Workers could be interviewed in a positive light and given certain opportunities of leisure and encouraged to save their money for a Volkswagon, but there was little expectation of any real fundamental change in the class structure. It's a form of propaganda which drew up memories for me of the COVID 19 pandemic. It was a time when the 'essential worker' was lauded and called a hero. The people who continued to do the crucial jobs without which society couldn't function, the grocery store workers, sanitation officers, and other blue collar jobs. Those people were given plenty of praise but ultimately their performance in the pandemic has led to little shifts in real life regarding the runaway income inequality which pervades the United States today.

The article on Leni Riefenstahl poses some interesting questions about both the definition of propaganda and the level of responsibility an artist commissioned to do a job has for the results of how their art is utilized and what it is used to justify. It's an especially difficult question thinking about the almost paradoxical ways in which art (using the general definition of the term) today is so ubiquitous yet artists themselves are so undervalued. Taking a job propping up propoganda for a regime that one was at most ambivalent toward wasn't an uncommon way of making a living back then, and indeed today such situations are practically the definition of the mantra that "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism". But that Riefenstahl might have in some way been a true believer in the tenets of the Nazi party oddly seem to confer a deeper status of propaganda to her film. That because it was by many indications true to her, its status as a film meant to induce a certain kind of thinking becomes stronger.