dissertacao part 5

When Riefenstahl wrote to Rodger asking him about the location of the Nuba tribe (and even offering a thousand dollars for an introduction with the wrestler), he wrote back, “knowing your background and mine I don’t really think we have much to communicate”. Riefenstahl is the author of Hitler’s documentary Triumph of the Will about Nuremberg’s 1934 rally. This film is generally recognized as a major contribution to the history of cinematography, it innovated the way of making documentaries and is an immense aesthetic accomplishment. Riefenstahl transformed an annual political rally into a larger historical and symbolic event.
The gap between Rodger and Riefenstahl’s background is not as big as the photographer claims to be. As seen before, Rodger was disturbed by the fact that when he was shooting pictures of the horrors of Bergen-Belsen he thought only about the aesthetic and composition of the image. He wanted to accomplish a beautiful image from that scene. Riefenstahl’s film is disturbing in that same aspect: “it presents as beautiful a vision of Hitler and the new Germany that is morally repugnant” (Deveraux 1992: 236). Mary Deveraux on her essay Beauty and the evil: the case of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will argues that Riefenstahl defended her film saying that her concerns in Triumph of the Will – as in all her movies – “were aesthetics, not political: that it was the cult of beauty and not the cult of the Führer, that Riefenstahl worshiped”.
Ironically, when Rodger’s pictures of the Nubas became well known, it brought those isolated tribes to the attention of the Sudanese government. The Islamic state of that government forced the Nubas into changing their life-style – making illegal their wrestling contests and forcing them to wear clothes. So when Riefenstahl pursued the Nuba’s myth created by Rodger, “progress and education” had finally reached them. But she was so fascinated and obsessed by Rodger’s photographs that she paid them to undress and to stage illegal fighting contests. Her pictures in that sense are a simulacrum of a myth.
If Rodger’s photographs are an identity construct of a post-colonial imagery, Riefenstahl’s are the staging of this identity. The interesting nature of this concept is that the end results of both photo-essays are very similar – both aesthetically and conceptually. Maybe because in the end every photograph is a type of simulacrum in the Platonian sense where the light is brought before the lens leaving a trace of the reality. Every photograph is a representation, making both photographers, Rodger and Riefenstahl, mythologists; they signified their representations from a social mask creating meaning and a sense of cultural identity to the Nubas. That is why this identity comes loaded with colonial imagery, because it was invented from a white European perspective. It could be argued that in that sense both photographers staged their pictures.




Left: Riefenstahl, Leni (1962), Kordofan, Southern Sudan, The only door in a Mekasin house-compound which reaches all the way to the ground is the main entrance. The wide top allows women with bulky loads to pass through easily.
Right: Rodger, George (1949), Kordofan, Southern Sudan, The keyhole entrance to a Nuba house in the Korongo Jebels. Doorways are shaped to allow admittance to people carrying loads of firewood of their heads