"The uniformed body crystallizes all these associations we have. It makes your chest look broader, your posture straighter, your shoulders stronger. It becomes shorthand for words like manly, strong, brave, dominant."

Said Paul Achter, "an associate professor of rhetoric at the University of Richmond, who has written on 'military chic,'" quoted in "Why Trump Loves a Man in Uniform/As thousands of soldiers prepare to march in President Trump’s military parade, what exactly will we see?" (NYT).

The article is by Vanessa Friedman, who writes that, in a military parade, "the uniformed body is part of a mass — denatured and subsumed into a whole — and particularly when the parade in question does not signify the end of an actual conflict." "Instead of honoring the sacrifice of individuals... it becomes a moment of sheer pageantry dedicated to the glory of the state or the head of state...."

Quoting Achter again: "It’s difficult to see this and not see Leni Riefenstahl" (that is, Hitler, as presented in "Triumph of the Will").

When it comes to expression about the military, is there some reason to prefer the rhetoric of "sacrifice" over that of "glory"? A parade is a form of expression. It's visual speech, visual propaganda. Can you tell whether the theme is sacrifice or glory? Is it inherent in the nature of a military parade that it will say: glory?

"Not sure if this was intentional...."

I split screened shots from Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of Will, with @realDonaldTrump’s video of his return from the hospital. Not sure if this was intentional, but it's eerily similar. His media team looking to history for inspiration, perhaps? pic.twitter.com/ZsZfHLttdL

— matt danzico (@mattdanzico) October 6, 2020

This made me look up old posts on this blog with the "Leni Riefenstahl" tag. I found "Is Michael Moore like Leni Riefenstahl?" from 2004 (the first year of this blog). Somebody else had compared Moore to Riefenstahl, and I said:

There are many huge differences between Moore and Leni Riefenstahl, though. Quite aside from the fact that she was working in support of Hitler and Moore is working against Bush (and Bush is no Hitler, despite some noise to the contrary), Riefenstahl would have snorted at the lack of artistry in Moore's work. She was all about beautiful and precise visual imagery. "Triumph of the Will" does not pound at you with voiceover assertions, it aims to lure you and seduce you with sequences of images. Moore's type of propaganda is far, far easier to resist, because it is immediately and constantly apparent that he is propagandizing. That is a lot fairer to the viewer: your resistance is instantly activated. You can decide what you want to think. What Riefenstahl did was incomparable.

And, from November 28, 2016, "As a filmmaker, Mr. Bannon, 63, has cited both the Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl and the left-wing documentarian Michael Moore as models." The post title is a quote from a NYT article. I wrote:

Why is Leni Riefenstahl is called a "propagandist" and Michael Moore is a "documentarian." The same word — whichever you choose — applies to both. Riefenstahl was unquestionably a great film artist, far more interested in film as art than Moore. See the excellent, nonpropagandistic documentary about her, "The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl." Moore is an out-and-proud propagandist. What's wrong with that if your cause is good? Riefenstahl presents the problem of what's wrong with art if your cause is bad.

So... there you see what should be my answer to the tweet. To serve your own good ends, you can use aesthetic devices that have been used by others to accomplish evil. To give another example, Socialist Realism is a great style for poster art, even though it was created and used by the Soviet Union. 

"All 214 Artists in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Ranked From Best to Worst."

By the rock critic (not the musician) Bill Wyman.

It's an amusing read if you're not the sort of person who gets steamed because your opinions are not shared. I mean, he puts Queen second to last, beating only Bon Jovi, but he states his reasons.

"If I can take just one book, to the proverbial desert island? Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman. I would spend the rest of my life memorizing it."

"Then I would walk around the island chanting Song of Myself forever. Not a bad way to live out your days on a desert island."

From "25 Famous Women on Their Favorite Books" (in NY Magazine). I've selected the quote from Elizabeth Gilbert.

Also interesting: The book Tina Fey picks is "Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir."

I was going to say I actually don't know who Elizabeth Gilbert is. Imagining that perhaps she's one of these writers of the short stories that I always skip over when I read The New Yorker, I was going to say I actually don't know who Elizabeth Gilbert is in a kind of modest, self-effacing way. But then I looked her up and saw that she's the author of "Eat, Pray, Love," a book I'm proud that I wouldn't even consider reading. And now I'm proud that I didn't recognize her name, but I'm ashamed that I got sucked in by her quote. Song of Myself, indeed. Bleh. The very thing I liked, I now hate.

"As a filmmaker, Mr. Bannon, 63, has cited both the Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl and the left-wing documentarian Michael Moore as models."

"In top physical shape as a young Navy officer, and for years wearing the banker’s uniform of expensive suits, Mr. Bannon has in recent years sported flannel shirts and cargo pants. With a paunch and a sometimes scraggly beard, Mr. Bannon has a rugged look that Stephen Colbert described as 'Robert Redford dredged from a river.'"

My favorite paragraph from the NYT article "Combative, Populist Steve Bannon Found His Man in Donald Trump." It's a long article, worth reading. I'll just say 2 things:

1. Why is Leni Riefenstahl is called a "propagandist" and Michael Moore is a "documentarian." The same word — whichever you choose — applies to both. Riefenstahl was unquestionably a great film artist, far more interested in film as art than Moore. See the excellent, nonpropagandistic documentary about her, "The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl." Moore is an out-and-proud propagandist. What's wrong with that if your cause is good? Riefenstahl presents the problem of what's wrong with art if your cause is bad.

2. I'm fascinated by how Bannon, who is about my age, looked in 1974, which is like Robert Redford dredged from a river in 1974:



ADDED: I made a new tag for Leni Riefenstahl, then searched the archive to add it to old posts. I see that back in 2004 I wrote "Is Michael Moore like Leni Riefenstahl?" Someone had compared Moore to Riefenstahl, and I was reacting to that. I said:

There are many huge differences between Moore and Leni Riefenstahl.... Quite aside from the fact that she was working in support of Hitler and Moore is working against Bush (and Bush is no Hitler, despite some noise to the contrary), Riefenstahl would have snorted at the lack of artistry in Moore's work. She was all about beautiful and precise visual imagery. "Triumph of the Will" does not pound at you with voiceover assertions, it aims to lure you and seduce you with sequences of images. Moore's type of propaganda is far, far easier to resist, because it is immediately and constantly apparent that he is propagandizing. That is a lot fairer to the viewer: your resistance is instantly activated. You can decide what you want to think. What Riefenstahl did was incomparable.

"God Bless America and the Anthem? And the fly-by? Could you militarize this event just a tad more?"

"And what in the name of the FSM was the point of giving us both Sam Elliott and Michael Douglas for the pregame Heroic Voiceover Brigade? And, Michael Douglas, how exactly do we link JFK's inaugural, MLK's Dream speech, the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima, Ali's KO of Liston in Lewiston, and this football game? A journey? More like a trip, actually. The pregame show was what Leni Riefenstahl would have done had she emigrated here as a child and gone to work for Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Price."

So wrote Charles P. Pierce about the Super Bowl intro, and I almost didn't post that because I had to check the Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Price reference  — is it "Mad Men"? yeah, sorry, I still don't want to watch it — not to mention the FSM reference — eh. It flicked my bloggable toggle switch and then came very close to toggling back. But I'm quoting it, really because I agree that they overdid it. Leni would have been much more insidiously subtle. But that's a good thing, right? You can defend against the ridiculously overdone. We can feel patriotic and festive in a mixed up clutter of history and pop culture, and then it's on to the football game.

The Pierce quote is embedded in this James Wolcott blog post. Wolcott is crankier than Pierce:

I had the pre-game on mute and every time I glanced up I wondered if we had declared war on Iraq or a hologram of Ronald Reagan was going to materialize on stage, raising a ruddy hand in blessing as Peggy Noonan ascended into heaven. The Super Bowl is bombastic enough without being a fanfare for World War III or IV, but who's counting? Or is it that the country requires this much self-affirmation now to reassure itself that it's still proud and virile? Maybe Stanley Fish can figure this out for us.

No link on the Stanley Fish reference, which is not something I can untangle with a Google search. I know who Stanley Fish is. I'm even in the middle of reading his new book, "How to Write a Sentence." (Check it out: I just wrote a sentence!) I'll assume Wolcott means to say something like: All those words and images require interpretation and Fish is the interpretation-meister.

But let's try to answer Wolcott's question: Does the country require this much self-affirmation now to reassure itself that it's still proud and virile?

I anticipate, instead of real answers, your snarky reframings of the question, asking whether Wolcott needs to reassure himself that he's still proud and virile. Indeed, I got the impression that his paragraph paralleled Pierce's, that he was envious of Pierce's writing prowess and trying to outmatch it. Ending with that limp Fish, he failed, which probably explains the flailing about "the county" and its imagined self-esteem problem. It's so problematic, raising the flag.

"Mrs. Ann, do you have (or could you produce) a list of 'DVD's you deem essential?'"

C Black sees a phrase I used and makes a request. I'm here to answer your questions, so, based on a quick scan of the shelf and probably leaving a few things out, here's my list (in alphabetical order) of 40 DVDs I'd try to get you to watch if you lived with me:

32 Short Films About Glenn Gould
American Movie
Aguirre the Wrath of God
Clockwork Orange
Coffee and Cigarettes
Crumb
Divorce Italian Style
Don't Look Back
Dr. Strangelove
Election
Fast, Cheap & Out of Control
Fight Club
Grave of the Fireflies
Grey Gardens
Grizzy Man
Heathers
It's a Gift
Lolita
Memento
Modern Times
My Dinner With Andre
Nights of Cabiria
Pecker
Psycho
Pulp Fiction
Room with a View
Rosemary's Baby
Royal Tenenbaums
Salesman
Serial Mom
Slacker
Spirited Away
Streetcar Named Desire
Stroszek
The Blood of a Poet
The Shining
The War Room
The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl
Wisconsin Death Trip
Wuthering Heights

Now, you may wonder which of these movies Meade had already seen and which ones have I succeeded in getting him to watch. You may wonder which ones, once watched, produced a negative reaction and about which ones did we see eye to eye. I'll leave that for Meade to say in the comments if he wants. The rest of you are welcome to guess, to produce your own lists, or to opine about mine.

Liberals ideate furiously over the black-and-white McCain website.

John McCain has an aesthetically pleasing website, which is distinguished by the very low color level. Instead of the usual florid blue and red, it uses elegant, crisp black, white, and gray. Perhaps that calls to mind some beautifully photographed black and white movie. Bring on the liberal commentators, and what movie do they think of? Of course, it's "Triumph of the Will," which, admittedly, is a film known for its crisp black and white photography (to go along with its Nazi propaganda).

Here's Atrios:

Imperial Stormtrooper Chic

And here's Ezra Klein:

But to get the full flavor of the terrifyingly martial undercurrent, watch the video "stand up," which is currently the default clip on the front page. It looks like an over-the-top parody of fascist campaign propaganda from a movie, and sounds like Triumph of the Will. It's also worth noting that in an effort to shore up his conservative credentials in a particularly pandering and ghoulish way, the next video is simply called "Reagan Tribute," and the weird shoehorning of McCain's time as a POW into his admiration for Reagan really has to be seen to be believed. I don't know how many cults of personality one web site can foster, but props to the McCain team for trying to find out.

What bugs me the most about their reaction is not the usual conservatives-are-Nazis business, it's the thoughtless tainting of the aesthetic of black-and-white design, this eagerness to score political points, with no feeling for art.

Klein does have a point about the film clip. The music is over-the-top. Visually, I think the film -- Errol Morris? -- and the website are excellent, but the music is off-putting. It announces the intent to manipulate you emotionally. That makes it a less effective effort at manipulation, though. I don't think Leni Riefenstahl would have done something so crude.

ADDED: I've amused Kevin Drum.

Robert Hughes and R. Crumb talk about Andy Warhol and Albert Speer.

Robert Hughes and R. Crumb, together at last. Hughes is the art critic who praises Crumb in the movie "Crumb." After a public appearance, at which it's established that both men hate Andy Warhol, the two go out to dinner and talk about Albert Speer:

After the discussion, Mr. Crumb quickly ducked out of the library, avoiding a throng of fans, and later joined Mr. Hughes for dinner, where they took a while to warm up to each other, but by the end were in a spirited discussion about Hitler's architect, Albert Speer, whom Mr. Hughes interviewed in the late 1970's.

Mr. Hughes told about an exchange in which Speer said that architecture was certainly one way to unite a people, but that if the Nazis had had television, there would have been no stopping them.

Mr. Crumb, finishing his plate of baked chicken, beamed. "Oh, that's great," he said. "It's true."

Is it? It seems to me television makes everything small. Grandiosity miniaturized and contained in a box, viewed across the tops of your toes, is not awesome but ridiculous. There you are, in your house, not merged in a massive throng, but on a sofa alone or with your intimates. If we were starting with a free country -- and not state-controlled TV -- I think instant mockery would doom a televised propaganda effort of the sort Speer wielded with architecture.

By the way, I recommend the documentary "The Architecture of Doom," which you should watch in a double feature with "The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl."

Hey, did you notice that Hughes and Crumb ducked out of the assembly and ate chicken; they didn't chicken out of the assembly and eat duck. Why do I bother to think and write such things? Maybe because I was raised on television and still like nothing more than idly flipping the channels looking for stray amusements. Am I wasting my life on trivia? A bit. But I'm also utterly immune to the charms of fascist dictators. Even the politicians I like enough to vote for, I still laugh at and think of as funny little men. That's another way of saying that on TV, Jon Stewart would outmatch Speer.

Is Michael Moore like Leni Riefenstahl?

The BBC reports on the reaction to "Fahrenheit 9/11" in Poland:

Gazeta Wyborcza reviewer Jacek Szczerba called the film a "foul pamphlet".

He said it was too biased to be called a documentary and was similar to work by Nazi propaganda director Leni Riefenstahl.

But politicians opposed to the country's involvement in the US-led occupation of Iraq have urged people to see the film.

"In criticising Moore, I have to admit that he has certain abilities - Leni Riefenstahl had them too," Mr Szczerba said in his review.

"Michael Moore will not convince Poles with his film," the Rzeczpospolita newspaper said in its review.

"People are very sensitive to aggressive propaganda, especially when it pretends to be an objective documentary or a work of art."

It is heartening to see that exposure to propaganda breeds resistance to it.

There are many huge differences between Moore and Leni Riefenstahl, though. Quite aside from the fact that she was working in support of Hitler and Moore is working against Bush (and Bush is no Hitler, despite some noise to the contrary), Riefenstahl would have snorted at the lack of artistry in Moore's work. She was all about beautiful and precise visual imagery. "Triumph of the Will" does not pound at you with voiceover assertions, it aims to lure you and seduce you with sequences of images. Moore's type of propaganda is far, far easier to resist, because it is immediately and constantly apparent that he is propagandizing. That is a lot fairer to the viewer: your resistance is instantly activated. You can decide what you want to think. What Riefenstahl did was incomparable.

I highly recommend the documentary "The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl" to anyone who is interested in the manipulation of political opinion and anyone who is interested in the intersection of art and politics. There is also an excellent Criterion Collection DVD of "Triumph of the Will" with historian commentary, which one ought to find difficult to bring oneself to buy but is genuinely important to watch. This film is always talked about loosely, as in the Polish reviews cited above, but, as in those reviews, people don't seem to have seen it or don't remember what they saw.