“Book Descriptions: “Fascinating Fascism” is the title of Susan Sontag’s celebrated NYRB article on Leni Riefenstahl’s "The Last of the Nuba," a photographic chronicle of the “aloof, godlike Nuba” of southern Sudan. The laudatory reception of this work, Sontag argues, functions as the cap to the snowballing rehabilitation of Riefenstahl in the eyes of the world; a rehabilitation which includes her reintegration into post-war society as a filmmaker summarily “concerned with beauty." Implicitly, therefore, this redemption assumes her to have been wholly unconcerned with the lamentable propagandistic “tangents” to her earlier and greatest works: the Nazi films, Triumph of the Will and Olympia. It is rather strongly implied by Sontag that this insidious cleansing of Riefenstahl’s reputation is symptomatic of the immense and bizarre appeal of fascist ideas; it is only by virtue of our own fascination with fascism, not as an object of study, but as an ideology with visceral mass appeal, that someone as irremediably entwined with its catastrophic past should find herself so startlingly and “convincingly” rehabilitated.
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