SOURCE: Schulte-Sasse, Linda. “Leni Riefenstahl's Feature Films and the Question of a Fascist Aesthetic.” Cultural Critique, no. 19 (spring 1991): 123-48.

In the following essay, Schulte-Sasse examines Riefenstahl's mountain films—Blue Light and Tiefland—in terms of the notion of a “fascist aesthetic.”

In labeling a text “Nazi” or “fascist,” critics often restrict their criteria (to the extent these are articulated at all) to content-based motifs such as the valorization of a Führer or leader figure, the exaltation of nature, the glorification of the military and of death, or the negative portrayal of “racial” (especially Jewish) groups. Although these motifs clearly pervade National Socialist culture, one can question whether, on the one hand, they are present in all of Nazi culture, and whether, on the other hand, they are unique to that culture. Already in the thirties and forties Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin offered analyses of Nazi culture...