Invasion of the
body snatchers

The case against Leni Riefenstahl

In 1972, meanwhile, an American anthropologist, James Faris, published Nuba Personal Art, a dense structural analysis of the body painting of the south-eastern Nuba around the three villages of Kao (or Kau), Nyaro and Fungor, based on fieldwork he had done between 1966 and 1969 while a lecturer at the University of Khartoum. In 1976, a few years after Faris published his monograph, Riefenstahl returned with a second and still more ravishing collection of photographs. This was called The People of Kau. It was the fruit of a four-month return field trip she had undertaken in 1975 to the same area that Faris had worked in.

As the rival visions of the two authors converged, the American edition of The Last of the Nuba came under critical attack by Susan Sontag in the New York Review of Books. In Sontag’s essay Riefenstahl’s book was paired, somewhat tendentiously, with a book by another author called Nazi Regalia. Sontag described Riefenstahl’s vision of the Nuba as the extension of a “fascist aesthetic” of physical perfection, of cultural purity and the triumph of the strong over the weak. Riefenstahl was also criticised in similar terms by Faris in an article published by the Sudanese government sponsored magazine, Sudanow, entitled “Polluted Vision.” That was in May 1980.

The latest incursion by curious westerners into the life and art of the Nuba is a television film, The Nuba–the first in the current BBC “Worlds Apart” ethnographic series—where James Faris has the role of anthropological consultant. It is couched, like Susan Sontag’s review and Faris’ earlier article, as an attack on Riefenstahl. The commentary proclaims that her pictures of the Nuba presented a caricature of their lives:

In her work for Hitler she extolled the triumph of the strong over the weak and the physical perfection thought by the Nazis to belong to a master race. Much later in life she imposed a similar vision on the south-eastern Nuba… She emphasised the blood, the savagery and the triumph of the strong over the weak… the emphasis on physical perfection was part of her romantic distortion of what the Nuba really are.

The commentary raises a number of important questions. First, are these issues of representation the true ground of conflict between Faris and Riefenstahl? Is there, as the commentary suggests, a life-or-death difference between totalitarian appropriation of the primitive—ie Riefenstahl’s work—and pure anthropological knowledge of “what the Nuba really are”? Or might the dispute involve other, familiar elements: an argument between a learned but possessive ethnographer, on the one hand, and, on the other, a vulgar romantic primitivist who has appropriated his subject?

In which case, can the new film itself be exempted from charges of moral inconsistency, attacking, as it does, Riefenstahl’s presentation of body-painting and wrestling, while itself dwelling at length on these selfsame practices? And finally, might it be thought that these questions of interpretation become irrelevant when set beside the radical and irreversible transformations in Nuba society that are also documented in this film, absorbing and beautifully shot as it is?

In the film Riefenstahl is accused of accelerating the destruction of the old Nuba way of life by attracting European tourists to their villages in search of the thrill of the primitive. The tourists, we are told, have distorted the economy by paying youths and girls in pose for their cameras, thereby drawing the situation to the attention of the Sudanese government. The government has responded by closing the area to foreigners and stepping up its programme of Islamisation.

What particularly upsets the Sudanese government authorities, it seems, as it formerly upset Christian missionaries, is that some Nuba still sometimes go naked. (For tourists who get this far, we can assume, this is part of the attraction.) The Nuba documents the difficulties the filmmakers had negotiating with the government—and with the Nuba themselves—for permission to film. After some negotiation, they report that they

…managed to convince the authorities that our wish was to counter the stereotype, to show that Nuba body art and dancing are not relics of some state of nature lost to the rest of the world, but part of a complex tradition in which Nuba ideas about themselves are expressed.

But the Nuba wrestlers, it turns out, insist on payment for the privilege of revealing their complex tradition. And the filmmakers discover that they have a highly organised procedure for extracting the maximum amount. Responsibility for this monetization of indigenous cultural practices, the film-makers argue, is also Riefenstahl’s. Before her visit, it is claimed, “when the anthropologist whose work forms the basis of this film carried out his research, the Nuba had been extremely helpful even when he was taking pictures”.

In the film, a Nuba elder says of Riefenstahl, “she only wanted naked people…she wanted blood from the fight…she had no understanding…she just brought lots of beads and money.”

Riefenstahl, for her part, has written of the difficulty she had persuading Nuba to be photographed, compared to the subjects of her previous books: “I had never met such camera-shy people.” She says she gave the Nuba beads, mirrors and polaroids, but does not mention money.

Are beads a bad thing? Is money a bad thing? One has to wonder, at this point, if the filmmakers gave the elder they spoke with anything in return for the interview in which he relays the low- down on Riefenstahl, and whether it should be considered good or bad if they did. (Presumably the filmmakers themselves don’t work for nothing.)

There are further charges against Riefenstahl made in the film. The catalogue of crimes ranges from promotion of the “fascist aesthetic” to charges, in effect, of corrupting minors. She is described repeatedly as having perpetrated what the film-makers term a “caricature” of Nuba society. Categorised initially in the early stages of the commentary as a “one-time Nazi propagandist,” she is subsequently referred to as “Nazi propagandist”, tout court.

The face of youth, the words of age

Riefenstahl’s record as a film-maker under the Nazis is not something anyone can feel comfortable defending. Her reputation is complicated by the fact that the films she made were so extraordinarily and ground-breakingly good (in Susan Sontag’s words, “they may be the greatest documentaries ever made”). But it is another thing to automatically extend the critique of her wartime documentaries to all her subsequent work. The carping tone of the commentary of the Nuba film is disconcerting for this reason.

In his own book, Nuba Personal Art, James Faris describes the difficulties he faced in Sudan, obtaining film and permission to take photographs. “I was not able to get photographs of the majority of designs I witnessed,” he writes. Given his concern with documenting Nuba art before it disappears, it might be thought that he would welcome at least the photographs in Riefenstahl’s book, if not her interpretations of them.

But no. “Her subjects are seen only as models,” he writes in his article,

objects appearing voyeuristically at the end of a telephoto lens—which in any case technically distorts the context, rendering it out of focus—or strenuously high-lighted with the use of flat flash at obscenely close distances.

Riefenstahl’s book, he says, in its pursuit of beauty, focuses only on youths and girls. “There are no elders to be seen,” he writes, “and no productive activity at all.”

And yet, in Faris’s own book, out of eighty pictures, there is just one of an elder and none at all of “productive activity.” This, it may reasonably be countered, is because it is a book about body decoration, which is not practised by elders. But then so is Riefenstahl’s. The core of The People of Kau is a sequence of thirty straightforward portraits of facial decoration. The artistry in these pictures is not Riefenstahl’s, it is the Nuba’s. In both cases, creating a record of their truly astonishing artistic achievements before they are swept away provides the only justification for introducing the perturbations that Nuba societies have experienced at the hands of photographers, camera crews and tourists.

Faris’s attitude to the art he so admirably and carefully documents in Nuba Personal Art and in the film is odd. He is rightly concerned, in a way that Riefenstahl is not, with the effect his work will have inside Sudan, but his conclusion is this:

I should emphasise that I feel it is probably not in the national interest of new socialist states that art traditions such as those described in this book survive.

This chilling statement, apart from its unexamined acceptance of the Sudanese government’s description of itself as “socialist”, puts Faris’ antipathy to Riefenstahl in a different perspective. Although the account of Riefenstahl’s work in the film does not amount to a radical misrepresentation, there is a significant and misleading bias. It is not really true, as Faris’s article and the film both assert, that in her account of the Nuba wrestling matches Riefenstahl “emphasizes…. the triumph of the strong over the weak.” On the contrary, she writes, “the Nuba are never brutal when fighting” (this is itself a subtle romanticisation, but of a different kind). True, she does not emphasise an interesting feature of wrestling matches that Faris stresses: the unimportance attached to winning. But she does direct her readers to Faris’s book, Nuba Personal Art, which she quotes at length.

Study of Nuba Personal Art, moreover, reveals that strength and purity are not ideals alien to the Nuba. “The chief reason for the personal art,” Faris writes, “rests on the proper cultural exposure and celebration of the healthy body.” So it seems not inappropriate that a visual record should dwell, as Riefenstahi’s book and Faris’s both do, on youth. This is the face the Nuba themselves wish to  present to the world. Youthful vanity is sanctioned in such cultures: young men and girls are for looking at; elders are for listening to.

Nuba wrestler, 1927 Photo by Hugo A. Bernatzik

By contrast, in the film, the filmmakers dwell on the young men’s idle words and mock those of the elders, The latter, we are told, (my italics)

are considered the custodians of the detailed knowledge thought necessary for making decisions and for organising ceremonial and sporting events. It is this supposed knowledge and understanding which entitles them to their position of authority.

In the film, interviews with elders and senior women are intercut to suggest that men are lazy, and that they are self-serving in their account of their own society. No doubt women among the Nuba do more of the physical work and less of the philosophizing, as they do in a good many African societies. There is nevertheless something impertinent in the sardonic way the film imports the concerns of western sexual politics into the consideration of a culture that is otherwise strikingly egalitarian. It is an impertinence in keeping, perhaps, with the views of an anthropologist who suggests that the destruction of their traditions should be supported in the interests of the state.  

Hypocrites voyeurs!

The Nuba is not a bland film, and this is to its credit. But it seems to be confused as to whether it is on the side of change or not. It criticises the power relations of Nuba society, yet condemns Riefenstahl for opening up the economy to tourists—tourists whose gifts are surely a means to free young men from the gerontocracy. The prompt organisation of these young men into cooperative bodies serving to regularise payments from their western visitors is something that one might expect to be applauded by self-identified political “progressives”. Yet we are told, on the contrary, that these youths are allowing the Nuba art of body painting to degenerate. (Is such decay to be applauded, perhaps, because it serves the national interest of a socialist state?)

The restless tone of the commentary of the film can, I think, be attributed to a deeper unease, one that most people feel when contemplating images of endangered societies such as the south-eastern Nuba. We feel guilt at the pleasure we take in their beauty and their sensuality. One reason for this is because we know that it is, to a significant extent, the forces unleashed on the world by our own civilisation that are destroying such cultures, even as we celebrate them.

This is not a perception that can be kept at bay by discerning a “fascist aesthetic” in the work of others, or uncovering hidden inequalities in the society itself, There is something morally questionable in the very enterprise of salvage anthropology and ethnographic film-making—this invasion of the body-snatchers that the Nuba have suffered. And yet we would not be without the images they generate. And nor, perhaps, will the descendants of present-day Nuba regret it. They will, for better or worse, be different people, living in a very different world. In this case, “Hypocrite voyeur!” is an accusation that we must all plead guilty to. ★