Commentary

China Watch

Forum Digests

Columnists

Letters

Shame on ways of the West

By Op Rana (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-04-11 07:36

Strange are the ways of the West. Artists and writers do not become famous for their creations alone. Many other factors - politics, for instance - play a significant role in determining their fate. But no politics can justify the way Leni Riefenstahl is being hoisted into the documentary filmmakers' hall of fame.

That the Nazi activist was a good filmmaker was never in doubt. There was never any doubt either about the innovative and creative superiority of many of her contemporaries and later generation directors. That is precisely what makes the West's tinted view of such artists a real tragedy.

Unfortunately, despite their versatility and pioneering contributions to the performing arts, Dziga Vertov is still the eccentric Russian with a camera and Joris Ivens is still the communist filmmaker. Unfortunately still, Sergei Eisenstein is just the creator of Battleship Potemkin and Robert Flaherty only the director of Nanook of the North. Almost unknown to the general public are Bert Haanstra (who gave us Glass) and Emile de Antonio, who made the Point of Order (on the McCarthy files) and The Year of the Pig (on the origins of the Vietnam War).

Good films, books and music are immortal. But only proper flow of information, occasional if not continuous, can ensure they are not forgotten. And this is exactly where the Western media have failed. The 70th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) passed without Western news agencies running any in-depth stories. The civil war was a watershed in international relations, bringing together an unprecedented number of writers, poets, artists, filmmakers, theater personalities and other individuals who fought for (or actively helped) the Republicans against dictator Francisco Franco.

It is the war in which the wildly gifted 29-year-old Christopher Caudwell was killed, only to be recognized as a genius after his Illusion and Reality, Studies in Dying Culture and Further Studies in Dying Culture were published posthumously. It is the war that saw the brilliant Ralph Fox - author of Novel and the People and Marxism and Modern Thought - fall to fascists' bullets. It is the war during which Franco's Nationalists left poet Miguel Hernandez to die. It is the war in which the great Federico Garcia Lorca became a victim of circumstances. And it is the war that aroused Pablo Picasso to create the Guernica and Joan Miro to paint Help Spain.

There were many others like Ramon Goya, Henry Moore and Rene Magritte, Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon, W.H. Auden, Antonio Machado and Langston Hughes, and Arthur Koestler, Andre Malraux, George Orwell and John Steinbeck (who praised Robert Capa's photographs for showing the "horror of a whole people in the face of a child"). And there was Paul Robeson.

The civil war drew Ivens to create the timeless The Spanish Earth (with narration from Ernest Hemingway, whose For the Whom Bell Tolls is again all about the war). And it made the irresistible Bertolt Brecht pen the sensitive Senora Carrar's Rifles.

The civil war is important because Hitler and Mussolini used it as a testing ground to launch their dirty assault on mankind. It is important because most of Europe adopted a non-interventionist policy toward Franco. It is important because just two years before Riefenstahl had made Triumph of Will, which some people today shamelessly say is a classic.

Till a few years ago, American essayist and critic Susan Sontag's view on Riefenstahl as the handmaiden of Nazism was the last word. Sontag called the Triumph the "most propagandistic film ever made, whose very conception negates the possibility of the filmmaker having an aesthetic or visual conception independent of propaganda". It is this propaganda, and the fear it generated, which drove Frank Capra (though uncredited) to make the seven-documentary-film series, Why We Fight, urging the United States to join the Allies in World War II. The first and the sixth in the series incidentally are on the Chinese people's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression.

But is the West bothered about all these great artists? No. Instead it is trying to put Riefenstahl on a pedestal much higher than what it has accorded to any of them. And that is a dangerous game against mankind.

E-mail: oprana@hotmail.com

(China Daily 04/11/2008 page8)