Fascism on the screen.

BACK IN THE MID-1970s when Leni Riefenstahl was reinventing herself as a "documentary photographer", that very public New York intellectual Susan Sontag wrote an article titled "Fascinating Fascism". Among other things she attacked the evasions in Riefenstahl's self-descriptions in her two photographic books, The Last of the Nuba and The People of Kau. Riefenstahl, Sontag insisted, had been a willing collaborator in Nazi film-making, and what is more her work, including the photographic books, was fascist art; beautiful and compelling, but fascist.

For many of us discovering Riefenstahl's life and work at the time, Sontag's article seemed to have gone too far. Triumph of the Will, Riefenstahl's record of the Nazi party rally of 1934, is only appalling in retrospect when you know the result of all that goose-stepping and ritual. (This can be bad enough. I've known participants who felt compelled to leave my discussion screenings of the film.) Nevertheless Triumph of the Will mainly shows Hitler emphasising national unity. He threatens no one. Moreover the film was surprisingly free of anti-Semitism. The loathsome Julius Streicher makes a one-sentence plea for racial purity and that is it. In fact Hitler gave a long anti-Semitic speech at the rally but this was either not filmed or ended up on the cutting-room floor. Certainly Triumph of the Will embodies a fascist aesthetic, but that was created by the architect Albert Speer, who designed the stadium with some contributions from Hitler himself, as well as Riefenstahl.

Still Sontag was right when she described the film as propaganda. A careful analysis of the sequence showing Hitler's first meeting with the SS after the Night of the Long Knives shows Riefenstahl transforming a difficult situation into a triumph. Among the assembled stormtroopers were comrades of the men killed by Hitler to placate the army. According to CBS correspondent William L. Shirer, it was a tense moment. Hitler was obviously nervous and the SS were lined up in front of the podium. This was in itself unusual. A photograph from the 1933 rally shows the brown shirts all around the area where Hitler was speaking.

Most of these undertones were covered up by Riefenstahl. The shots of Hitler that appear in the film--mainly mid-shots--minimise the nervousness observed by Shirer. You can see it but you have to look. A viewer has to examine the sequence even more carefully to find visuals of the SS drawn up in front of the Fuhrer. They are only seen in one of the overheads.

But is Olympia, Riefenstahl's two-part film of the 1936 Olympics, fascist too? Certainly it is a celebration of power and strength, with male athletes often treated as sexual objects. Just look at the diving sequence in Part Two. Still the film includes the best footage ever taken of the American runner Jesse Owens. In the German commentary he is referred to as "the black Jesse Owens". But Owens was one of the most handsome and graceful men at the games and Riefenstahl's cameras celebrate his elegant virility, not to mention his extraordinary sporting triumphs.

Anyway what exactly did Sontag mean by fascist art? "Fascist aesthetics", she argues:

   flow from (and justify) a preoccupation with situations of control,
   submissive behaviour, extravagant effort, and the endurance of
   pain, they endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and
   servitude. The relations of domination take the form of
   characteristic pageantry, the massing of groups of people, the
   turning of people into things ... and the grouping of people and
   things on an all-powerful hypnotic leader figure or force.

Obviously this is a very useful description; and it is true of much of Riefenstahl's work--but not all. Sontag herself worried about linking the two very beautiful photographic books The Nuba and The World of Kau with fascism. And indeed there are some extraordinarily effective individual portraits that should have given her pause. Nevertheless years later evidence surfaced that Sontag was right about the wrestling in The Nuba. The stills are images of power and conflict, all rippling muscles. Riefenstahl's film of the same or similar events shows the encounters as playful and light-hearted.

Coral Garden, however, the fruits of the underwater diving Riefenstahl began when she was seventy-one and continued well into her nineties, is a celebration of the natural beauty of the underwater world. Teifland, her last completed film, is anything but fascist or authoritarian. It's a story of rebellion against tyrants. The film also provided a way of distancing the director from Nazi film-making. The shooting was prolonged interminably with the final sequences only completed after the end of the war. Apparently Riefenstahl witnessed an atrocity in Poland, tried to protest but got nowhere and in her own way opted out. This I emphasise is my own interpretation. But why else would a director of her experience sit on a crane directing the movement of prop trees in her studio forest fractionally to the left or right for days on end if she did not want to prolong the shoot?

THESE REFLECTIONS on one of the great controversies of the 1970s were prompted by the release of 300, a work that conforms to all of Sontag's criteria for fascist art. 300 is aimed at young audiences and is emphatically mainstream; and for these reasons very dangerous. It is directed and co-scripted by Zack Snyder with Kurt Johnstad, but the real auteurs are Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, creators of the graphic novel--comic to you and me.

300, the graphic novel, first appeared as issues one to five of the Dark Horse comic series. These drawings virtually spring off the page, with contorted figures in dark silhouette and densely composed action pictures rendered by colourist Lynn Varley into a rich amber. The story is of the 300 Spartans who held the pass of Thermopylae in northern Greece--the so-called hot gates--against the onrush of an immense Persian army. Historically they were on the verge of victory when a traitor revealed a back way to the Spartan position, enabling the Persians to surround and annihilate the defenders.

The tale, one of the great feats of arms of the ancient world, was first filmed in 1962 with a stalwart Richard Egan as Leonidas the Spartan king, and Sir Ralph Richardson as Themistocles the Athenian leader. Somewhat creaky in parts--"Let us see how insolence meets death" thunders David Farrar's villainous Xerxes the Persian king--300 Spartans gets the 480BC politics about right, and the importance of Themistocles' naval victory is clearly indicated. The film was shot on location around Thermopylae with a believable treatment of the Greek and Persian tactics and in the best sense works like a documentary.

300 is quite another matter. Costumes are wildly unhistorical. The Spartans' gleaming muscles and leather jock straps might have delighted Leni Riefenstahl but have nothing to do with the armour and red tunics worn by the real warriors (red so no one could see Spartan blood). Indeed Miller's portrayal seems to have been inspired by Jean Louis David's 1814 painting Leonidas at Thermopylae, only on the canvas just about everyone is completely nude.

The Asian hordes--Persians--are masses of monstrous undefined figures, sometimes digitally painted, fit only to be hacked to pieces by our Spartan heroes. The film was shot over sixty days in two small Montreal studios; the rest is digital painting and special effects. These took nearly another year to complete. As in the graphic novel there is a noirish use of shadows counterpointed by amber tints. (This amber hue in the film and comic may also come from the David painting.) The narrative is simplified from the original, which uses a series of tales related around various campfires to fill out the back-story. 300 the film, we discover, is an extended flashback related by David Wenham's Dilios as the Greek avenging army advances on the Persians. Dialogue is virtually the same as that contained in the balloons of the graphic novel. The compositions while using the same motifs as the Comic book are simpler, with figures staying in the foreground.

What makes 300 profoundly sinister is not that it portrays the ruthlessly militaristic Spartan society with its worship of violence and unkempt beards (all of which were something of a joke amongst the more civilised Athenians, at least when they didn't need the Spartans as allies); it is that the violence is celebrated. "No prisoners! No mercy!" yell the Spartans in the movie, and this is supposed to be admired. Even these supposed heroes are dehumanised, shown as a mass of shields and spears, the characters unrecognisable. 300's Leonidas (Gerard Butler) proclaims they are fighting for liberty and freedom; but what kind of liberty do we see in the film? The boy Leonidas is turned into a thug hardened by regular floggings, then sent out into the wilderness to die or return as king.

As ruler Leonidas murders a messenger from the Persian king, portrayed unhistorically as a black. This may have been based on an anecdote recorded by Plutarch when the Athenian leader Themistocles had an interpreter for the Persians condemned to death for misusing the Greek language. True or not, the story is hardly to the credit of either Themistocles or Leonidas. In reality the Spartans did believe they were fighting for liberty, but it was liberty for "the Polis"--the city.

Leonidas is as egomaniacal as Hitler, his followers embracing an equally brutal servitude. There is even a touch of Hitler in the bunker, when Leonidas realises that his men are doomed and yells, "Spartans, ready your breakfast and eat hearty for tonight we dine in hell!" A particularly nauseating addition is the way Miller has made the traitor a hunchback Spartan whose parents could not bear to follow the city's brutal custom of allowing him to die when he was found to be deformed.

Critics have dismissed 300 as just a film of a comic strip, but the movie is compelling drama and quite well acted, with Gerard Butler making a powerful Leonidas, Lena Headey a tautly understated Spartan Queen and Rodrigo Santoro an evilly androgenous Xerxes--historical nonsense of course but still effective.

Does any of this apply to America's current sabre-rattling against Iran? The graphic novel dates back to 1998-99, when it was extraordinarily popular. A will to violence in some hidden recesses of the American psyche perhaps. However, Sydney Morning Herald film critic Paul Byrnes has unearthed statements by Frank Miller that indicate he does see the Persians in his comic as some kind of equivalent to the "Muslim hordes" he believes now threaten America. So if it turns out that 300 is George Bush's favourite film as Patton was Richard Nixon's, be very afraid.

So what should be done about 300? Here I believe context is everything. Triumph of the Will was one kind of film when it was shown to German audiences in the 1930s, quite another in a university lecture room with every historical nuance analysed and discussed at the end of the screening. 300 ought to be compared with the great epics of the past that treated similar themes, such as Spartacus and Fall of the Roman Empire. These of course include so-called fascist visuals but they are observed objectively and are never endorsed.

There are also problems with the new digital technology, whether the actors are filmed against blue or green screens. Spartacus and Fall were shot in various forms of wide screen with great depth of field which allowed for a visual richness which is as yet beyond computer generated images. This technology allowed writers and directors to create complex drama with no real villains, just characters. Recently Ronald F. Maxwell achieved much the same in his Civil War epics Gettysburg and Gods and Generals including, it must be admitted, some digitally created Civil War towns in the long shots.

Ultimately the best antidote to 300 is 300 Spartans, not as good as the aforementioned works but an eminently civilised film that gives us in Richard Egan's Leonidas and Sir Ralph Richardson's Themistocles leaders capable of outmanoeuvring the Persian enemy without turning into psychopaths. Above all 300 Spartans celebrates heroism and honour without ever degenerating into sadism or the pornography of violence.