Leni Riefenstahl bathes in the "blue" light of the moon in her early film The Blue Light (1932).
Kirsten Dunst bathes in the blue light of a passing planet called "Melancholia" in Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011).
Albert Speer I liked. He wasn’t also maybe one of God’s best children, but he had some talent that it was possible for him to use during…. OK, I’m a Nazi.
Trier made this remark in an interview for Melancholia, in the context of a rambling and provocative discussion about Trier's heritage and his interest in Nazi aesthetics. Reactions to the comment led to him being declared a "persona non-grata" at the Cannes festival.
The context and tone of the remark has been picked over for a few years, and it's evident that the reaction was over the top, excessively cautious, at the expense not just of free speech but of artistic dialogue. The media still demands that some things be kept separate, and has little taste for black humour; Cannes buckled in fear of claims of anti-semitism, primarily, but also because of Trier's willingness to talk about Nazi aesthetics and the Israel-Palestine conflict in the same sentence. There are parts of history you're not supposed to talk about at the same time, and never in art.
The comments themselves are lighthearted, obviously intended as part of a comedy routine ramble in which Trier plays the media presentation of him as an auteur with a radical vision and the will-to-offend against a persona, in this case, of a bumbling-but-self-aware bigot. The lighthearted tone treads the boundaries of acceptability in the same way that his films do, but it also obscures the seriousness of Trier's engagement with Nazi aesthetics in Melancholia. The film is peppered, most significantly, with frequent references to early work by Leni Riefenstahl, director of the most famous Nazi propaganda film The Triumph of the Will, and in particular to The Blue Light (above).
The Blue Light follows Riefenstahl as Junta, a woman captivated by a mysterious light that draws anyone else who sees it to their deaths. Declared a witch by a suspicious town for her ability to survive in the face of the blue light while their children don't, the woman (played by Riefenstahl) disappears up the mountain in search of the light. By citing the film,Trier is consciously engaging with what Sontag calls, in her essay on Riefenstahl, the aesthetics of "fascinating fascism". Though The Blue Light comes from 1932, before the Nazi's came to power, in her essay Susan Sontag takes the mountain narrative of Riefenstahl's film to be "proto-nazi", "a visually irresistible metaphor of unlimited aspiration toward the high mystic goal, both beautiful and terrifying, which was later to become concrete in Führerworship".
Trier's citation of Riefenstahl, alongside his use of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde to underscore the film's prologue, makes very clear that Trier's engagement with the question of whether an aesthetics of beauty can avoid being fascist is anything but flippant in the way his comments seem. The film demands, right from its start, that the legacy of the Nazi's and their relationship to aesthetics must be interrogated. The mark Riefenstahl left on the history of film cannot be effaced, even if we wanted to efface it. Trier's work is in irreverently confronting a history in the present, the past in the same breath as the future; he illuminates, with the blue light of melancholy, the black and white.
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