Дзига Вертов и Лени Рифеншталь: репрезентация реальности в тоталитарную эпоху

Abstract

The article examines the aesthetics of Soviet documentary films and German non-fiction and experimental films. It appeared in the wide artistic context of the avant-garde of the 1920s and was radically reworked in the 1930s. The subject of the article is the concept of the documentary in a totalitarian culture and its purpose is to show the transformation of reality in the film art of the 1930s. The article analyses the stylistic and theoretical features of Dziga Vertov’s and Leni Riefenstahl’s documentaries. The novelty of the article lies in the author’s appeal to understudied films that embody the totalitarian aesthetics of the era of Stalinism and German Nazism. The author poses a question about the existence of obvious similarities and differences between Russian and German films, which is highly relevant in the light of ongoing scientific discussions about the influence of totalitarian regimes on creative processes. The author of the article comes to the conclusion that, despite the figurative and semantic similarity of individual episodes of the films by Vertov and Riefenstahl, and their common political pathos and interest in capturing images of leaders and their meetings with people on the screen, the directors had different attitudes towards the representation of political and social reality. In Three Songs about Lenin, Lullaby and Three Heroines, Vertov turns to folklore and epic genres, and creates an intertextual cinematic world that includes a wide range of meanings and topics that do not fit into the official Soviet canons. In Triumph of the Will and Olympia, Riefenstahl aestheticizes politics and depicts on the screen the official myth about the state and its citizen, which was inspired by the heroics of antiquity and Wagner’s operas adopted by the official ideology of fascism. Riefenstahl shot a fact with the aim of aestheticizing it, while Vertov gave it a new figurative meaning on the editing table. It is natural that the soviet director’s aesthetics could not coincide with the era: Vertov’s works did not appear on the screen, and he himself was forgotten. Riefenstahl, on the contrary, became the main cinematographer of Hitler’s Germany.