Susan Sontag uses the artistry of film director and later photographer Leni Riefenstahl as an example to analyze the idea of fascist art. Sontag finds that many works of art from the fascist era try to impart a certain idea of beauty that is itself a propagandistic and ideological political statement. Sontag offers an extensive description of fascist art, but in some ways her generalizations can be applied to nearly all works in some fashion and so raises the issue of whether she has actually identified a different style or done so in a way that is sufficiently differentiating.
Sontag begins by referring to Leni Riefenstahl's book of photographs, The Last of the Nuba. Sontag finds a number of outright lies in what Riefenstahl claims about her life and her work on the cover and traces these lies to show how Riefenstahl has fabricated a certain image of herself and her role in shaping the Nazi era. Riefenstahl shapes a mythology for herself much as she used myth in shaping an image of Germany in her major work, Triumph of the Will, in which Sontag finds many elements of the fascist style.
Triumph of the Will helps answer the question of how Hitler came to power and how he managed to mobilize the German people in his terrible design. The power of his voice and his speaking style is apparent even when one does not understand the language, and the way Riefenstahl shapes this documentary footage also shows how mythology was mixed with politics to generate and feed the fears of the people about their place in the world and the supposed enemies who would prevent them from rising to their true and rightful position as leaders in the world. Mythological images have great power to evoke action in people, and the masses at Nuremberg were ready to be told that their destiny was greater than the world had believed and that they could rise to the occasion. This only partially explains how so many could have become accomplices in the h...