A Trial By Cinema

The concept of “Being” as a manifestation of “presence” in Western ideologies positions “writing” only at the second (representational) role, a sort of technology for duplication of a speech’s truth. This speech supposes a simultaneous presence of the speaker and the object raised so that it becomes a perfect medium for an emergence of truth (Hardiman, 2015: 293). However, the subject’s presence in speech becomes a control over interpretation of the truth brought forward. Desires to find “the true meaning” of a text is inextricable from the speaker “subject” in the text. It is no wonder that the centuries of grand narrations are periods thickly laden with the presence of “speakers” to discipline and stabilize meanings. Writing no longer becomes something autonomous since it is an extension of the speaker, with the control to ensure a singular meaning.

The centuries of grand ideologies are eras always loomed by the speakers’ presence. The readings over them are always overshadowed by the control over meanings, and the certainty of it makes reading a method to be repeated to gain the same, stable package of meanings. This certainty colors the way of viewing a singular reality, and even shapes mythes around meanings; like the inevitability of the prophecy about capitalism’s fall that never comes true and the promises of global economic prosperity. The experience of meanings of the speaker is a vertical relation since the speaker is actually no longer obvious in the writing. Sophistication and complication of political power and “aesthetic” technology in the narration of ideology are now reduced by people’s horizontal socialization in varied social media that also produce, distribute, and spread information in shaping the world’s image—mediascape. The reading of grand narrations is no longer an act of deriving a principle from a past major concept, but a look at a network of signs emerging around the concept. A reading based on Derrida becomes a kind of history without the past because it is impossible. A reading over history, probably, is no longer a method of find “true meanings”. In Derrida, a reading is not a method but an event, thus not something to be repeated like an automatic operation.

Facism constitutes one of the most vertical relations of the symbolic experience in reading grand narrations. Sophistication of such political power is based on what Walter Benjamin calls “political aesthetization”; in such sophistication politics turns to a production of beauty based on a certain aesthetics. The most conspicuous of such “political aestheticization” is the idealization of “body” in the Nazi ideology, which can be seen from Leni Riefenstahl’s work, Olympia (1938). The “body” idealization in the film is how physically the body is viewed as the derivation of a most “metaphysical” idea; this standardization targets something as a “perfect” fact, precision, image of “rationality”, etc. From those “body” political practices by Riefenstahl, the most traumatic thing is not about the politics of “anti-Jew” but first of all it is also about the body political propaganda by the Nazi to eradicate “invalid” humans. Nazism, as projected in the Triumph of the Will (Riefenstahl, 1934), creates a universe of urban space like a stretch of “beauty formation” through Hitler(ian) iconoclasm identical to Germany, and vice versa. This “beauty formation” has shaped an imperative for the people, outside humanity itself.

In Deleuzian terminology, the period before the World War II is a moving-image century with motion that controls time and is able to form a human psychological automata. We know the cinema before that era as mechanical motions in montage law, shaping time through motions. Cinema in the moving-image era positions art as an automatic movement, which at the same time is a mass automatization as shown by both propagandastic cinema products and Hollywood ones in reaching out to the public social psyche. Also, in the contention for influence with Hollywood, Nazi thought it was necessary to use cinema as a media that can construct images into people’s mental architecture all over the world.

In Deleuzian view, Hans-Jurgen Syberberg considers that the final product of moving-image is in Leni Riefenstahl (Deleuze, 1989: 264), since Hitler himself was actually also shaped by the laws of movine-image that guide the mass. Hitler: A Film from Germany (Hitler, ein Film Aus Deutschland) by Hans-Jurgen Syberberg (1977) is a work based on the trial on Hitler in cinematic ways. Here Hitler’s nomenclature is not Hitler as an individual category but Hitler in his relation to the people. Susan Sontag says that this film is more appropriately called “Hitler as a film” or Syberberg’s Hitler (Sontag, 1980: 139). The Fuehrer that we know is virtually constructed images just like political “aestheticization”, through fantasies and idioms surrounding him.

In this work, Syberberg also uses Richard Wagner’s repertoire in his Gesamtkuntswerk. As an approach of art that completes all other arts’ elements, Gesamtkuntswerk is different from total art or even totalitarian art. “The Gesamtkunstwerk seeks to realise as many of the aspects of reality as can be contained in the form of the work by uniting all art forms and all artistic effects” (Munch, 2010: 24). It was just like Hitler who “shaped” Nazi’s reality by using all artistic resources to the extent that German reality was Nazi reality itself. Totalitarian art also seeks to cover and influence all realities, but the goal is to influence the mass as the vulnerable reality. Gesamtkunstwerk is the totality of reality in the artistic while totalitarian art is more about the practices to influence the mass.

“Hitler” as an individual has suffered from political punishment. The destructions caused by the Nazi are real and trial over them have happened. However, as a form of an aesthetic and myth surrounding it, “Hitler” is still a trauma until today. Syberberg uses this trauma to try Hitler through cinema itself, making it a sort of an ideal therapy through the mourning effect of Sigmund Freud: “It provides an overflow of information: the method of saturation. Syberberg is an artist of excess: thought is a kind of excess, the surplus production of ruminations, images, associations, emotions connected with, evoked by, Hitler” (Sontag, 1980: 153). Thus, just as Alexander Kluge who considers that the real cinema is in the audience’s mind, not on the screen, in this context Syberberg’s cinema is the use of societal trauma to try Hitler based on an “inner projection”.

Syberberg realizes that he can’t rely on documents to show how the Nazi event really happened, just as he can’t replicate the cruel acts. He creates a simulation just like in fiction. To understand history in Syberberg is to understand that it is no longer a construction or representation of meanings of the past; no more the supposition of a speaker behind a writing. Hitler in Syberberg is a historical typography without the past; something that has been shaped through a network of signs surrounding him.

Bibliography
Deleuze, G. (1989). Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Hardiman, B. (2015). Seni Memahami: Hermeneutika dari Schleiermacher sampai Derrida. Yogyakarta: Kanisius.

Munch, A. V. (2010). Redemption in Totality: Cultural Utopias of Late Romanticism and Crossroads of Art and Politics: Wagner, Behrens, Fidus, Hitler. Dalam M. B. Rasmussen, & J. Wamberg (Eds.), Totalitarian Art and Modernity (hal. 19-35). Aarhus: Aarhus University Press.

Sontag, S. (1980). Syberberg’s Hitler. Dalam S. Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn (hal. 137-165). New York: Vintage Books.