 Still from the "Night Porter" by Liliana Cavani (1974) I take an advantage of this being a sort of diary and confess that I have been procrastinating with this post. Exhaustion and task overload aside, it is the allure of fascism, as described by Susan Sontag, that produces a rejection and paralysis (in me). Lately, I am accompanied by fear. It (fascism) is also all around, the return of it, it is the Zeitgeist and the leitmotif of my Instagram feed (I looked too long at the post about Alex Pretti being shot by ICE officer, now I am fed with images of violence on repeat). It is the REALITY and something I have discussed last Saturday over dinner table with some newly met people - the emergence of the undead (in Germany). It is both ominous, apocalyptic and unspectacular. Abstract. And streamed daily. I am thinking about those that were taken in the morning and those for whom they will come for at night (Baldwin). Leni Riefenstahl re-wrote Leni Riefenstahl, she could not out herself as one (of many, but most prominently so) who immortalized the Reich as something. to look at, appropriate and aesthetically digest. Susan Sontag seems to be disgusted, I can relate, though it is a surprising reaction to have, a contagion. It makes me think of Erich Fromm's diagnostics of Hitler as "necrophiliac" - he points to the grimace of his face suggesting that he smells something bad (his own rot?), as well as his general disposition to render all that is alive dead. Homicidal, suicidal, necropolitical mania. I am fascinated by what is beautiful, strong, healthy, what is living. I seek harmony. Leni Riefenstahl as quoted in "Fascinating Fascism" by Susan Sontag (1975) Sontag proposes to see "The Last Of The Nuba" as a part of Riefenstahl's triptych of "fascist visuals," it is also a "lament for vanishing primitives." In the third panel, The Last of the Nuba, the stripped-down primitives, awaiting the final ordeal of their proud heroic community, their imminent extinction, frolic and pose in the hot clean desert. (Sontag) The important events in Nuba society are wrestling matches and funerals: vivid encounters of beautiful male bodies and death. Such form of representation reduces the complexity of social life and broader environment of political and cultural transformations of Sudan to an image of oiled, ripped and naked fetish-people for the Western gaze. (according to Sontag, the aesthetic imagination as manifested in the fascist art glorifies surrender; it exalts mindlessness: it glamorizes death.) THE MYTH is constructed (politics of representation) What is distinctive about the fascist version of the old idea of the Noble Savage is its contempt for all that is reflective, critical, and pluralistic. In Riefenstahl’s casebook of primitive virtue, it is hardly the intricacy and subtlety of primitive myth, social organization, or thinking that are being extolled. She is especially enthusiastic about the ways the Nuba are exalted and unified by the physical ordeals of their wrestling matches, in which the “heaving and straining” Nuba men, “huge muscles bulging,” throw one another to the ground—fighting not for material prizes but “for the renewal of sacred vitality of the tribe.” *there is something off with the visual and textual narrative of this post, I note this for now, will need to come back to it, perhaps the visual and narrative binding of a black body with violence that I certainly don't aim to reproduce..but also I disagree with Sontag in some parts, Riefenstahl seems to exhibit the Nuba as both "passing" and out of time, pure (!), the deconstructive movement here (turned towards Riefenstahl's visual proposition) exposes the strange dynamics of elevation and erasure.. Binding of eroticism and death (what kind of disposition towards life is fundamental to modernity and colonial laboratory), fetishization of vitality as represented by a black body (tbc)* Roberto Strongman in "Queering Black Atlantic Religions" presents the subject of Pierre Verger's photographs as looking back, reversing the desire, escaping ethnographic fixation.  From "The Last of Nuba" by Leni Riefenstahl  From https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2011/8/9/sudan-the-plight-of-the-nuba-people/  Photo by Pierre Verger ANGLES AND PERSPECTIVES (OF SEEING AND IMAGE-MAKING) In another course, we have discussed drone imaging and status of visual evidence. There are two images that haunt me in that context. Seeing from above (from how big of a distance, what are the scales at work), documentation of a crime, what processes unfold between image capture/construction, interpretation (determination of truth), intervention and remembrance? (I might come back to it) Are violence, savagery still features of representation of (only) the Other? Why is anthropology (still) so involved in description of suffering? What forms of repair, justice, visibility are produced in such accounts? 1. Aerial photo of Auschwitz-Birkenau II complex taken by the South African Air Force on 23 August 1944. 2. "Blood Sands" seen from space near el-Fasher, western Sudan (November 2025), indicating mass killings.   THE FRAGMENTED IMAGING/ PARTIALITY / RECOMPOSITION OF SUBJECT Some notes on Trinh Minh-ha "Woman, Native, Other" (1989) “woman is the Other” (Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949) “He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other.” inescapability of white mind's categories and domination? what are the spaces of other reasoning and not-unreason Reassemblage// fragmentation, exposure of montage, looping, cuts as expository tools - critique of ethnographic filmmaking self-reflexivity and speaking near-by why is an anthropologist always desiring an encounter with the otherness (it is a part of the job, a core of it even, estrangement of various degrees, always produced even when seemingly already existing prior to an encounter) - as a critical gesture they/we try to position themselves/ourselves differently, dilute authority, co-author, listen, "give voice" (oh-oh) BUT for whom is the depiction, visual representation produced and for what purpose who speaks about the work that the film becomes how is the near-by a continuous relation against commodification (films as fluid, interactive movements) - between (non)documentation and (non)fiction, beyond fixation of identity and cultural category hybrids and borderlines, how reality can be "seized" (maybe not at all), restructuring of postcolonial and male gaze  Still from "Reassemblage"  Still from "Surname Viet Given Name Nam"
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