Culture

Remembering Ella Bergmann-Michel, an artist who showed how fascism lurks in the everyday

A new BBC poll once again saw Nazi-era filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl rehabilitated—but a contemporary documentarian captured a more complex side of fascism

December 04, 2019
article header image

Last week, the BBC released a poll that saw 368 critics, programmers and academics across the world vote for their top ten films directed by women. The results were then compiled into a ranking of the top one hundred films.

Some observers were taken aback by the fact that two Nazi propaganda films made it into the top fifty. Film director Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938) were commissioned by Adolf Hitler's regime, and claimed the 45th and 37th spots respectively. Out of the 368 who voted, 35 placed a Riefenstahl in their top ten.

The repeated presence of fascist art on this self-avowed feminist project is made more egregious considering there was another German documentary made during the same period that has been largely forgotten by our popular tastemakers.

*

Directed by German artist Ella Bergmann-Michel, Wahlkampf 1932Election 1932, also called The Last Election—documents the final days of Weimar Germany. Bergmann-Michel filmed the streets of Frankfurt in January 1933, mere weeks before Hitler was appointed Chancellor and a month before the Nazis took advantage of the Reichstag Fire to tighten their dictatorial grasp.

Bergmann-Michel’s footage highlights the presence of election posters and flags hanging from windows. The hammer and sickle insignia of the Communist Party is equally visible, as are the three arrows of the Social Democratic Party.

Despite the prevalence of voter intimidation and political violence from the Nazis, Bergmann-Michel paints a more serene picture of the political moment, in which the only hint of struggle is suggested by an empty space left by a torn poster. Instead, she films children in a playground, and average people walking the streets. The mundanity of these images clash with our retrospective knowledge as 21st century viewers.



If you were to watch Bergmann-Michel's film on your laptop in a Starbucks or Costa, the most disquieting part would be when you look up, unable to meaningfully distinguish between the images you saw on-screen and the reality before you. What happened in 1930s Germany is not so remote as it appeared in a history textbook at school. Rather, it is an ongoing vulnerability.

*

Before moving into documentaries in the 1930s, Bergmann-Michel spent much of the previous decade working as an artist in Weimar Germany. Influenced by all the latest Modernist movements in the 1920s: constructivism, surrealism, and of course, Dada, she produced works that the Nazis would deem “degenerate art”. According to a New York Times article from 1984 about a posthumous show of her work, some of the art displayed was found behind a wall in her Hitler-era residence, possibly hidden.

Bergmann-Michel was never able to complete the film as the Nazis would come to take power: “Then I had to stop filming for political reasons", she since said. The unfinished state of the film itself becomes a comment on the destructive legacy of the Nazis.

Bergmann-Michel was fortunate enough to outlive Hitler, and she continued to produce work after the war. However, material on her film career is relatively scant, particularly compared to the writing on her Nazi contemporary Riefenstahl. In many ways, Wahlkampf 1932 represents the antithesis to Riefenstahl’s documentary approach.

In an interview for influential publication Cahiers du Cinéma, Riefenstahl said she rejected the quotidian in favour of beauty in her documentaries. Bergmann-Michel meanwhile dwells on the everyday. Riefenstahl’s films assault the audience with their engorged runtimes (Olympia is three and a half hours long), while Wahlkampf 1932 can only ever exist as a fragment, barely a quarter of an hour long.

After the war, Riefenstahl went on to rehabilitate her image, and in that respect she was aided by Western intellectuals, who sought to divorce the technical beauty they saw in her films from the genocidal ideology it promotes. Susan Sontag was one of the few critics to push back against the whitewashing of Riefenstahl’s reputation in her 1974 essay "Fascinating Fascism", in which she writes: “Riefenstahl’s films are still effective. Because their longings are still felt, because their content is a romantic ideal to which many continue to be attached.

*

With this in mind, we must ask ourselves how two pieces of Nazi propaganda could score so high on a list made up by film experts, while a piece of anti-Nazi documentary did not receive a single vote.

One could argue that it is not the fault of the voters that Wahlkampf 1932 is underappreciated. True, but as academics, programmers, and critics it should be part of their role to unearth the works of obscure film-makers like Bergmann-Michel rather than simply reprise a Nazi propagandist like Riefenstahl. Since all art is subjective, superlatives like "greatest" when applied to film are not based in scientific fact, but rather form part of a larger narrative about film. The people invited to participate in the BBC's poll are in the best possible position to highlight under-seen work, to tell a different story, yet instead they submitted to the legacy of Riefenstahl's output.

This is not to say that those who voted for either Triumph of the Will or Olympia are fascists. On the one hand, it speaks to a general inability, or perhaps unwillingness, to interrogate the political implications of the films we watch, even among supposed experts of the medium. Meanwhile the omission of films like Wahlkampf 1932 suggests a lack of curiosity to seek out acts of resistance in film culture, and a submission towards some mythical canon established by those who came before.