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The Last of the Nuba
Leni Riefenstahl
A large book of color photographs of the Nuba peoples of the Kordofan region of southern Sudan, made by Leni Riefenstahl on visits between roughly 1962 and 1977 and first published in German in 1973. Riefenstahl's camera dwells on oiled, muscular bodies, wrestling and ceremonial adornment, presenting the Nuba as a vision of physical beauty and vigor set against an implied backdrop of a vanishing world. The images are technically accomplished and undeniably striking. They are also inseparable from who made them and how: the book became the center of a famous debate about whether Riefenstahl's earlier aesthetics — she had been Hitler's most gifted propagandist — simply carried over into a new subject. It is best approached with that history fully in view.
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The artist
Leni Riefenstahl (1902–2003) was a German filmmaker and photographer whose reputation is permanently bound to the Nazi regime. She directed Triumph of the Will (1935), a filmed glorification of the Nuremberg rally widely regarded as the most technically brilliant propaganda film ever made, and Olympia (1938) on the 1936 Berlin Olympics. She was close to Hitler and Goebbels, was arrested and held after the war, and went through denazification proceedings; she was never convicted of war crimes but was never rehabilitated in public opinion, and she spent decades minimizing and disputing the extent of her Nazi involvement.
The book
The Last of the Nuba (German 1973; English 1974) gathers her Sudan photographs, framing the Nuba as an idealized vision of bodily strength and beauty.
How it has aged — the reputation
The book is a touchstone precisely because of that history. In her 1975 essay "Fascinating Fascism," Susan Sontag argued that the images are continuous with Riefenstahl's Nazi work — a celebration of the strong over the weak and of physical perfection — and called the book the third panel in a "fascist" triptych; she also showed that accompanying biographical claims softened Riefenstahl's real closeness to the regime. Critics further note the pictures ignore the Nuba's actual political situation. Readers can find the photographs accomplished while recognizing the ideological freight Sontag identified.
For more context
Sontag's essay is the essential companion; standard biographies detail Riefenstahl's wartime record.
Sources - Fascinating Fascism — Susan Sontag, NYRB - The Last of the Nuba — Wikipedia
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Leni Riefenstahl
- Year
- 1974
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Colorado