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"Not sure if this was intentional...."

I split screened shots from Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of Will, with @realDonaldTrump?s video of his return from the hospital. Not sure if this was intentional, but it's eerily similar. His media team looking to history for inspiration, perhaps? pic.twitter.com/ZsZfHLttdL

? matt danzico (@mattdanzico) October 6, 2020

This made me look up old posts on this blog with the "Leni Riefenstahl" tag. I found "Is Michael Moore like Leni Riefenstahl?" from 2004 (the first year of this blog). Somebody else had compared Moore to Riefenstahl, and I said:

There are many huge differences between Moore and Leni Riefenstahl, though. Quite aside from the fact that she was working in support of Hitler and Moore is working against Bush (and Bush is no Hitler, despite some noise to the contrary), Riefenstahl would have snorted at the lack of artistry in Moore's work. She was all about beautiful and precise visual imagery. "Triumph of the Will" does not pound at you with voiceover assertions, it aims to lure you and seduce you with sequences of images. Moore's type of propaganda is far, far easier to resist, because it is immediately and constantly apparent that he is propagandizing. That is a lot fairer to the viewer: your resistance is instantly activated. You can decide what you want to think. What Riefenstahl did was incomparable.

And, from November 28, 2016, "As a filmmaker, Mr. Bannon, 63, has cited both the Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl and the left-wing documentarian Michael Moore as models." The post title is a quote from a NYT article. I wrote:

Why is Leni Riefenstahl is called a "propagandist" and Michael Moore is a "documentarian." The same word ? whichever you choose ? applies to both. Riefenstahl was unquestionably a great film artist, far more interested in film as art than Moore. See the excellent, nonpropagandistic documentary about her, "The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl." Moore is an out-and-proud propagandist. What's wrong with that if your cause is good? Riefenstahl presents the problem of what's wrong with art if your cause is bad.

So... there you see what should be my answer to the tweet. To serve your own good ends, you can use aesthetic devices that have been used by others to accomplish evil. To give another example, Socialist Realism is a great style for poster art, even though it was created and used by the Soviet Union. 

Full post as published by Althouse on October 07, 2020 (boomark / email).