Tenth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

In 2018, Leni Riefenstahl’s film “Olympia” (1938) turned eighty years old. It was a propaganda effort to show German athletic prowess, but also to legitimize Nazi Germany as an actor on the global stage. The Olympic Games are inherently nationalist in character. This is a venue when individual countries can exhibit their superiority over others in a controlled setting. In the background is Riefenstahl’s earlier film “Triumph of the Will” (1935), and “Olympia” must be evaluated within its context. Riefenstahl prepared the German masses for military conflict with Olympic competition serving as “war by other means.” The German participants in the Olympics provided a blueprint for the “New Person” that Nazism required. The question of fascist aesthetics, and the disciplinary regimes that affect the body are the paper’s conceptual foci. Using Riefenstahl’s art as exemplars, aesthetics and discipline become highly relational under the dictates of power. On the aesthetic side, Riefenstahl’s filmic representations of idealized bodies fit into Friedrich Nietzsche’s conception of Apollonian art as opposed to the imageless art of the Dionysian. Nietzsche’s “will to power as art” can be contrasted with Hitler’s “triumph of the will.” Through Michel Foucault, another disciplinary regime that impacts the body can be identified: the organized sports apparatus. Foucault speaks of the “anatomo-politics of disciplinary institutions,” and the mechanisms of the sports complex fit into this conceptualization. Riefenstahl’s visual imagery in both “Olympia” and “Triumph of the Will” portrays the fascist aesthetic, and the disciplinary effects on the body, and the body politic.