SOURCE: Sontag, Susan. “Fascinating Fascism.” In Under the Sign of Saturn, pp. 73-105. New York, N.Y.: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1980.

In the following essay, originally published in the February 6, 1975, edition of New York Review of Books, Sontag argues that Riefenstahl's The Last of the Nuba expresses a “fascist aesthetic” in its representation of the human body, which is further reflected in Riefenstahl's films.

I

First Exhibit. Here is a book [The Last of the Nuba] of 126 splendid color photographs by Leni Riefenstahl, certainly the most ravishing book of photographs published anywhere in recent years. In the intractable mountains of the southern Sudan live about eight thousand aloof, godlike Nuba, emblems of physical perfection, with large, well-shaped, partly shaven heads, expressive faces, and muscular bodies that are depilated and decorated with scars; smeared with sacred gray-white ash, the men prance, squat, brood, wrestle on the arid slopes. And...