In Mary Devereaux’s essay “Beauty and Evil,” she discusses how the film Triumph of the Will raises the question, how do we examine certain films as an important artistic/aesthetic achievement when they advocate morally ‘wrong’ ideologies? Devereaux writes about three possible methods in which we can evaluate this film and/or its aesthetic qualities. They are, 1.) Formalism, 2.) Sophisticated formalism, and 3.) Nonformalism. She finds claims that the first two are weak but argues in favor of nonformalism. I will claim that all three forms of interpretation are weak and she errors in arguing for nonformalism.
Formalism can be understood by the separation of aesthetics and moral content. Someone who has adapted the formalist view would evaluate …show more content…
Someone who believes in S.F would evaluate a film’s forms as well take into account the moral content. They would be able to justify this because the moral content is evaluated based on how effectively the message is translated to the audience. The S.F does not evaluate the moral “good” or “bad” of the message/intent of the film.
Nonformalism evaluates the aesthetic by taking into account the ‘entirety’ of the film (including its message). A nonformalist would argue that the message is part of the aesthetic of the film. This is the viewpoint that Devereaux aligns the closest with.
In Devereaux’s essay she finds fault in the formalist view. She says that formalists fail because they bracket the very components that make the film morally objectionable (it’s content) and it brackets its essence as a work of art (in the case of Triumph of the will) its vision of National Socialism.” A Nonformalist perspective is ideal to Devereaux because she considers the morality of the film’s message to be part of the aesthetics/form of the film. In many ways I agree with Devereaux’s claim that art is only fully evaluated when both aesthetic and message/vision are …show more content…
I think that she makes an error in assuming that you can delineate between the films ideology and the ideologies of those making it (at least I disagree in the context of Triumph of the Will). It is like saying Travis Bickle from the film Taxi Driver has a morally good intent on cleaning up NY City in the beginning of the film. No one would say that because after watching the whole film we realize that he is psychotic and ideas of ‘cleaning up the city’ include murdering the people he thinks are scum. Hitler says he wants to bring back a pure Germany, which sounds patriotic and morally ‘good’ out of the context of history, but what we know now is that his intent was to murder millions of innocent, Jewish people. She is making an epistemic error. We know what the Nazis ideology was and we can see the seeds of it within Triumph of the Will. In order to maintain the integrity of her claim she would have to argue that we should only evaluate art through the perspective of the time period in which it was made. That would be an impossible task, because many of us do not know what it was like to be a German in 1934. I think that Devereaux is making up this distinction so she can make a morally sound evaluation of the film’s artistic greatness. The visions are undeniably related and cannot be severed (and history has testified of that). Riefenstahl’s vision was conceived in/from that of Nazi’s vision. Riefenstahl was a product of her