"Through my optimism I naturally prefer and capture the beauty in life"
About this Quote
Optimism is doing a lot of quiet political work here. Riefenstahl frames her aesthetic as temperament: a natural preference for beauty, almost like a photographer’s instinct rather than an artist’s choice. “Naturally” is the key alibi. It suggests inevitability, as if what she filmed and how she framed it couldn’t help but emerge from a sunny disposition. That move matters because her legacy is inseparable from the fact that her most famous “beauty” was engineered in service of Nazi spectacle.
“Prefer and capture” is revealing, too: preference implies selection, capture implies control. It’s a credo for an eye that edits the world into coherence. In Riefenstahl’s hands, beauty isn’t passive admiration; it’s an act of extraction. Her camera doesn’t merely find elegance, it manufactures it by isolating bodies, angles, and rituals that read as purity, strength, inevitability. Optimism becomes a rhetorical solvent that dissolves ethical questions into aesthetics: if you’re “capturing beauty,” you’re not responsible for what that beauty persuades people to accept.
The line also echoes her lifelong self-defense strategy after 1945: the insistence that she was an artist, not an ideologue; that form is separable from consequence. Yet the sentence betrays how form becomes consequence. When you claim optimism as your method, you’re claiming the right to look away from suffering, mess, contradiction - the very elements that would puncture propaganda’s smooth surface. In that sense, the quote is less a confession of innocence than a manifesto for selective vision.
“Prefer and capture” is revealing, too: preference implies selection, capture implies control. It’s a credo for an eye that edits the world into coherence. In Riefenstahl’s hands, beauty isn’t passive admiration; it’s an act of extraction. Her camera doesn’t merely find elegance, it manufactures it by isolating bodies, angles, and rituals that read as purity, strength, inevitability. Optimism becomes a rhetorical solvent that dissolves ethical questions into aesthetics: if you’re “capturing beauty,” you’re not responsible for what that beauty persuades people to accept.
The line also echoes her lifelong self-defense strategy after 1945: the insistence that she was an artist, not an ideologue; that form is separable from consequence. Yet the sentence betrays how form becomes consequence. When you claim optimism as your method, you’re claiming the right to look away from suffering, mess, contradiction - the very elements that would puncture propaganda’s smooth surface. In that sense, the quote is less a confession of innocence than a manifesto for selective vision.
Quote Details
| Topic | Optimism |
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