Fotografía, voluntad e incertidumbre

Abstract

This article establishes a relationship between the photographic work (films and photography) of Leni Riefensthal and the philosophical ideas of the quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg.. These authors are contemporaries and have in common their service to the National Socialist party in Germany. The first, through the production of an idealizing graphical work of an Aryan people and its leaders; the second, by helping the German atomic bomb project with his scientific experience and knowledge. On this occasion however we look into their intellectual and aesthetic principles rather than at their personal biographies. Photography is the element which helps us analyse a concurrence in their artistic and philosophical outlook and attitudes. While in the case of the photographer and filmmaker Leni Riefensthal it is pomposity and arrogance which best defines her work, in accordance with Walter Benjamin’s observation of political aesthetication by fascism; in the case of the notorious physicist, his neoplatonic conclusions as a result of his famous uncertainty relations stand out. The latter is surprisingly related to some observations he made after taking into consideration a number of cloud chamber photographs of atomic particles. Science and art encounter each other behind thought through the modern instrument of photography. Expression and knowledge, the two most outstanding potentialities of the camera, find a common ground in the subliminal thinking and aesthetics of these two German authors. The essence of the German people, portrayed in film by Leni Riefensthal as Apollonian athletes, haughty voices and grandiloquent statues of marble and granite in remembrance of classical Greco-latin art, ruled by geometric cannons, but understood here as cardboard work, stretches its hand to the uncertainty principle, as a truly Damocles sword suspended over the head of modern physics, and interpreted by Heisenberg as a bastion of those formal relationships, pure and geometric, which define the world and the essence of things. Photography and its products, after being a positivist observational instrument at the service of XIX century science, were questioned by this new idealism which showed its savage force in XX century art, science and politics.