Leni the non-conformist (& why we’re sometimes conformists.)

There’s a psychological experiment that examines how influenced one is by his or her peers. They are placed in a room with a projector that shows an image of several lines of varying length - and a last one that needs to be matched to one of the others, like in the image below.

The test subject is told that everyone in the room is a test subject, but they are not; they are actors placed there to try to create a fake community for the one true test subject. The first few fake test subjects are asked, and they answer with the wrong answer, “B”. The examiner goes down to each subject and they all continue to say, “B”. The last test subject is the true one, and his or her answer depends on what they see on the screen, as well as what they think their peers believe. Solomon Asch conducted this study on college students and this was his result:

To Asch’s surprise, 37 of the 50 subjects conformed themselves to the ‘obviously erroneous’ answers given by the other group members at least once.

According to Asch, people conform to a wrong answer for two reasons: they want to be liked, or they trust the group’s opinion. In all of the pictures I’ve seen of this study, all of the test subjects are men. I’ve always been fascinated with what would happen with a mixed group and different variations. All female actors and male test taker, all make actors and female test taker, and so on. Moreover, if the groups were truly mixed, would women or men align themselves with the majority more often, or would there be no statistical difference?

Leni taking photographs in Africa.

In my experience, women have trouble withstanding the pressures of community more than men. (Anecdotal, no less.)

So one person that totally fascinates me is Leni Riefenstahl, because of her absolute resolution when it comes to her art. She made (possibly) propagandist films commissioned by the Nazi party, which she calls art films. Her arguments are that at the time, most Germans supported Hitler and her films are more about art than about fascism, and she never publicly endorsed the Nazi Party and was not a member of it. After the fall of the Nazis, she was blacklisted and never made another movie until she was 90-something, when she made a scuba diving movie. I find it incredible that she never once caved in to any admission of guilt or being a propagandist. She said “no” to all the critics. She declared herself an artist through-and-through until the day she died.

As most film critics describe her as the most accomplished, creative and innovating female filmmaker of the 20th century now, she spent most of her life not making movies. I admire her resolution but at the same time she sacrificed her career for it. (Although maybe even if she admitted she was wrong, she could still be blacklisted.) Ultimately she didn’t care about being accepted and she didn’t care if people thought her films were propagandist. She cared about being right. She trusted her own instinct and never balked. Whether she’s right or not, is above my pay-grade. Ultimately, I thought that was pretty inspirational.

Oh, and her work is incredibly striking, too.

You can read more on Leni and watch her Nazi-commissioned films (warning: some people are offended by the Nazi imagery) and you can read more on conformity studies to get more in depth statistics.