Sir, - In his book The Country and the City, Raymond Williams demonstrates how that marvellous paean to the "natural order" of English country-house life, the poem To Penshurst by Shakespeare's contemporary Ben Jonson, actually represents an obscuring of the exploitative economic relations upon which such an order was constructed. It is a specifically Romantic misunderstanding that art is remote from ideology, and that its function has most often been anything other than to mystify in the name of power.
Thus, both Leni Reifenstahl herself and Paul Myers, who writes about her (Weekend, January 16th), miss the point: the filmmaker's celebration of Hitler and the Nazi regime in no way detracts from the work's status as art; and her films' deliberate suppression of the brutality upon which the Reich was based merely places them in a tradition of servitude to the tyrant, petty or potent, as old as art itself. - Yours, etc., Alan O'Leary,
Via Aselli, Pavia, Italy.