Review: Modern Enchantments by Simon During

“During’s implication is that there is something fundamentally flawed about the contention made by critics from Siegfried Kracauer (who in 1927 analysed the high kicks of dancing girls as “the rational and empty form of the cult”), through Debord, Baudrillard and Virilio, that commercial cinema represents the “triumph of the spectacle”; that it is not an exercise in secular magic but in power magic, the most overt manifestations of which are the Nazi propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl.”