Triumph of the Will

During my Staycation a couple of months ago, I watched "Triumph of the Will", a propaganda film about the 1934 NAZI party congress and rally at Nuremberg, made at Hiter's behest by Leni Riefenstahl.  The film can be found on YouTube with English subtitles here.

Triumph is widely recognized as the first modern documentary and a masterwork of film-making and propaganda.  Roger Ebert reviewed it in his series of "Great Movies".  Interestingly, when he revisited the film in 2008, what had seemed decades before like a masterpiece struck Ebert as "a terrible film, paralyzingly dull, simpleminded, overlong and not even "manipulative," because it is too clumsy to manipulate anyone but a true believer. It is not a "great movie" in the sense that the other films in this group are great, but it is "great" in the reputation it has and the shadow it casts."

This was the first time I ever saw Triumph and I found it fascinating.  The NAZIs knew how to create a spectacle which made their horrific philosophy appear legitimate, even heroic and inspirational.  One can understand how the images of hundreds of thousands of Germans acting in unison would instill nationalistic fervor in pre-war Germans.  All the footage was carefully calculated to produce a particular response.  Racial politics are only mentioned once, when one of Hitler's functionaries refers to racial "purity".  They weren't advertising their full-blown genocidal intentions just yet.

I found the "pre-rally" footage to be especially interesting, with thousands of tents lined up to house the participants, giving us a too-brief glimpse of camp life.  The shots of shirtless German youth in their absurd pulled-high shorts washing each other seems hilariously homo-erotic in a culture that despised gays.

As Ebert says, the film is slow and overlong, filled with endless shots of buildings, rows of people, and speeches.  But its power is clear.

It's disturbing to know that even as this happy, optimistic and sanitized rally was occurring, millions of Germans were already being imprisoned, tortured and murdered while Germany prepared for war.  The film also produces mixed emotions with the realization that a short eleven years later, most of the people pictured would be dead due to the very things they're celebrating in the film.

If you're interested in history, Triumph is well worth your time.