Triumph of the Will Discussion

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I want to open this up for discussion although it is a very controversial subject...


I went to film school a few years back and this film was analyzed during film history classes along with all the other 'landmarks' in cinematic history. It was regarded very highly by my Instructors as a technical masterpiece of filmmaking who showed various scenes, and allowed for class commentary. It was all very interesting to us, the young inexperienced filmmakers, more than half of us hadn't even seen a film by Buster Keaton or even heard of Ingmar Bergman. So this was all new news to us, about how a nazi propaganda film could be considered high art.

But the moral question penetrated so greatly on this film none of us could watch it without a certain level of discomfort.

The reasons are obvious for those feelings, but I have subsequently read in so many film history books, film publications, and books written by famous critics that this film really ushered in a number of technical filmmaking achievements, and is still held in such a high regard as a real cinematic work of art, influencing many directors. Some even declare the film 'the greatest Documentary ever made'.

Basically my question is: Is it possible to remove the subject matter from a film and just analyze it on a technical level?? Even for something like this?

I borrowed the film from my library and critiqued it over a weekend and even people who saw the DVD box on my coffee table were like "why are you watching that??!" and my wife left the room half way through to go read her book.

The reason I'm bringing this up is due to an Ebert review on the way June 27th that has been anticipated for some time...

"Whether it is truly great or only technically qualifies because of its importance is the question." - Roger Ebert
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"More human than human" is our motto.



This thread would have helped 3 months ago when I was doing my history report!

But really, I'll have more later . . .
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And lo the whispering wanderer weeps
what whit to whom did my life keep?



I am having a nervous breakdance
Propaganda film is film right? I can't see why a film class should not analyze propaganda film. Actually, it would be a pretty bad film class if Riefenstahl was never mentioned. I don't see the point in removing the subject matter either. It's an important film because it was effective, it made that nazis look good and powerful. I think film classes all over the world should spend more time analyzing films like this. Not only film classes, btw.
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The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf and the lamb, then smiled, "seeing that his work was good".

--------

They had temporarily escaped the factories, the warehouses, the slaughterhouses, the car washes - they'd be back in captivity the next day but
now they were out - they were wild with freedom. They weren't thinking about the slavery of poverty. Or the slavery of welfare and food stamps. The rest of us would be all right until the poor learned how to make atom bombs in their basements.



Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.


Good post, Piddz. I've had this discussion at other forums, and I always come down on the side that her films should be studied. It's not really that different from other films. Even though she was making a "documentary" film with what may be perceived as a skewed perspective, and thus it's a propaganda film, every film made is from a perspective and could be perceived as a "propaganda" film. It's only what we know about the Nazis after the fact that turns Leni Riefenstahl into a horrible monster, someone who a few believe is as bad as Hitler himself!



Leni Riefenstahl is an incredibly important and interesting personage in the history of world cinema, and I too find it disturbing that people want to censor her work. This is not because I'm a neo-Nazi; far from it. It's because "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Riefenstahl was a cinematic genius. I posted that incredible film above, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl because it's a superb three-hour documentary which goes over her entire life, and it mixes many scenes from her movies with an interviewer grilling her in her old age about questions which she mostly answers, but seems a bit uncomfortable in doing so. I'm not here to talk about whether she was a Nazi or not. (She never joined the party.) But, she did stay in Germany when most of the greatest filmmakers and actors took off, so why did she do it? She may have done it just to show that she was a great filmmaker and maybe she was truly naive or didn't actually pay attention to politics. She kept saying, over and over about Triumph of the Will, that the film won awards throughout Europe. She was proud of her skills and proud of the accolades from critics and viewers. I'm not here to rationalize her behavior, but I am here to attest to the fact that she knew how to shoot and edit a film for maximum emotional and aesthetic impact, even when her aesthetics actually do lean towards a form of racism and sexism.



The opening of Triumph of the Will shows a subliminal storytelling skill which few films have ever matched. It begins in the clouds, amongst the Gods, and eventually we see an airplane bringing God (Hitler) down from Heaven to Earth to be with his "children" and nurture them. When "He" arrives, the people all passionately welcome him in a monumental parade. After that, the entire country (especially the youth) seem mobilized to make their country grow in strength and do hard labor to improve the land for "all of us". It's only later at the Nuremberg Rallies where the question of "outsiders and undesirables" is mentioned that the implication that Germany will flourish better if it was "purer" is raised. Riefenstahl claims she had no hand in the staging of all the massive scenes in the film, but sometimes that seems hard to believe because the camera is always in the right place, whether it be for composition, context or maximum impact. Boy, I hope I don't sound like a Nazi here, but this film is a textbook of cinematic vocabulary, even if I find her followup, Olympia, the document of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, to be far more groundbreaking cinematically. To give Riefenstahl some credit, in Olympia there is at least three times more footage of the African-American star of the Games, Jesse Owens, than there is of Der Fuhrer.



OK, even though there's more to say, I'll cool it and come back later. I hope somebody else responds before I return. Oh, and since I know what Roger Ebert thinks about Song of the South, I'm betting he tries to slam the movie bigtime. Believe me, the movie has things to slam, but it still should never be censored, no matter what Rog may think.



Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.
For anybody who feels left outside of the discussion because they haven't watched the film, here is the beginning. It's certainly not cleaned up at all, but you will be able to see what is there, relate it to what I said, and make an introductory opinion. Remember, this was filmed in 1934, and not one "superpower" said anything bad about it or boycotted the Olympics two years later.




Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.
I don't actually understand why this clip has no subtitles, but it's easy enough to understand how strong a public speaker Hitler was. This is truly scary stuff, even without the translation.

&feature=related



So many good movies, so little time.
Technically a great film. I would have trouble calling it a great film without the adverb technically to qualify it since calling a movie a "great film" would seem to endorse its content.
Along the same lines I would call Gone with the Wind a great film technically, but I could never call it a great film since its content is so reprehensible.
Both movies are very important because of what they say about the eager audiences for whom they were intended. Triumph was aimed at an audience who had been through the horrors of losing a war and then the great depression that followed it (very similiar to the American South). A once very proud nation had fallen to lows from which many probably thought they would never recover. And yet, in just a few years, Hitler had restored the economy and national prestige. Triumph of the Will was an understandable celebration of those accomplishments.
However, Riefenstahland other intellectuals would have known of Hitler's thoughts and plans from his book, Mein Kampf . Although her work was technically great, her creation was reprehensible in that it helped pave the way for what was to follow.
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Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.
Somebody edited together several scenes from The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl which involve her being interviewed about Hitler and the making of and repercussions from Triumph of the Will. It's better as is in the documentary, but it's still plenty fascinating here.

&feature=related



This was an early attempt I made at analysing Leni:

Leni Riefenstahl is the single most controversial director in the history of film. To some she is an irredeemable monster, a master propagandist complicit in the horrors of the Nazis. Others see her as a naive artist, used by a foul regime but herself unaware of the ways in which her art could be exploited. To still others she is a feminist icon, a strong woman forced to make difficult moral choices while attempting to work in a male-dominated industry. What few doubt are the astonishing technical achievements of her work. Both her documentaries, Triumph Of The Will and Olympia, for good or ill, are milestones in movie history.
Leni Riefenstahl was born in Berlin in 1902. Her father, Alfred, a businessman who had elevated himself from poor beginnings to the respectability of Berlin's middle class, was something of a petty despot. Cold towards his children , he would fly into tempers if his authority was challenged in any way. There are those that speculate that maybe the distance between Leni and Arthur left her in need of a compensating father figure. Her mother, Bertha Sherlach, had been a part-time seamstress before she married. Their first child, Helene (Leni) Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl, was born on August 22, 1902 in the family's apartment on Prinz-Eugen-Straße in Berlin. Leni's younger brother, Heinz, was born three and a half years later. He died at the age of 38 during WWII at the Russian front.
Riefenstahl studied painting and started her artistic career as a dancer, but an injury of the knee put an end to her sensational career. After that, she became famous as an actress, a film director, a film producer and a film reporter. She became world-renowned as an actress, especially for her role in The Blue Light in 1932.
When Hitler came into her life, Riefenstahl was already an accomplished actress and director. Like many Germans living in economic despair at the time, she found the Fuhrer charismatic and lauded his efforts to build National Socialism, by her own words unaware of his ultimate intentions. Although Riefenstahl denied all accusations, there were rumours about a relationship between herself and Hitler.
She was granted the dream of every filmmaker, an unlimited budget, to photograph the annual Nazi Party rally of 1934, she created Triumph of the Will, an inestimable propaganda tool in building the myth of Hitler-as-saviour. This film brought her the greatest success but summed up one of the biggest problems Riefenstahl had in disassociating herself from the Nazis. It was brilliantly made and remains a model of documentary cinema technique. Triumph of the Will used an omniscient point-of-view, a fly-on-the-wall style common to many documentaries today. Aerial shots used in the film help achieve the effect that we are observing the majesty and power of the Nazi Party from the heavens. Riefenstahl's use of editing techniques, like the slow dissolve, also helps create what would become the Nazi myth of invulnerability. In one shot we slowly dissolve from an aerial shot of clouds to an overhead shot of the crowd, a transition that makes Hitler appear as someone descended from the heavens.
However, at the end of the war this film destroyed Riefenstahl's career, for it was no longer recognized as a piece of art but was condemned as a National Socialist propaganda film.

After Hitler saw the outcome of Triumph of the Will he convinced Riefenstahl to film the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. For this event which was to symbolize the spectacle and prowess of Nazi Germany, Riefenstahl used even more innovative and powerful techniques than in Triumph of the Will. She used the most sophisticated equipment and techniques of the day. She trained cameramen as divers and used underwater cameras to film the diving sequences. She had cameras mounted on balloons, airplanes, steel towers, and rafts. She also had trenches dug in the stadium turf in order to film the athletes from low angles.

The end result of the filming of the Olympics was titled Olympia. To her credit, even though Hitler ordered Riefenstahl to downplay the achievements of any non-white athletes, Riefenstahl's film focuses on the achievements of African American track star, Jesse Owens. Nonetheless, along with Triumph of the Will, many continue to view this documentary as a symbol of Nazi power and might. She defends herself in an interview in 1967, "It is always said that I worked for the Nazis, that the Nazis helped me. But I was not in the Party and they made only difficulties for me..." Yet we must make up our own mind on the political implications of the film. But it is hard to deny that Olympia, examined purely as a film, is one of the most beautiful and exciting works Riefenstahl has produced.


Olympia, and later her series of photography books on the Nuba tribe, brought criticism that Riefenstahl's image of the perfect body was a fascist ideal. On the other hand, her portrayals of the physical beauty of black tribesmen showed a contradiction with Hitler's pathological race theories.
In conclusion, Riefenstahl has largely been demonized for her connection with Hitler's Nazi Germany. After World War II ended, she was imprisoned by the Allies for three years. Her film equipment and much of her property were confiscated by the French government. Recently, the aged filmmaker hoped that a biography of her life and work would help clear her name and reputation as the best and biggest mouthpiece for Nazi propaganda. As the legendary filmmaker stated: "I wasn't welcome in America. I was a pariah. It would be nice to go back. All anyone ever asks about is the Nazis. There was so much more".

The often-imitated, seldom-honoured artist remained a controversial and unrepentant pariah up until her death on September 8, 2003. Ironically, her own well-crafted black-and-white motion-picture images of Hitler, Nazi pageantry, and the Jesse Owens Olympics helped keep both her genius and her past alive. In the words of Ray Müller, director of The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, "Her talent was her tragedy."


AND AFTER HER DEATH LINGERS THE QUESTION: WAS LENI RIEFENSTAHLGUILTY, AND IF SO, OF WHAT?
It's no use looking to her for the answers. Throughout
questions about her role in the Nazi regime were deflected with
lies, obfuscation and, when they failed, numerous lawsuits. Her
autobiography is a stupendous 900-page concoction of evasion and half-
truths. A single example: at one point she airily ponders of her first
meeting with Hitler, "Was it accident or fate that we came together
Well, neither actually; it was the letter she sent to him in which she
fawned, "I was impressed by you and the enthusiasm of your audience.
My wish is to meet you personally" Just as she restaged speeches for
Triumph Of The Will or feats of athleticism for Olympia, she
constantly re-staged and re-invented her own life, perhaps for similar
reasons: to make it prettier, more perfect. She constantly denied she'd
been aware of Hitler's Final Solution or of the brutalities of the German
Army. And, in her defence, it's true she never joined the Party, citing
later her disgust at its racist ideology. But she had supported that regime
and flattered its ghastly leaders. She took their money and made films to
their specifications. Her history is inseparable from theirs, and while she
never committed an act of violence, perhaps those who did were inspired
to greater cruelty and vigour by her glorification of their ideas.


There is a single picture that gives the lie to her protestations of ignorance: a photographic smoking gun. It was taken on September 12, 1939, 12 days after the Nazis' invasion of Poland. Riefenstahl was in the small town following the 10th Army's advance. Two days before, four German soldiers had been killed. Military units responded by rounding up local Jews and marching them to the town marketplace, where they were ordered to dig graves — they were not informed whether they were to be for the soldiers or for themselves. At some point a shot was fired and the soldiers fired randomly into the crowd of unarmed villagers. Nineteen were killed. It was to be one of the first war crimes of World War II.
Though she denied she was present, a snapshot later surfaced of Riefenstahl the moment the shooting started. Beside her, distracted, is the face of a young Wehrmacht soldier; ironically it is the kind of attractive, youthful face she had romanticised in her films. Her face is contorted into a scream of anguish. It is the face of someone who understands what is happening and does nothing to try and stop it.





Like many Germans living in economic despair at the time . . .
One thing Riefenstahl definitely was not during the Nazi years of the 1930s-1940s is "living in economic despair." As you pointed out, she was a star actress, a popular director--Germany's movie industry was every bit as glamorous as Hollywood in those days, and she was living on a much higher standard than the average German peasant or factory worker.

She was granted the dream of every filmmaker, an unlimited budget


Again, no poverty for Leni! The Nazis loved movie stars and their glamor, and Leni played them to the hilt to get what she wanted. She sought out Hitler--she wasn't drafted into the Nazi inner circle.


After Hitler saw the outcome of Triumph of the Will he convinced Riefenstahl to film the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin . . .


Now how long do you think it took Adolph to "convince" Leni? Again, she wasn't a slave laborer in a Nazi factory as many Europeans became. She was a willing participant who did her best to give the Nazis the films they wanted so she could remain part of that inner circle and sop up the gravy they were squeezing out of Europe. To suggest that she somehow made these great films glorifying Nazis and yet somehow remained innocent and ignorant as to what it was all about is like saying your favorite modern director has all the resources to make the movie he wants and is then surprised that he turned out a good film. Leni knew what she was doing, and she knew how to get what she wanted. One word sums up both her and that female dog that Hitler was so fond of.

She was an artistic director, but a really lousy human being.



Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.
Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1935)


I've had this discussion at other forums, and I always come down on the side that Leni Riefenstahl's films should be studied. It's not really that different from other films. Even though she was making a "documentary" film with what may be perceived as a skewed perspective, and thus it's a propaganda film, every film made is from a perspective and could be perceived as a "propaganda" film. It's only what we know about the Nazis after the fact that turns Leni Riefenstahl into a horrible monster, someone who a few believe is as bad as Hitler himself!

Leni Riefenstahl is an incredibly important and interesting personage in the history of world cinema, and I too find it disturbing that people want to censor her work. This is not because I'm a neo-Nazi; far from it. It's because "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Riefenstahl was a cinematic genius. I posted that incredible film above, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl because it's a superb three-hour documentary which goes over her entire life, and it mixes many scenes from her movies with an interviewer grilling her in her old age about questions which she mostly answers, but seems a bit uncomfortable in doing so. I'm not here to talk about whether she was a Nazi or not. (She never joined the party.) But, she did stay in Germany when most of the greatest filmmakers and actors took off, so why did she do it? She may have done it just to show that she was a great filmmaker and maybe she was truly naive or didn't actually pay attention to politics. She kept saying, over and over about Triumph of the Will, that the film won awards throughout Europe. She was proud of her skills and proud of the accolades from critics and viewers. I'm not here to rationalize her behavior, but I am here to attest to the fact that she knew how to shoot and edit a film for maximum emotional and aesthetic impact, even when her aesthetics actually do lean towards a form of racism and sexism.



The opening of Triumph of the Will shows a subliminal storytelling skill which few films have ever matched. It begins in the clouds, amongst the Gods, and eventually we see an airplane bringing God (Hitler) down from Heaven to Earth to be with his "children" and nurture them. When "He" arrives, the people all passionately welcome him in a monumental parade. After that, the entire country (especially the youth) seem mobilized to make their country grow in strength and do hard labor to improve the land for "all of us". It's only later at the Nuremberg Rallies where the question of "outsiders and undesirables" is mentioned that the implication that Germany will flourish better if it was "purer" is raised. Riefenstahl claims she had no hand in the staging of all the massive scenes in the film, but sometimes that seems hard to believe because the camera is always in the right place, whether it be for composition, context or maximum impact. Boy, I hope I don't sound like a Nazi here, but this film is a textbook of cinematic vocabulary, even if I find her followup, Olympia, the document of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, to be far more groundbreaking cinematically. To give Riefenstahl some credit, in Olympia there is at least three times more footage of the African-American star of the Games, Jesse Owens, than there is of Der Fuhrer.



OK, even though there's more to say, I'll cool it and come back later. I hope somebody else responds before I return. Oh, and since I know what Roger Ebert thinks about Song of the South, I'm betting he tries to slam the movie bigtime. Believe me, the movie has things to slam, but it still should never be censored, no matter what Rog may think.