Despite its reputation, prospective viewers can be certain of one thing at least: the infamous "Triumph of the Will" isn't going to brainwash you into becoming a fervent Nazi, and even the lauded genius of Leni Riefensthal cannot make a sweat-dripping, toothbrush-moustached Hitler a surreptitiously alluring prospect. To be honest, aside from historical interest the film is more likely to set you yawning (I'm sure I wasn't the only person in the cinema last night surreptitiously pinching myself at times to stay awake...)
Leni Riefensthal does her best to create art and entertainment out of the unpromising material of a Party Congress -- compare, for example, the challenge of depicting the sycophantic speeches, party hacks and troop-rousing at Brighton or Bournemouth in the modern-day party conference season -- and initially at least succeeds, although some of the interest to the viewer nowadays is more ironic than iconic. Little did she know that in the shots from the Fuehrer's aeroplane she was preserving a roofscape of ancient Nuremburg that would be destroyed for ever by the war that followed the rule of this self-proclaimed 'man of peace'; or how many of the cheering boys would die in the snows of Stalingrad, and the country girls in their folk costumes starve on acorns and roots...
The style of the film's opening is largely that of the silent era: events are introduced and participants characterised without dialogue, as -- in scenes reminiscent of a Royal Wedding or Jubilee procession -- Hitler arrives at a Nuremburg decked for the occasion, and the waiting crowds burst into a fervour of excitement as they catch sight of the main attraction, in a swell of cheers and waves that break out ahead of his car and ebb away behind. (Empathising with my own experience, I couldn't help wondering just how long they had been waiting under the sun for those brief glimpses in return for their day out!) By the time we reach the hotel tastefully decked out with lightbulbs spelling 'HEIL Hitler', the adulation has been thoroughly established. After a torchlight mass serenade, the most interesting part of the film starts.
Here we get a backstage insight, as it were, into the human organisation required to assemble those faceless marching masses: the vast soup-kettles, the volume of wood that has to be hauled, the tents and troughs and links of sausages, the shoulder-jousting and tomfoolery of the young men -- not just 'evil' Nazis, but cheerful, fallible individuals living for the moment and enjoying the novelty of their camp under canvas. The proceedings of the congress itself are represented by clips from many speakers (one could feel a collective stir across the cinema when Goebbels was captioned, as I suspect he was the only 1934 Party official most of us had heard of...) which have an oddly inward-looking air: one gets the feeling of eavesdropping on private party policy.
This is the Nazi Party looking out at Germany rather than preaching to her directly -- which makes me curious as to the intended purpose of this film. It feels to me like a production intended for 'inside' viewing rather than for national distribution, an impression that with hindsight I think partly derives from the way that the speeches deal openly with how the Party should manipulate and lead the German people, and partly from the determination to show absolutely everything in the subsequent parade -- frankly it reminds me of official videos of school plays, where the photographer has to make certain that every single parent will get at least one close-up of their own child. I have an irreverent mental image of the SS, the SA, the cavalry, the 'Arbeit-Soldaten', and every other unit in that interminable march, all sitting through the entire film just waiting for their own individual moment of glory...
The famous massed movement sequences, I'm afraid, leave me cold. They remind me of nothing so much as experimental abstract film, a curiosity as an art-form for five minutes or so but with nothing really to hold the interest for long periods: an idea of this section of the Congress could have been given via a few illustrative sequences in very much less of the time. And the march-past, as mentioned above, becomes simply tedious: did people -- other than those involved -- really sit and watch this stuff in adoration? It's one thing to line the streets in anticipation of spectacle and cheer when something actually turns up to amuse you, but TV highlights are always edited; and for good reason.
The shots of Hitler orating are interesting not for themselves, or their content -- you realise at the end of each utterance that what he has actually *said* is fairly vacuous -- but as an attempt to understand why he was said to be such a powerful speaker. I have to say that I just don't get it. This doesn't seem a man who can whip crowds to hysteria, or indeed -- even with all Riefensthal's efforts -- hold our attention. The crowds hail him because of what he represents rather than who he is, but how did he ever get there?
As a film, I didn't find this the work of mesmerising yet horrible genius I had been led to expect. Sections of it are artistic, sections intentionally entertaining, others unintentionally so. It is basically a silent documentary with interpolated speeches (we never hear any dialogue save the scripted exchanges -- all the 'spontaneous' glimpses are visual only), and the soundtrack, while inoffensive, is all on one brassy note and becomes fairly monotonous. If this is, as advertised, "widely regarded as the greatest propaganda film of all time", it doesn't actually seem to me terribly persuasive; and it could have been a lot more tightly edited. It's a record of self-congratulation by the Nazi Party in their years of ripe ascendancy, and of interest mainly as such.
Leni Riefensthal does her best to create art and entertainment out of the unpromising material of a Party Congress -- compare, for example, the challenge of depicting the sycophantic speeches, party hacks and troop-rousing at Brighton or Bournemouth in the modern-day party conference season -- and initially at least succeeds, although some of the interest to the viewer nowadays is more ironic than iconic. Little did she know that in the shots from the Fuehrer's aeroplane she was preserving a roofscape of ancient Nuremburg that would be destroyed for ever by the war that followed the rule of this self-proclaimed 'man of peace'; or how many of the cheering boys would die in the snows of Stalingrad, and the country girls in their folk costumes starve on acorns and roots...
The style of the film's opening is largely that of the silent era: events are introduced and participants characterised without dialogue, as -- in scenes reminiscent of a Royal Wedding or Jubilee procession -- Hitler arrives at a Nuremburg decked for the occasion, and the waiting crowds burst into a fervour of excitement as they catch sight of the main attraction, in a swell of cheers and waves that break out ahead of his car and ebb away behind. (Empathising with my own experience, I couldn't help wondering just how long they had been waiting under the sun for those brief glimpses in return for their day out!) By the time we reach the hotel tastefully decked out with lightbulbs spelling 'HEIL Hitler', the adulation has been thoroughly established. After a torchlight mass serenade, the most interesting part of the film starts.
Here we get a backstage insight, as it were, into the human organisation required to assemble those faceless marching masses: the vast soup-kettles, the volume of wood that has to be hauled, the tents and troughs and links of sausages, the shoulder-jousting and tomfoolery of the young men -- not just 'evil' Nazis, but cheerful, fallible individuals living for the moment and enjoying the novelty of their camp under canvas. The proceedings of the congress itself are represented by clips from many speakers (one could feel a collective stir across the cinema when Goebbels was captioned, as I suspect he was the only 1934 Party official most of us had heard of...) which have an oddly inward-looking air: one gets the feeling of eavesdropping on private party policy.
This is the Nazi Party looking out at Germany rather than preaching to her directly -- which makes me curious as to the intended purpose of this film. It feels to me like a production intended for 'inside' viewing rather than for national distribution, an impression that with hindsight I think partly derives from the way that the speeches deal openly with how the Party should manipulate and lead the German people, and partly from the determination to show absolutely everything in the subsequent parade -- frankly it reminds me of official videos of school plays, where the photographer has to make certain that every single parent will get at least one close-up of their own child. I have an irreverent mental image of the SS, the SA, the cavalry, the 'Arbeit-Soldaten', and every other unit in that interminable march, all sitting through the entire film just waiting for their own individual moment of glory...
The famous massed movement sequences, I'm afraid, leave me cold. They remind me of nothing so much as experimental abstract film, a curiosity as an art-form for five minutes or so but with nothing really to hold the interest for long periods: an idea of this section of the Congress could have been given via a few illustrative sequences in very much less of the time. And the march-past, as mentioned above, becomes simply tedious: did people -- other than those involved -- really sit and watch this stuff in adoration? It's one thing to line the streets in anticipation of spectacle and cheer when something actually turns up to amuse you, but TV highlights are always edited; and for good reason.
The shots of Hitler orating are interesting not for themselves, or their content -- you realise at the end of each utterance that what he has actually *said* is fairly vacuous -- but as an attempt to understand why he was said to be such a powerful speaker. I have to say that I just don't get it. This doesn't seem a man who can whip crowds to hysteria, or indeed -- even with all Riefensthal's efforts -- hold our attention. The crowds hail him because of what he represents rather than who he is, but how did he ever get there?
As a film, I didn't find this the work of mesmerising yet horrible genius I had been led to expect. Sections of it are artistic, sections intentionally entertaining, others unintentionally so. It is basically a silent documentary with interpolated speeches (we never hear any dialogue save the scripted exchanges -- all the 'spontaneous' glimpses are visual only), and the soundtrack, while inoffensive, is all on one brassy note and becomes fairly monotonous. If this is, as advertised, "widely regarded as the greatest propaganda film of all time", it doesn't actually seem to me terribly persuasive; and it could have been a lot more tightly edited. It's a record of self-congratulation by the Nazi Party in their years of ripe ascendancy, and of interest mainly as such.