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Triumph of the Will

(1935)

Architectural direction of the Nuremberg Rally: Albert Speer

The celebrated film by Leni Riefenstahl is of the 1934 sixth Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg. The romantic opening showing Hitler's arrival by air is one of the most famous sequences in film history. Many of the events of the congress are covered, though not in strict chronological order, because the rhythm of the film is intended to build up Hitler's personal image.
Susan Sontag has referred to the film as 'the most successfully, most purely propagandistic film ever made.'

What is Propaganda?

The word 'propaganda' derives from the name of an organisation set up in 1622 by the Roman Catholic church to carry on missionary work, the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (Congregatio de Propaganda Fide). Today propaganda is seen as the systematic effort to manipulate other people’s beliefs, attitudes or actions. The propagandist has a specified goal or set of goals and to achieve these he deliberately selects facts, arguments, images etc. to present them in the ways he believes will have the most persuasive effect.

The Power of Propaganda

Both Hitler and Goebbels, Hitler’s brilliant propaganda minister, believed that cinema was potentially the most powerful mass medium of the new age. Goebbels perceptively realised that the public had little appetite for Brownshirt cinema epics and therefore exploited the use of entertainment as film propaganda. The films commissioned by Goebbels were about the need to mentally and emotionally conquer the German people for the Nazi Revolution.

Propaganda had a key role in this task, but to achieve its objective it had to find ways to keep mass enthusiasm alive. Film art, Goebbels thought, could greatly contribute to this endeavour. Hence his admiration for Eisenstein’s Potemkin as the cinematic myth legitimising the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.’
Robert Wistrich ‘Weekend in Munich: Art, Propaganda and Terror in the Third Reich

In 1934 Hitler commissioned Leni Riefenstahl, the only director whom he believed came close to rivalling the work of Eisenstein, to produce an artistic film about the Party convention at Nuremberg, Triumph of the Will. In her book on the film, Riefenstahl notes that ‘The preparations for the Party convention were made in concert with the preparations for the camera work.’ In reality however, the rally was intended from the outset to be the stage for a spectacular piece of film propaganda glorifying Nazism.

Although 'Triumph of the Wil'l was indeed about the Nuremberg Party Congress, preparations for the rally were carefully constructed around the preparations for the film. The Third Reich’s architect, Albert Speer, carefully constructed the groundwork for the event, with grandiose building arrangements and precise plans for marches. The city of Nuremberg became a stage-set for Reifenstahl’s film, with a sea of swastika banners, bonfires and torches. Reifenstahl’s cinematic technique creates a sense of feverish movement and a seemingly endless array of banners and people.

'Triumph of the Will' is un-equalled as propaganda and is, according to the historian Professor Robert Wistrich ‘...the supreme visualisation in cinematic form of the Nazi political religion. Its artistry, reinforced by the grandeur and power of the Nuremberg decor, is designed to sweep us into empathetic identification with Hitler as a kind of human deity. The massive spectacle of regimentation, unity and loyalty to the Fuhrer powerfully conveys the message that the Nazi movement was the living symbol of the reborn German nation.’

The Making of the Film

During the making of the film, Leni Reifenstahl used thirty cameramen and over one hundred other technicians. Many special arrangements were made for the filming process, including the construction of lifts which could take cameramen up to a height of 120 feet and of concrete pits in front of the speakers’ platform; cameramen on roller-skates and elaborate tracking rails from which cameras could follow movement.

Leni Reifenstahl has always claimed, however, that she knew nothing of the objectives of the Nuremberg Rally and she describes the conception of the film as follows:

'Shortly after he came to power Hitler called me to see him and explained that he wanted a film about a Party Congress, and wanted me to make it. My first reaction was to say that I did not know anything about the way such a thing worked or the organisation of the Party, so that I would obviously photograph all the wrong things and please nobody - even supposing that I could make a documentary, which I had never yet done. Hitler said that this was exactly why he wanted me to do it: because anyone who knew all about the relative importance of the various people and groups and so on, might make a film that would be pedantically accurate, but this was not what he wanted. He wanted a film showing the congress through a non-expert eye, selecting just what was most artistically satisfying - in terms of spectacle, I suppose you might say. He wanted a film which would move, appeal to, impress an audience which was not necessarily interested in politics.'
Leni Reifenstahl
'In one form or another, directly or indirectly, all films are propagandist. The general public is influenced by every film it sees. The dual physio-psychological appeal of pictorial movement and sound is so strong that if it is made with imagination and skill, the film can stir the emotions of any audience.'
Paul Rotha
'Sometimes you have to lie. One often has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit.'
Robert Flaherty
Consider the following tasks in the light of the quotations above:
  • Think about how the historian would view Triumph of the Will. How valid do you think it is as an accurate portrayal of the Nazi rally at Nuremberg in 1934? If you do not think that it is an accurate record, is such a film useful to the historian in other ways?
  • At her trial after the war Leni Reifenstahl was acquitted of war crimes on the grounds that Triumph of the Will only depicted what other German newsreels of the time had also shown of Nuremberg and that she had not falsified or constructed anything in her film. In your opinion, does the film look like a newsreel or do you think that it has been arranged and shaped to affect the audience in a specific way?
  • What effect do you think that Triumph of the Will would have had on the audience when it was first screened?
  • For whom do you think the film was made?
  • Do you think that the film maker is unbiased towards the events that she is recording
  • What are the relationships between the images and the sound track in the film?
 

 

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