Triumph of the Will

The history of cinema is full of dark ironies. One of them can be found in the life and career of Leni Riefenstahl, the German director who is both the best-known and the most infamous female filmmaker that ever lived. Much of her infamy was due to her 1935 film Triumph of the Will, one of the most important documentaries ever made, known as the most influential piece of on-screen propaganda in history.

The film depicts events that took place in the city of Nuremberg in September 1934, when the National Socialist Workers’ Party (NSDAP) held its sixth national congress. It was the second such event held since its leader, Adolf Hitler, came to power as Chancellor in January 1933. Following intertitles reminding the audience how much time has passed since the start of the Great War, Germany’s defeat and the “German rebirth” brought by Hitler’s ascendancy, the film starts with Hitler flying to the city and driving from the airport to his hotel, being greeted by tens of thousands of cheering citizens and Party members. The next day, massive rallies with hundreds of thousands of participants are held, which include reviews and parades of the Party’s paramilitary forces from the SA and SS, the Hitler Youth, the Reich Labour Service (RAD) and the 18th Cavalry Regiment of the Reichswehr, Germany’s regular military. Hitler and a number of top Nazi leaders hold speeches at night, concluding on the fifth day when Hitler claims that “all loyal Germans will become National Socialists” and “only the best National Socialists will become Party comrades”.

Triumph of the Will is a film that is always going to be burdened by the fact it advances a cause considered to be the vilest in all of history and praises a man considered the embodiment of absolute and irredeemable evil. An even bigger problem for Riefenstahl’s film comes from that task being done so effectively. From today’s perspective, Triumph of the Will, which like almost all films at the time was completed in black-and-white, might not look like something special, but by the standards of the 1930s it represented quite an achievement. That is not so surprising, considering that Leni Riefenstahl was already an accomplished filmmaker and had won Hitler’s favour with her mountain films like Blue Light. What Riefenstahl achieved in this film was to use most of the technical resources of UFA, Germany’s formidable film studio, to fuse propaganda with an exciting and breathtaking feature film. Riefenstahl’s main trick was to stage the actual happenings on the streets, in halls, stadiums and exercise grounds of Nuremberg in such a way that they look as impressive on screen as possible. In this, she had Hitler as her most valuable associate. The politician, whose rise to dictatorial power was in many ways a consequence of his charisma, rhetorical skills and meticulously practised stage appearances, was the nearly perfect star for Riefenstahl’s film. All this is achieved despite Hitler appearing relatively briefly in the film and giving few and not particularly memorable speeches. They are overshadowed by the scenes of hundreds of thousands of Nazis marching, parading, singing and expressing their devotion to the Führer and his New Order. The most impressive is the scene when Hitler, flanked by SS leader Heinrich Himmler and SA leader Viktor Lutze, lays a wreath at a Great War memorial in the presence of 150,000 stormtroopers – an image of solemnity and power.

Riefenstahl, on the other hand, allows some lighter tones at the very beginning of the film, depicting masses of Hitler Youth goofing around their tents and having the time of their lives, making those scenes not that different from those seen decades later in Woodstock. Fun, however, was hardly on Hitler’s mind when he organised the rally and commissioned the film. He had become Chancellor recently and his grip on power was not as strong as it would be only a few years later. The biggest challenge had occurred only a few months earlier with factional struggles within the Party that ultimately resulted in the Night of the Long Knives, the bloody purge of SA leadership led by his old comrade Ernst Röhm – an event that is even indirectly addressed in the film. A reason for the new film was also that Riefenstahl had covered the previous rally a year earlier in The Victory of Faith, another documentary which quickly disappeared because Röhm’s presence in it was rather embarrassing for the regime. That film, which was for decades considered lost, served as a good template for Riefenstahl. A year later she would cover another rally in Nuremberg in the film Day of Freedom: Our Wehrmacht, which, among other things, celebrated Hitler’s decision to defy the arms limitations set by the Versailles Treaty.

Riefenstahl’s film was quite a box office success in Germany and it helped maintain Hitler’s cult of personality among Germans and the perception of him as a national saviour who ended the violence and economic turmoil of the Weimar Republic, restored order, erased the humiliations of Versailles, and was leading Germany into a new glorious era of might and prosperity. The negative aspects of Hitler’s rule, like the brutal secret police, concentration camps, racism and institutional anti-Semitism that would ultimately evolve into the Holocaust, cannot be seen in Triumph of the Will. Riefenstahl was arrested and blacklisted as a Nazi propagandist after the war, but she spent most of her life claiming that she knew nothing of the atrocities against Jews. Her claims might be backed by the fact that the film does not contain explicit anti-Semitic content, nor are Jews mentioned directly (although Julius Streicher, the most notorious anti-Semite among the top Nazi leadership, who was after the Second World War hanged at Nuremberg for inciting genocide, appears in the film).

If Triumph of the Will is compared with The Birth of a Nation, another “problematic” cinema classic, D. W. Griffith’s work from two decades earlier looks much more dangerous with its openly racist attitudes and hostility towards “wrong” people. Riefenstahl was, in a way, fortunate to make those films at a time when Hitler’s Germany was still relatively weak and still had to rearm before engaging in violent conquests. The Third Reich still needed to reassure the rest of the world that its intentions were reasonable and peaceful, an effort that was two years later culminated with the Berlin Olympics, covered by Riefenstahl in Olympia, another classic documentary which, unlike Triumph of the Will, did not gain much infamy.

Although primarily made for a German audience, Triumph of the Will was shown outside of Germany. There, for obvious reasons, it did not have the same propaganda impact, but it nevertheless proved to be quite influential. Some of the people who took it very seriously were filmmakers, including those with a reputation as staunch anti-Nazis. They recognised it as an effective and very dangerous piece of propaganda that they should try to counter in different ways. Some, like Charlie Chaplin, used some of its iconography as inspiration to mock Hitler and the Nazis in The Great Dictator. Others, like Frank Capra, were convinced that Nazi propaganda must be refuted with propaganda of its own, resulting in the famous series of WWII-era documentaries Why We Fight. Riefenstahl’s film continued to influence filmmakers even after the end of Hitler and Nazism. Its narrative technique, editing, iconography and other methods of psychological manipulation were adopted by various filmmakers for various purposes, ranging from Hollywood directors in search of “cool” images to those trying to sell commercial products. Because of that, there are traces of Triumph of the Will in many things we watch and take for granted today, but it takes a keen eye and good knowledge of history to be aware of it. Yet, it is almost certain that Leni Riefenstahl would have liked to earn her place in cinema history in a different way.

RATING: 7/10 (+++)

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