Free Sample Essays > European History
Was “Triumph of the Will” a documentary or propaganda
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, and impress an audience which was not necessarily interested in politics.”
In an interview in 1964, reprinted in A Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema by David Thomson, Riefenstahl made clear that she felt “Triumph of the Will” was a recording of an event, not a propaganda film, said, “If you see this film again today you ascertain that it doesn't contain a single reconstructed scene. Everything in it is true. And it contains no tendentious commentary at all. It is history. A pure historical film... it is film-vérité. It reflects the truth that was then in 1934, history. It is therefore a documentary. Not a propaganda film. Oh! I know very well what propaganda is. That consists of recreating events in order to illustrate a thesis, or, in the face of certain events, to let one thing go in order to accentuate another. I found myself, me, at the heart of an event which was the reality of a certain time and a certain place.
My film is composed of what stemmed from that.”
It cannot be denied that “Triumph of the Will” is a record of an event. It is a film of an actuality and happened when and where the film says it did. In an account of the making of the film, Riefenstahl writes that she was involved in the Rally's planning - and conceived the event with filming in mind. As Susan Sontag (a revered novelist and director) reiterates in her article entitled ‘Fascinating Fascism’: “The Rally was planned not only as a spectacular mass meeting, but as a spectacular propaganda film.” However, by 1993 in The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, Riefenstahl claimed that she was not involved in the design of the Rally - "I just observed and tried to film it well. The idea that I helped to plan it is downright absurd."
The film was financed by the Nazi Government, commissioned by Hitler himself, completed with the full cooperation of all involved, with huge resources at her disposal - an unlimited budget, crew of 120 and between 30 and 40 cameras. It stands as a powerful artistic representation of the ideas in Hitler's book Mein Kampf - work, extreme nationalism, and belief in corporative state socialism, a private army, a youth cult, and the use of propaganda and the submission of all decisions to the supreme leader, i.e. himself. The film, however, reached and influenced far more [next page]