Eighty-five years ago today, the National Socialist Party was midway through its hugely successful rally at Nuremberg — the Reichsparteitag des Willens, or Rally of the Will. Unlike previous get-togethers, the 1934 rally would produce a hit movie, one that cinéastes still watch with appalled fascination to this day. Its creator was a brilliant cinematographer and editor who could compose and edit anything — except, in the end, her own life. If only she’d been able to snip one problematic decade out of her 101 years, we’d know Leni Riefenstahl as a game old gal who in her sixties went off to live with an African tribe, in her seventies learned to scuba dive, and at the age of 98 survived a plane crash in the Sudan. There was a documentary made about her a few years back in which she’s seen getting off the boat at the end of a day’s diving. The captain and her friend Horst walk up the pier ahead of her, lost in conversation. She follows behind, carrying her scuba gear and oxygen tank. She’s 92, and it never occurs to either man to give her a hand. They don’t think of her as a woman or as a nonagenarian.
Ah, if only it weren’t for that awkward patch …
In the 1930s, Fräulein Riefenstahl put her formidable film-making talents to the cause of the Third Reich, and, after attending the Reichsparteitag des Willens in 1934, produced one of the most remarkable films ever made: Triumph Of The Will.
Go back to that scuba-diving disembarkation scene in Ray Müller’s The Wonderful Horrible Life Of Leni Riefenstahl. In theory, it could all be a setup, and the participants chewed over how best to do it beforehand and did fifteen takes: anyone who’s worked in documentaries knows how phony the whole business is. But the point is it seems careless — as if it happened, and the camera happened to be there to record it.
There’s no sense of that in any frame of Triumph Of The Will. Granted that audiences were a lot less media savvy in 1934, and granted that a people dumb enough to fall for National Socialism will fall for anything, it’s still hard to believe that even in its day anyone accepted what remained Fräulein Riefenstahl’s official explanation to the end — that this was just a “documentary record” of the 1934 annual party convention. Early on, we see the Führer‘s motorcade driving through Nuremberg, with what seems like the entire citizenry jammed on to the streets to greet him. Riefenstahl’s camera shoots Hitler (if you’ll forgive the expression) from directly behind him, a sequence which for some reason always reminds me of Gore Vidal’s boast that only very famous people such as himself know what the back of their heads look like. There’s a fabulous moment when the great man — Adolf, not Gore — is responding to the Hitler salutes offered up by the crowds with his campy little elbow-bend and wrist-flip and, as his Mercedes moves forward, the sun catches his fingers and fills the palm, first bathing it in glory and then making it appear as if the Führer‘s hand is the very source of the sunlight itself. Did the director just get lucky? Did the sun just happen to hit? Seconds later, we cut to a long shot of Hitler in the Mercedes continuing down the street. There’s no camera in the car, although the scene we’ve just witnessed could only have been filmed by someone in the back seat. Another minute goes by, and we’re back to the close-up of the Führer‘s neck.
Did she stop the car, get out and film the long shot, and then get back in? Did Leni get Adolf to do re-takes? Or maybe she made the entire population of Nuremberg re-take the scene; maybe they staged the procession twice. If Hitler was unusually agreeable about taking direction, it was because this was never a filmed record of an event so much as an event created for the film. Whatever Triumph Of The Will is, it’s not a documentary. Its language is that of feature films — not Warner Brothers gangster movies or John Ford westerns, but rather the supersized genres, the epics and musicals where huge columns of the great unwieldy messy mass of humanity get tidied and organized — and, if that isn’t the essence of totalitarianism, what is? Riefenstahl has the same superb command of the crowd as Busby Berkeley, the same flair for human geometry (though Berkeley would have drawn the line at giving the gentlemen of the chorus as swishy a parade step as Hitler’s personal SS bodyguard do).
Mark Steyn, “Triumph of the Will”, SteynOnline, 2019-09-07.
October 29, 2023
QotD: Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will
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