Triumph des Willens

Leni Riefenstahl  (1935)

The BFI screening was introduced by Toby Haggith, Curator at the Imperial War Museum Film and Video Archive.  Haggith wasn’t the most confident speaker and, as he acknowledged, went on too long – but fair enough:  he had a great many interesting things to say.  He was likeably candid too:  in his admission that he found the film difficult to watch largely because it was so protracted; in his scepticism about Leni Riefenstahl’s post hoc efforts to distance herself from the regime which Triumph of the Will memorialises (she reckons she didn’t know what the Nazis were about).   Haggith talked about the copies of the film held by the Imperial War Museum under the Enemy Property Act and the attempts by Riefenstahl’s lawyers very near the end of her long life to assert ownership of these.  He explained that it was Riefenstahl rather than the Nazi high command who had worked hardest for her to be involved in filming the 1934 Nuremberg Rally.  The extract from Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947), which formed the BFI programme note, took a rather different view before going on to describe the extent to which the rally was staged with an eye to Riefenstahl’s capturing it on film.

At the start of Triumph of the Will, Hitler’s plane materialises, in pompously messianic fashion, from the clouds on its descent into Nuremberg.  Throughout the film, Riefenstahl and Sepp Allgeier, who headed the large photographic team, regularly use a God’s-eye view to impressive effect – not only in shots of military marching formations but also in the way the camera looks down on the massed tents of the Hitler youth assembled for the rally, and in order to convey the vast depth of the hall in which the Nazi leaders deliver their speeches.  The non-aerial camerawork is no less remarkable, picking up the statuary and the medieval buildings of Nuremberg, with swastikas fluttering from them, to convey an impression of historical unity, of the sustained and sustaining spirit of the Fatherland.   Yet I ended up agreeing with Toby Haggith that much of the film is tedious.  If you know (even if you haven’t seen it) that Triumph of the Will is an aestheticised, propagandistic distillation of the Nuremberg Rally, you assume that the film’s opening self-description as a ‘record’ of the event is highly disingenuous.  And so it is, to an extent, yet it often doesn’t feel that way:  the endless parades and marches sometimes go on so long that you seem to be experiencing the event in real time.  I’d guess I’m more antipathetic than many to military displays and party conferences and even to being in an audience that voices its unanimity – but, while I stayed the course, there were several walkouts from NFT1, and in the latter stages of the film’s 110 minutes:  I did wonder if people couldn’t take any more because they were bored rather than outraged.   At the end, I couldn’t honestly remember if I’d seen Triumph in its entirety before.  This amnesia makes me feel guilty.

I remember during or shortly after Watergate reading a piece in which the writer described the faces of the chief culprits in the Nixon administration as reminding him of those of figures symbolising evil in medieval religious art.  The writer (I can’t remember who it was) implied that he was surprised to be saying this, that in the real world we don’t expect people to be expressionist studies of their souls.  You get a similar impression watching the various speakers who take the stand at Nuremberg:  the banality of evil isn’t much in evidence here.  We may be watching the usual suspects with the benefit of hindsight; even so, they mostly – the less well-known ones anyway – have a well-fed, thuggish similarity that’s powerfully oppressive.  In this company, the three distinctive figures are the lean-and-hungry-looking Goebbels; Hess, physically imposing in a less brutal way than the others and whose dark, burning-eyed zealotry is disquieting not least because he also suggests a more complex personality; and Hitler himself who, as always, appears to be an utterly implausible embodiment of the collective desires of his devotees.

The soundtrack in the assembly hall is astonishing.  To me, a German sporting crowd voicing passionate support or cheering a victory makes a particular noise – but perhaps it’s the crowds at the Nuremberg rallies that make me feel this.  The noise, a kind of deep-seated bellowing, is frightening because it sounds both masterful and irrational.  By contrast, the Nazi oratory here often seems not only stale but vocally forced.  The delivery of the speeches gets top marks for high-decibel vigour but not for anything else.  There are the dim reversals (‘The state did not create us:  we created the state!’), the increasingly predictable symmetries (‘Hitler is Germany and Germany is Hitler!’).  It’s the odd, humanly real facet of the rally that, after a while, starts to make more impression than the film’s iconography.  The Nazi leaders had little faith in microphones:  you start thinking how hoarse Hitler must have made himself yelling for so long, so often.

Toby Haggith described the first television screening of the film in 1992 and the discussion that preceded it.  The participants included George Steiner, who described Triumph of the Will as the only piece of Nazi art to stand the test of time.   While I’m not able to judge the scale of Riefenstahl’s technical innovation and achievement, you can’t fail to be impressed by the metamorphosis of flags into a shimmering sea or of marching hordes into geometric patterns and back to uniform(ed) men again (even if Busby Berkeley had been doing the same kind of thing with chorines before Triumph of the Will was made).  What’s more arguable is how effective the film was – and indeed how much it was used by the Nazis – as propaganda.  The Wikipedia article suggests differences of opinion about this among film historians and I was struck by Haggith’s suggestion that Triumph didn’t need to be brilliant propaganda because the Nazis had already and overwhelmingly won the political arguments in Germany.

Watching the film made me wonder if it was Teutonism as well as Nazism that I felt hostile towards.  The ‘light-hearted’ scenes of the Nazi campers engaging in physical rough and tumble are among the most gruesome – and the mixture of sugar and martiality in the tunes we hear is a German characteristic that has survived well beyond the death of the Third Reich.   As Toby Haggith promised, the film was followed by a three-minute piece of Allied propaganda, with clips from Triumph of the Will, scored by the Lambeth Walk, put together to make fun of the goose-stepping soldiers, Hitler et al.  The effect was genuinely comic – and a tonic.   I usually feel a resistance to audience applause at BFI (cf yesterday’s viewing of The Chalk Garden) but on this occasion I fully sympathised – even if I didn’t join in.

13 October 2010