Triumph of the Will

After class on Wednesday I was thinking about Triumph of the Will...

Throughout the entire film I was thinking about how much it reminded me of Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin. I realize this is an interesting contrast - the two films are essentially two sides of the exact same coin. Triumph of the Will represents the power and polish of a totalitarian government. Like any piece of brilliant propaganda, it shows the public what it is supposed to think. Hitler himself called the film, an "incomparable glorification of the power and beauty of our Movement." The same holds true with Battleship Potemkin - it too is propaganda that feeds the public an image. This image is, however, the opposite image that Triumph of the Will portrays; it shows a crippling, murderous government. Reifenstahl's film uses a more sophisticated visual language - it is more refined, eloquent , and poised. While Eisenstein's film is more rough, crude, and vulgar. Both, however, are using the same tools to tell their story. One has the poor helpless people who are oppressed by their government and the other has a triumphant and admirable government leading its people to their rightful place in the world - or so the propaganda would suggest. I just thought that although the film language used in these two films are very different, they reminded me of each other...

Consequently I read that it took 6 months to edit Triumph of the Will, and that the actual running time of the film only represents around 3% of the footage that Riefenstahl actually shot (imdb.com). I also thought it was interesting to note that Steven Spielberg used a nearly identical shot from another one of Reifenstahl's Nazi films called Tag der Freiheit - Unsere Wehrmacht. Spielberg opened and closed his film, Saving Private Ryan, with a shot of an American Flag blowing in the wind backlit by the sun - giving the flag a translucent quality. This was done by Reifenstahl with the Nazi flag in her 1935 film - how ironic. Consequently Reifenstahl died in 2003 at the age of 101. She was quoted as saying, "I filmed the truth as it was then. Nothing more..."

The "truth" she filmed was heavily edited to make it seem like absolute truth which was then fed to the German people - it was a beautifully shot trap. A trap which nearly all of Germany bought and then fell into; it really was a deadly type of language...