TRIUMPH OF THE WILL Movie Review

Triumph des Willens

“In all of my films there was … yes; let us say purity,” Leni Riefenstahl told Cahiers du Cinéma in 1965. “It repulses me so much to be faced with false men that it is a thing to which I have never been able to give artistic form.” Considering that she made that remark more than 30 years after creating one of the cinema's most infamous and evil masterworks, you've got to give Riefenstahl some credit. She's like the husband in the old Lenny Bruce routine whose wife walks in while the guy's having energetic sex with his secretary—and he simply denies it. Of course, in the bigger sense, Riefenstahl may not be lying at all; she's simply telling us that she feels no reason to be repulsed at having made this powerfully influential “documentary” record of the 1934 Nazi Party Rally, because there was nothing false or duplicitous about her boss and friend, Adolf Hitler. Riefenstahl is still invited to film festivals where her considerable talents as a filmmaker are celebrated, but it's more than simply an uncomfortable experience to watch this skillfully assembled Nazi recruiting poster, intricately choreographed and filmed by an army of cameramen all under Riefenstahl's command, and then to listen to film students and “scholars” politely applaud her entrance into the theatre as she—and they—proceed to separate the idea of “pure art” from its context, purpose, and consequences. This “purity” without responsibility is one of the cornerstones of Nazi ideology, and is still the basis for Riefenstahl's rationalization and selective memory regarding her pride in the creation of Triumph of the Will. Still content to have been “only following orders,” Riefenstahl is a living memorial to the denial of truth. Her film, which is filth, survives. She remains its proud creator.

NEXT STOP … Birthplace, Shoah, Night and Fog

1934 115m/B GE D: Leni Riefenstahl; W: Leni Riefenstahl; C: Sepp Allgeier; M: Herbert Windt. VHS NOS, VYY, BAR