Triumph of the Will, the 1934 film directed by Leni Riefensthal, works not only as a propaganda film about Hitler and those who followed him but a guide to codes of masculinity, the nature of spectacle, how the then nascent medium of film could be used to manipulate audiences, how fascism was beautiful and how that beauty led to both the contemporary cult of male athleticism, and the industries of advertising and public relations.
Perhaps it would be helpful to clarify terms and positions before we get to the meat of this paper. I use code as defined by Barthes, and explained by JVA Cuddon, in the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Theory, namely that it is "a cultures system of signification through which reality is mediated" (143)--here I would argue the reality mediated depends less on time and place, and more on audience intention. It cannot be denied that that the authorial intentions of this text were in line with the intentions of fascism, namely power, order, control and the elimination of a dissenting other, and in some ways these intentions are determined by time and place, but this does not mean that the text has not been used in other places, for other purposes.
There are no dead texts, or to put it another way, a text can be revived when it needs to be, for a variety of aesthetic and political purposes. When a text is revived outside of its specific location it mutates. With this film, it is impossible to revise it straight, the Nazis are so evil, its functional lessons are extracted, and the movie can not quoted directly. This essay then has two parts, the first is a discussion of how the film was made, its purposes and intentions, and its history in a context of Third Reich Germany. The second is an exploration of the history of the film after it left the Nazis hands, and how it's themes and meanings have broken with the past and moved into present day spheres.
The background to film in the Third Reich is a good window to the specifics of Refiensthal's films. Josef Goebbels was given permission by Hitler to deal with the raw work of propaganda from music to art exhibits to posters to radio broadcasts. He especially enjoyed film, and made a point of visiting movie makers, watching the productions of his film studios, and even editing the news reels that were required by law to appear before every film projected. This does not mean that Hitler did not know the power of film and did not attempt to control it through Goebbels. Ernest K Bramsted's exhaustive study "Goebbels and National Socialist Propaganda" elucidates the four goals that Hitler had for film, saying that "Hitler looked upon the film as a major instrument of effective propaganda because of its four specific qualities: 1) subjective emotional appeal; 2)limitation of contents; 3) possibility of using it through out the world to illustrate the fighting attitude and 4) continuous and uniform repetition" (66), these four points could very much be considered a guide to the structures of Riefensthal's film: the movie has no narrative thrust. There is rarely a shot that is longer then 12 seconds. The whole film is intended to rise emotionally to a kind of mania. There is no time or space made for emotion to be replaced, and no engaging of the intellect. As well the film is a closed text, with no ambiguity in the symbolism or intentions. For example Hitler, is put behind a series of clouds, fogs, mists, and filmed so that he towers over the audience---there is only one way of looking at Hitler except as a Nietzschean Superman, a minor god that will bring all that is good about Germany back from humiliation and shame. Triumph of the Will was shown mostly with in Germany, but her next film Olympia, made of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and nearly 4 hours long, was used as a demonstration throughout the world as an example of the strength of Aryan Will. The last element on Bramsted's list is patently obvious. There is much repeating of abstract pattern (for example: soldiers goose stepping, boys at play, close examination of uniforms, panning across rooftops, and early morning callaesthetics ) that is often connected as imagery but rarely connected narratively.
The power of her work might have taken over Riefensthal herself. She claimed that she did nothing wrong, that she would have done anything to maintain her role as a film maker, that she did not know what was happening in the concentration camps, and all that she made was documentaries. She also claimed that she was cleared from any wrong doing in denazifaction hearings, done by the americans in 1948 and 1952. She also has said that Olympia was not commissioned by the Nazis, that Goebbels hated her, and that all she ever wanted to do was make beautiful films. All of this was placed in context by Susan Sontag, in her essay, Fascinating Fascism, for the February 6, 1976, New York Review of Books, and later collected in Under the Sign of Saturn.
Is it possible that Triumph of the Will was so seductive that it convinced not only the viewers in Nazi Germany, but the creator itself ? It is possible that she did everything she could to make her art and she might have been blind in that way. But she did order Romany prisoners to work as extras in Triefland, her romance completed after the war. She was only partially cleared in the 1948 hearing, and she asked for the 1952 hearing so that she could work again. The claims about beauty and documentaries are more difficult to parse.
The problem of calling this documentary is that this is a filmed spectacle, accurately reflecting the purpose of the event. The event was stage managed, with sets constructed by Hitlers architect Alfred Speer, and featuring mass seduction. Her depections of this are similar to the words of the SS commanders, she was only following orders. How could she have opened a set of symbols, that was closed by everyone else involved, from the soldiers on up to the chief commander himself. The whole event is managed like a Hollywood set and so it becomes an accurate depiction of a gross simulacra. The kind of film making that Riefensthal does is similar to the work of DW Griffiths and Cecil B. DeMille. They gave the audience what it demanded, they hid politics into films that had casts of thousands, and they used the founding myths of nationhood as fodder for public entertainments. In the case of Griffiths, there is the additional similarity in terms of racial politics. .
In a 1964 Cahier du Cinema article , quoted by Sontag, Riefensthal says "I can simply say that I feel spontaneously attracted by everything that is beautiful. Yes beauty, harmony... it comes from the unconscious and not from my knowledge." The film is gorgeous and harmonic. If this was her stated goals, and if the movie was not about Nazis, then it would be viewed as a piece of unmitigated genius. That the work can be clearly formalist, and away from any sort of content is a lesson that will come in handy for other sources.
There are other matters that make the film beautiful--there is the cult of male beauty and athleticism, the cult of authority, the harmonics of order and power, and the nature of spectacle to entertain rather then give specific information. There are very few shots of speeches, even though the work is about a rally--there is no long medium length shots where Goebbels or Hitler or Goering tell people about chickens in every pot or the devolepment of the autobahn. What is shocking about this film then, is that for a movie about Fascism is the lack of demagoguery.
The beauty comes from somewhere, and goes somewhere. It is meant to be aspirational, and to reflect moral goals. To be beautiful in this film is to be a solider, or to be prepared to be a solider. To be a solider is to be obedient, to be good, to be clean, well pressed and ready to give ones life for a cause. It is also to be a cog in a machine, part of a larger whole. Aesthetic order is a good indication of moral order, and to be a good citizen is to be a good son, a good German, a good Christian and a good member of the populace. In the third scene of the film shots of roofs of houses, all in a row, and all immaculate--are quickly cut to show men at work. All of this is holistic. Those who cause disorder are made ugly--not in this film, but the goal of Nazi Propaganada is to work together, for example the rally is made to work with the film, the radio broadcasts are used to advertise both. There is synergy. So that the jews are depicted as grotesque, as filthy, as improper, as bad citizens, bad fathers, bad children and ugly to boot.
This comes close to home, all of what has been written about Triumph of the Will can be written about today's commercial culture. There is today still a cult of male beauty and athleticism, the cult of authority, the harmonics of order and power, and the nature of spectacle to entertain rather then give specific information. But it is intended to sell late capitalism, rather then fascism. John Ralston Saul talks about it in his entry on the film in The Doubters Companion:A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense saying "Calvin Klein sells underwear with muscular young people who aren't wearing any. Diet Coke shows their bottle against the photo of a crowd of intense marathon swimmers about to race way. The only words are "TASTE IT." As with the Brownshirts having boyish fun, the product, the images and the words have no relationship. The non-linear suggestion, which avoids all the burdens of proof and argument is that , is that wearing Calvin Klein underwear will make you beautiful..." (295)
There is truth in what Saul says and one can note that truth with a simple look at examples from our culture. We worship the athlete, note every statistic, take over large sections of the newspaper and television for them. The athletes play for us. Although there may be precedents in Roman gladiatorial Combat, making the athlete the center of our cults comes very much from Riefensthal. Look at her Olympia of 1936 was the first harbinger of the Olympics today, with the massive bureaucracy hidden by spectacles of opening and closing ceremonies, of world cities begging to host these things, of public stage sets being built to house them. They wear Nike, the classical fetishization of Hitler being recast. She is our godess, but the victory in question is one of commerce.
This commerce is also built around the cult of male beauty. Saul mentions Calvin Klein, with his men that have perfect lines, and no voices. They are often "rescued" from the working classes, one can think of Mark Walhberg, from South Boston who was unconnected to any talent, but who was was so beautiful that he deserved a billboard in Times Square. There are also the ads for Abercrombie and Fitch, shot by Bruce Weber, who has never met an Ayran frat boy he didn't like. His images of leisure do not sell clothes, but the idea that one can have or be the frat boy in question, with the correct outfit. There is no ideology to these texts, no content at all. There was an ideology, however negative, to the cult in Triumph of the Will, the abstraction of meaning was made for a purpose.
The authority mentioned in Triumph of the Will was one that attempted at political legitimacy. Think of it as a promotional video to sell a war, without mentioning the natural consequences---from dead bodies to economic feasibility. In his 1983 book Simulations, Baudillard talked about a world that had copies but no models, and how we view war combines Riefensthals poetic avoidance of violence with Baudillard's discussions around the lack of models. Look at the latest war we are mired in--Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction--but George W. Bush has said they might have. Iraq did not fund Al Qaeda, but Bush keeps telling us he did. The president was disciplined for going AWOL on a National Guard base in Texas during Vietnam but he flies a fighter plane onto an air craft carrier to announce that the war is over, when it obviously is not. All of these heavily staged media events hide big lies, a lesson that Triumph of the Will teaches well.
The harmonics of order in Triumph of the Will, relate to contemporary aesthetics as well. Nothing is out of place, there is no chaos, and there is nothing that deviates from standard lines. Think of Disney World, with its elaborate musical numbers on pristine stages directed by people called cast members. Or pop music where sex, death, love, destruction, and chaos are excised, replaced with a template of proper movement. We have given up our lives to spectacle, to the image of the thing rather then the thing itself. We watch television that fakes documentary as much as well as Riefensthal did, we eat food that has not seen a farm for most of its production. We live in a service economy among the ghosts of mechanical and industrial production.
Triumph of the Will was created to ignore the realities of the day, to ignore that loving Hitler made you complacent in the destruction of jews and other undesirables, that soldiers were not only handsome men that gave a sense of order but were trained killers and to worship them was to worship destruction and death. She did not note that people were starving, that they were suffering. She did not note that German Culture was more then Wagner, that the Weimar republic was as close to a workable socialist state as twentieth century humanity had come. She had no content, because the minute that content was introduced, then the text becomes open, and people can use it for themselves.
As Leonard Cohen says in his song Democracy, "It's coming from the feel that this ain't exactly real, or it's real, but it ain't exactly there". There is nothing real in Riefensthal, because having something real means having something that people can hold onto. If you are promised food or shelter or something else tangible then when you are not delivered it, you can rightfully be disappointed. It is not your fault. If you are promised something abstract, like honour or nationhood or love then the dissonance that occurs in translation can be explained by a lack of general understanding.
I do not want to suggest in this paper that we are now fascist or that Coca Cola and Calvin Klein are about to round up their competitors in box cars, but Reifensthal developed a new language that did not depend on any of the old forms. Her techniques are used because they are convincing. They require no thought, no ambiguity and no complexity. She replaced German folk culture with a new kind of mass media, a heavily mediated series of imagery that told the people what they wanted rather then vice versa. Popular culture then became more serious then a series of entertainments, it became a series of indoctrinations. There can be no audience participation, no burrowing under the meaning proscribed. We are sold to, and watching the film now, with knowledge of exactly what joining those crowds means, there is still seduction. There is a desire to be that handsome, that stalwart, to follow something so closely and believe in something so strongly. It is seductive. Popular Culture is seductive, it grabs the viewers heart, and genitals, and with those two safely in grasp it avoids the brain. To be aware of its machinations is to be aware of the consequences that follow.