Triumph of the Will

A record of the Nazi party congress held at Nuremberg in 1934. A plane descends through cloud, the city appears below, a crowd waits. Then come the parades, the speeches, the torches, the night assemblies. There is no narrative and no event, only the image of an organised spectacle. This is not a documentary but propaganda itself. The congress was designed partly so that the film could be made: platforms, tracks and lighting were built in advance. The camera is not recording what happened; it is shooting something staged to be recorded. The subject is not politics but the crowd being presented as a single body. People are shot from above, in ranks, symmetrically; individual faces are almost absent. The leader is filmed consistently from below. Those two choices do all of the film's political work. More than thirty cameras and a large technical crew were used. Leni Riefenstahl spent later years defending herself as merely an artist; the defence was widely rejected and the argument continues. The formal influence is not denied, but what the form was used for cannot be separated from it. In Germany screenings are conditional on educational and historical context. Who it is for: people studying propaganda technique and film history. Who it is not for: anyone thinking of watching it as a film; this is evidence of how a regime constructed itself and should be watched only in that context.