I slapped a cute headline on a minor pop-culture controversy the other day, and Mark Steyn Club member Larry Jordan thought it "a bit obscure" and required some explanation - which prompted fellow Club member Fran Lavery to acknowledge she hadn't known a thing about what I was on about. So, for Fran & Co, and for my return to our Saturday movie beat (thank you to Kathy Shaidle), I thought I'd take a look at the prequel to what I breezily called "The Triumph of the Will & Grace". Here's the source of that punning title:
Eighty-five years ago today, the National Socialist Party was midway through its hugely successful rally at Nuremberg - the Reichsparteitag des Willens, or Rally of the Will. Unlike previous get-togethers, the 1934 rally would produce a hit movie, one that cinéastes still watch with appalled fascination to this day. Its creator was a brilliant cinematographer and editor who could compose and edit anything - except, in the end, her own life. If only she'd been able to snip one problematic decade out of her 101 years, we'd know Leni Riefenstahl as a game old gal who in her sixties went off to live with an African tribe, in her seventies learned to scuba dive, and at the age of 98 survived a plane crash in the Sudan. There was a documentary made about her a few years back in which she's seen getting off the boat at the end of a day's diving. The captain and her friend Horst walk up the pier ahead of her, lost in conversation. She follows behind, carrying her scuba gear and oxygen tank. She's 92, and it never occurs to either man to give her a hand. They don't think of her as a woman or as a nonagenarian.
Ah, if only it weren't for that awkward patch...
In the 1930s, Fräulein Riefenstahl put her formidable film-making talents to the cause of the Third Reich, and, after attending the Reichsparteitag des Willens in 1934, produced one of the most remarkable films ever made: Triumph Of The Will.
Go back to that scuba-diving disembarkation scene in Ray MĂĽller's The Wonderful Horrible Life Of Leni Riefenstahl. In theory, it could all be a setup, and the participants chewed over how best to do it beforehand and did fifteen takes: anyone who's worked in documentaries knows how phony the whole business is. But the point is it seems careless - as if it happened, and the camera happened to be there to record it.
There's no sense of that in any frame of Triumph Of The Will. Granted that audiences were a lot less media savvy in 1934, and granted that a people dumb enough to fall for National Socialism will fall for anything, it's still hard to believe that even in its day anyone accepted what remained Fräulein Riefenstahl's official explanation to the end - that this was just a "documentary record" of the 1934 annual party convention. Early on, we see the Führer's motorcade driving through Nuremberg, with what seems like the entire citizenry jammed on to the streets to greet him. Riefenstahl's camera shoots Hitler (if you'll forgive the expression) from directly behind him, a sequence which for some reason always reminds me of Gore Vidal's boast that only very famous people such as himself know what the back of their heads look like. There's a fabulous moment when the great man — Adolf, not Gore — is responding to the Hitler salutes offered up by the crowds with his campy little elbow-bend and wrist-flip and, as his Mercedes moves forward, the sun catches his fingers and fills the palm, first bathing it in glory and then making it appear as if the Führer's hand is the very source of the sunlight itself. Did the director just get lucky? Did the sun just happen to hit? Seconds later, we cut to a long shot of Hitler in the Mercedes continuing down the street. There's no camera in the car, although the scene we've just witnessed could only have been filmed by someone in the back seat. Another minute goes by, and we're back to the close-up of the Führer's neck.
Did she stop the car, get out and film the long shot, and then get back in? Did Leni get Adolf to do re-takes? Or maybe she made the entire population of Nuremberg re-take the scene; maybe they staged the procession twice. If Hitler was unusually agreeable about taking direction, it was because this was never a filmed record of an event so much as an event created for the film. Whatever Triumph Of The Will is, it's not a documentary. Its language is that of feature films - not Warner Brothers gangster movies or John Ford westerns, but rather the supersized genres, the epics and musicals where huge columns of the great unwieldy messy mass of humanity get tidied and organized — and, if that isn't the essence of totalitarianism, what is? Riefenstahl has the same superb command of the crowd as Busby Berkeley, the same flair for human geometry (though Berkeley would have drawn the line at giving the gentlemen of the chorus as swishy a parade step as Hitler's personal SS bodyguard do).
The sets (that's what they are) that were built for Hitler's speeches blend Cecil B de Mille with expressionist sci-fi: no party convention in Britain, Canada or even Obama's America ever offered its leader a stage like this. It exists in the same relationship to reality as, say, Berkeley's "Lullaby Of Broadway" sequence in Gold Diggers Of 1935: in that scene, the conceit is that the number's taking place in a nightclub, but, as the song continues and the dancers multiply and the perspective extends ever further into the distance, you realise that no nightclub anywhere on earth has a stage that vast. Riefenstahl stretches reality in the same way, beginning in the streets of old Nuremberg with the band serenading Hitler below the balcony of his ivy-clad hotel, and steadily abandoning human scale until the FĂĽhrer is standing alone atop a giant stone block as thousands of standard-bearing party members march in formation below: extras on a set. In the twenty-first century, you can see Riefenstahl's influence in the work of George Lucas (Star Wars) and Paul Verhoeven (Starship Troopers), both filmmakers for whom the principal thrill of directing seems to be the opportunity it affords to subordinate the individual.
Filmed a mere eighteen months into Hitler's rule, and only a few weeks after President Hindenburg's death removed the final remnant of the pre-Nazi state, Triumph played a critical role in establishing the sheer scale of the party's iconography. Riefenstahl was a genius: watch the opening, with Hitler's aircraft (he was the first politician with a campaign plane) descending through the clouds to the city below as if bearing a god to earth. She was one of the first to understand how to convey the unseen: thus, the shadow of the FĂĽhrer's plane falls on the columns of Nazis marching up the street in Nuremberg.
She was let down by the party's weak spot: people. Not the blond boy drummers of the Hitler Youth. Nor the adoring women, gazing at their FĂĽhrer as enraptured as Hedy Lamarr in the heights of orgasm in Ecstasy. But in the Nazi bigshots, whom not even Riefenstahl can make look anything other than seedy and shifty. And the trouble with that Hitler salute is that on at least a couple of occasions it exposes an incredibly sweaty armpit. There are some things even a control-freak can't control.
Her directing career ended with the Third Reich. Had she been worse at making the Nazis look good, her insistence that she was no more than a hired hand might have been accepted. Instead, she found herself too toxic to get any project off the ground, until finally, at the age of 100, she got to release one last film, a simple undersea documentary. "Art is my life and I was deprived of it," said Leni Riefenstahl. Tough. Working in the German film industry, she saw that happen early on to innumerable Jewish film-makers. She was neither one of that select group of Nazi fanatics committed to industrial-scale slaughter, nor merely of that vast contemptible mass of Germans too indifferent to evil to object to it. Whatever her disclaimers, she made evil look better than it had any right to: a cautionary tale in the art of film.
~Thank you to Kathy Shaidle for her splendid summer cinema series. Kathy has been a wonderful presence - on- and off-stage - on this week's Mark Steyn Cruise.
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Well, Leni was certainly an amazingly strong, tough, intelligent and gifted woman. Such a shame she was side-tracked, for awhile, by yet another form of toxic, destructive and genocidal socialism; in this case national socialism.
Uniforms by Boss
Film by Reifenstahl
Vehicles by Porsche
In Mein Kampf when Hitler defines the "big lie" and blames it on Jews, he draws philosophical justification and direction from German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, calling him, "One of the greatest thinkers that mankind has produced", adding for good measure that Schopenhauer called the Jew "The Great Master of Lies".
The World as Will, the second book of Schopenhauer's major work The World as Will and Representation begins with a Latin epigraph:
Nos habitat, non tartara, sed nec sidera coeli:
Spiritus, in nobis qui viget, ilia facit.
In 1584, English "country gentleman" and MP Reginald Scot translated that in The Discoverie of Witchcraft as:
Not hellish furies dwell in us,

Nor starres with influence heavenlie;

The spirit that lives and rules in us,

Doth every thing ingeniouslie
In other words, neither good nor evil should guide us, but ourselves. It's a little like John Lennon's nightmare.
According to The Life of Henry Cornelius Agrippa, German occult writer Henry Cornelius Agrippa - and "counsellor" to Charles V, Emperor of Germany - used ye olde Latin phrase to say that the principles for "grand operations" should not be looked for externally, but the spirit within should be relied on.
We are using the same schema as a scholar of witchcraft, Hitler, Hitler's favorite philosopher, and an occult writer.
In the political sphere that is gobbling up the rest, most people seem to have acceded to this, which has resulted in a working compromise that good won't grapple with evil. Good people with active consciences in their personal lives consistently demur. Without an external source of good, they have no rationale by which to judge someone else's will. So the strongest will often triumphs, not the best.
"Without an external source of good, they have no rationale by which to judge someone else's will." I was thinking about a thought close to this over this weekend while enjoying my grandchildren in SoCal. There will be their parents' influence, both sets of grandparents' as well as aunts and uncles, but as I passed their future public school again and again, I worried exactly how the good influences will be able to combat the Leftist ideological creep into their minds as they undergo twelve years of mind and character formation. How true that the strongest often is victorious over the best and the victorious gets wings with the most efficient organization, slickest promotional media productions and fattest wallets.
Will wins wars, and it's a battle for the mind, so I would say concentrate your will in determining to draw from the good, subvert the evil, and teach them to intentionally live in truth as they learn to recognize, detect and deconstruct the constant barrage of deception. I wouldn't leave it to chance. And pray and hope for the best.
Gee, Sol. That's very good. I often thought if George Washington were alive today what would he advise American parents. Something very close to what you just composed. Thanks for that.
"'Art is my life and I was deprived of it, said Leni Riefenstahl.'" A richer remark was never spoken, I suppose. Thanks, Mark, for expanding on the obscure bits of history for your fan base.
In the past, Mark has used the Brooks Atkinson line (from Atkinson's review of "Pal Joey"), " Is it possible to draw sweet water from a foul well?" In the case of "Triumph of the Will" it's quite a challenge. I first saw the Riefenstahl epic in an undergraduate class on film making. Like most persons, I am sure, I had that feeling of mesmerized fascination and gut-wrenching disgust at seeing the flick. (My father was in the First Army in Europe during the war and my mum went through the Blitz.) I agree that most of the set pieces of "Triumph" were probably (elaborately) staged but the film is so brilliantly edited that it packs a huge emotional wallop.....except for teensy-weensy problem of it's subject matter. I suppose one must approach "TOTW" in the same way we look at the use of German rocket scientists to get to the Moon. Even the most evil systems can create technical, engineering and aesthetic marvels but must be taken severely in context. Is that "sweet water?" - I don't think anyone can really say.
Excellent, synchronized pose-striking particularly. Pedantry corner; it's compressed air in the tanks, not oxygen. Oxygen is toxic at 2 atmospheres, anything deeper than about 33 feet. This is probably what did for Commander Crabb at Portsmouth in 1956, or possibly USSR navy divers checking for spies.
As a GenXer I miss the focus on sea exploration. I remember a special on National Geographic (I believe) , regular TV. US had a huge advantage in deep sea diving because of our 'access' (as we'd say to day) to helium. We were able to cut the oxygen with inert helium, thus avoiding oxygen poisoning *and* nitrogen narcosis.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/sealab/
Another telling detail: the music accompanying the plane's descent from the clouds is the first act Prelude from Wagner's Lohengrin. Drawn from the mythic and religious tales of the Holy Grail, the association with the sweaty Austrian Schicklgruber would have twigged with the Nazi cognoscenti (if that's not an oxymoron). That Lohengrin arrives and departs on a boat drawn by a swan is part of that myth--and also part of operatic lore. When tenor Leo Slezak played the role once, there was a backstage mix-up, and the swan boat left without him. Unperturbed, he calmly asked: "Wann geht der nächste Schwan?" ("What time's the next swan?") Leni would have ordered another take.
PS: As for La Riefenstahl's culpability: did she watch her own movie? I have seen TotW several times, but never more memorably than with a largely Jewish audience once in college. The visceral reactions--hisses, profanities--to the speakers--Julius Streicher, of cursed memory, in particular--turned the film from a historical curiosity to a cavalcade of dark stars. I haven't seen such audience participation since Rocky Horror.
PPS: As for her Olympia, I can't see Riefenstahl's paean to the beauty of the athletic body through anything but the lens previously focused on these monsters. I have seen both films several times, but I think I'm done for this lifetime. Gross, as the Germans might say.
The 1934 Nuremberg rally was very much one of feeding the beast - coalescing the beast.
WRT women's equality: Quite a while back at our state airport the men and the women ground staff had distinctly different jobs and correspondingly different pay rates. The women then complained and the jobs were made the same. First day of the new work situation the women were told to pick up the bags - do the hard work - they weren't at all pleased.
Mentioning Hedy Lamarr is misleading and unfair, she was Anti-Nazi, fled Germany and even worked on military research on frequency skipping remote control. I recently saw some drone footage of a massive formation of the Peoples Liberation Army and it was way scarier than the Nuremberg rally. The Chinese are today's menace and not an 85 year old problem that no longer exists.
"... not an 85 year old problem that no longer exists."
Ilhan Omar and co maintain (simultaneously) that it never happened but wasn't sufficiently thorough.
I assume that the Nuremberg rallies were consciously intended to evoke the final scene of Act Three of Wagner's "Meistersinger," where the guilds of the city converge for the singing contest. There is footage, I believe from the Riefenstahl film, where members of the "farming community" ("Bauernstand") perform. They are dressed in military ranks and dressed in paramilitary uniform. The camera captures them facing (I assume) Hitler, while singing a very sub-Wagnerian marching-song, and shows that just about every one of them has a Hitler-style moustache. Those men have completely surrendered any hint of individuality, but I suppose that that is Riefenstahl dialling up the "community" concept only slightly further than the identity fanatics of today.
Some years back, the British Library held an exhibition of maps which didn't tell the strict, cartographical truth, one such being a plan of a Nuremberg rally. On top of the marching routes to be taken by various contingents were markers to denote where applause would spontaneously erupt. Hitler lookalikes and clapping carefully planned with grid references and stop-watches; no doubt, it all went like clockwork.
In 1992, confident of winning the UK General Election, Labour leader Neil Kinnock attended a jaw-droppingly jarring rally in Sheffield, shortly before voting day. Some people suggested it caused his defeat, which I doubt, but it was political choreography of a type not seen in the UK previously, other than in Oswald Mosley's dreams, and became notorious as "Kinnock's Nuremberg Rally." Since then, of course, keeping the prospective Prime Minister cocooned, surrounded by adulation, safe from hecklers and anything but the tamest of questioning, has become standard practice in UK elections, although I don't think even Blair went quite so far down the Nuremberg route.
If you'll recall from that bio-documentary on Riefenstahl, she got very heated when questioned about her attempt to film the Party Congress the year before, in 1933. She insisted it wasn't a "real" film, just some odds and ends that she filmed without any proper preparation. I think she was annoyed at having it brought up because despite its rough condition, it was clearly a first draft for what would be a polished production the following year. Hitler's arrival by plane - that's in there, but its very brief. A year later, she'd had a chance to think about it and turned it into an extended montage of clouds and landscape, culminating in the arrival (from Heaven!) of her hero. The physical setting was also improved in the intervening time: instead of crowded downtown Nuremberg, the action was moved to the big stadium, with the city serving as a picturesque background for the parade through winding streets.
Obviously, Riefenstahl wasn't some tourist snapping photos at a big event: the 1933 project could only have been done with Nazi Party approval. And the fact that she was called back to do a bigger, better film the following year meant that her first draft was approved, and she was given an even bigger budget and freer hand to come back in 1934 and make her propaganda masterpiece. Ironically, her insistence that she was on bad terms with Goebbels would tend to reinforce the even more damaging suggestion that it was Hitler himself who approved of and supporter her work.
Despite her participation in Nazi propaganda, Riefenstahl was immensely talented. If you want to see her work without the tiresome Nazi boosterism, watch her 1938 film, "Olympia" chronicling the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The quality of the photography, the use of slow motion, the focus on beauty throughout, is a wonderful achievement, and there's very little political ammunition in it at all.
It wasn't a first draft. This was to be the defining film but with the murders of Rohm and SA members, the party purge... the film was not only closeted but all copies destroyed save one in London and that one is available to be watched on the web. The framework is all there, but polished in Triumph.
Indeed, a counterexample to Mr. Stein's contention that Riefenstahl loved subordinating the individual is the diving sequence in Olympia, which aside from a brief wide angle establishing shot focuses on nothing but individuals, including two Asian (Japanese?) divers.
From a Christian point of view the term "triumph of the will" is as contemptible an expression as anything could possibly be. It is the pure distilled essence of original sin, the assertion of unaccountable human self-determination. The fact is, also, that it is a basic tenet of leftism wherever leftism is found. It simply means if you acquire enough political power you are beyond moral accountability and free to design and implement anything, no matter how heinous or destructive. Tell me the whole Democrat field of presidential wannabes doesn't believe this. Their proposals are entirely insane and divorced from any authentic conception of morality, justice, or human prosperity. They believe themselves fully entitled to the fevered incoherence, malice, and rapine of their imaginings. If we are headed for a "triumph of the will" world we better stockpile some canned goods and go live in a cave somewhere in Greenland.
Great comment, or as the youngins write these days, "^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ THIS ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^".
Todd,
That sums it up perfectly.
"... a people dumb enough to fall for National Socialism will fall for anything ..."
How apropos of your first paragraph. A people dumb enough to fall for Will and Grace will fall for anything... including Bernie Sanders and AOC.
The beginning of the film... the flight into the city... the sense of expectancy... also highlights the fact that Hitler was way ahead of the game in politics. He campaigned as we would expect a modern candidate to.. but this is early '30's Germany. It must be remembered that "Triumph of the Will" was a rehash of the previous year's Party meeting and filming (Der Sieg des Glaubens) as several of the principal actors from that year were absent... permanently ..as in Ernst Rohm after that little "Night of the Long Knives" affair. So Leni did get a mulligan of sorts to make eagle.