Triumph of the Will tried to carry on with the old playbook

If only it weren't for that awkward patch…

Triumph of the Will :: SteynOnline
by Mark Steyn
Mark at the Movies
September 13, 2014

Eighty years ago this week, the National Socialist Party had just wrapped up its hugely successful rally at Nuremberg - the Reichsparteitag des Willens, or Rally of the Will. Unlike previous get-togethers, the 1934 rally produced 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.

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 Müller'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 15 takes: anyone who's worked in documentaries knows how phoney 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, …

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