Triumph of the Will and the Cinematic Language of Propaganda
February 23, 2017 7:18 PM   Subscribe

Folding Ideas is a Youtube channel that analyzes movies and video games. By popular demand, the latest video is on Triumph of the Will and how it reflects fascist ideology and the historical context in which it was made.
posted by RobotHero (22 comments total) 51 users marked this as a favorite
 
I think it is not a coincidence that he's covering this movie at this time, yes.
posted by RobotHero at 7:41 PM on February 23, 2017 [8 favorites]


Now having watched the video, I'm really struck by how the presenter ended by noting that the way we view Nazis is in large part still informed by their propaganda. How Riefenstahl's goal of depicting the inevitability of Nazi power - despite all else we now know about their monstrous evil - still tinges the edge of our understanding of who they were.

I also appreciated the Foucault quote noting that Nazi propaganda required a view of their enemies as being simultaneously weakly degenerate and also all-controlling.

(Also, holy cow, I never realized Wal-Mart's annual revenue is about one-eighth of the annual revenue of the U.S. government. Does that mean Wal-Mart has more revenue than Texas? California? That's just insane.)
posted by darkstar at 8:08 PM on February 23, 2017 [12 favorites]


It's also worth taking a look at "Propaganda" by Jacques Ellul. I no longer have a copy of this, but one quote (from wikipedia):
The aim of modern propaganda is no longer to modify ideas, but to provoke action. It is no longer to change adherence to a doctrine, but to make the individual cling irrationally to a process of action. It is no longer to transform an opinion but to arouse an active and mythical belief.

Ellul's "The Technological Society" is also very worth a read.
posted by Death and Gravity at 8:09 PM on February 23, 2017 [15 favorites]


I'm glad he starts out by rejecting the idea that it's revolutionary in terms of filmmaking. I had a brief stint in film school years ago, and we did talk about Riefenstahl's use of composition and so on -- which as this video and a lot of film criticism has pointed out, is a tacit endorsement of Nazi ideology. I can't remember if we watched the whole thing or just part of it in class, but either way, the idea that this film is a revolutionary work isn't limited to people who never think about movies, and it seems to be very much alive.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 8:23 PM on February 23, 2017 [3 favorites]


The quote from Umberto Eco in Ur-Facism is particularly appropriate to our current moment in this country:
The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies…. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.
This, I feel, has been much of the linguistic gymnastics of the "right" in America since, at the very least Reagan, but perhaps Nixon or earlier. You can see it in gay marriage and bathroom bills, but you can also see it in the abject racism masquerading as policy.
posted by petrilli at 8:49 PM on February 23, 2017 [29 favorites]


"To this day we continue to use Triumph of the Will as a reference point for our mental construct of the Nazi regime. Think about that. Our idea of the Nazis is deeply informed by a propaganda film produced by the Nazis for the explicit purpose of creating that mental construct."
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 10:21 PM on February 23, 2017 [15 favorites]


In his book, Albert Speer writes of several times during the war when the Allies missed their chances by over-estimating the Nazis, and by assuming that the Nazis had the capabilities and capacities that their propaganda projected.

For instance, there was a significant bombing hit on the centralized Nazi ball-bearing industry. The Allies assumed that the remaining equipment, that was relatively mobile, would be quickly and efficiently relocated and dispersed. Speer says that there was confusion, denial, and deliberate disinformation regarding the scale of damage inflicted in the first raid, and so no effective defensive reaction was achieved. A second one-day bomb run could have virtually ended the war.

Also, the "Cathedral of Light" effect in Triumph of the Will required every anti-aircraft light the Nazi's possessed, the risks of taking them all out of military service during the filming was balanced by giving the impression that the Nazis had an unlimited number of these lights in inventory to play around with.
posted by StickyCarpet at 6:50 AM on February 24, 2017 [11 favorites]


I just love Folding Ideas, and this was an excellent episode.
posted by xingcat at 6:53 AM on February 24, 2017 [2 favorites]


One need only look at the work of groups like NFL Films and FOX Sports to see modern echoes of Riefenstahl's techniques.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:02 AM on February 24, 2017 [6 favorites]


see modern echoes of Riefenstahl's techniques

The Super Bowl.
posted by Mister Bijou at 7:24 AM on February 24, 2017 [7 favorites]


That's a terrific piece of video commentary, and I thank you for posting it and introducing me to Folding Ideas. I knew nothing about Riefenstahl's earlier movie Triumph des Glaubens, featuring Romm, and the attempt to destroy it after the Night of the Long Knives—what a story! But I do want to push back against one thing, the conflation of "it's Nazi propaganda" with "it's ipso facto a bad movie." He doesn't come right out and say it's a bad movie, but that's the impression he leaves you with with all that verbiage about how "They made their own movie and had their own critics praise it to make it important" and "None of the filmmaking ideas were new... the only thing new was scope." But right after saying that, he turns around and talks about the difference between propaganda by hate groups and that spread by the state, a distinction of "order of magnitude": "the sheer scope of the budgets available to government means that it's a laughable comparison." So sheer scope does make a significant difference, and the mere fact that each of the filmmaking ideas wasn't new doesn't mean the combination, boosted by a huge budget, didn't create something new and important. (That's not even considering the fact that in art nothing is new.)

Look, I don't like Nazis any more than you do. But I vividly remember seeing Triumph des Willens in college, and being blown away—I'd expected a boring piece of propaganda and found myself riveted to the screen. Riefenstahl was a terrific director, however awful her subject and patronage, and to say she couldn't have been because she made movies about bad people with a bad ideology is exactly the conflation of art with politics that I've been fighting against all my life. Of course you can make good movies (or books or art) celebrating bad people; virtually all the great Soviet directors made propaganda at one point or another, and Eisenstein's October and Battleship Potemkin, both propaganda movies that use the same kind of (not-new) tricks Riefenstahl did, are routinely and correctly cited as classics of the cinema. (Note too the Communist relations to religion and pseudoscience, which under Stalin were not that dissimilar from those of the Nazis, and "the point of it all is to center the Party in every aspect of life.") Let's not let our hatred of Nazism push us into letting politics dominate everything else.
posted by languagehat at 8:38 AM on February 24, 2017 [5 favorites]


Thorzdad: "One need only look at the work of groups like NFL Films and FOX Sports to see modern echoes of Riefenstahl's techniques."

Oh god. I remember having to sit through those NFL "Road to Victory" films in gym class when it rained in middle school.
posted by octothorpe at 8:56 AM on February 24, 2017 [1 favorite]


see modern echoes of Riefenstahl's techniques

My personal favorite is the "Bow down before the power of Santa" rally in the "Most Horrible X-Mas Ever" episode of Invader Zim, which has the benefit of making you unable to take the techniques seriously ever again.

I think Riefenstahl seems groundbreaking to modern eyes simply because few people have seen many works of that time period. The first time I saw The Third Man on the big screen, I was blown away by the cinematography. Then, a little later, I saw M and others and realized that while Third Man is still an amazing film for many reasons, including skillful deployment of those techniques, they weren't exactly new.
posted by praemunire at 8:58 AM on February 24, 2017 [5 favorites]


But who cares if they were new? Let's say you think M invented some piece of technique, and then you discover that no, actually it occurred earlier in a now-forgotten work by a Slovenian directer—does that lessen the value of M? I simply don't understand this angle.
posted by languagehat at 9:01 AM on February 24, 2017 [1 favorite]


But who cares if they were new? Let's say you think M invented some piece of technique, and then you discover that no, actually it occurred earlier in a now-forgotten work by a Slovenian directer—does that lessen the value of M? I simply don't understand this angle.

Huh? It would mean it was not some ground-breaking new invention, and, to the extent the work seemed amazing to me because it was doing something I had not formerly thought possible, once set in the context of other works doing the same thing, my esteem for the work might moderate. In some ways, it's the reverse of the Godfather effect--when you've seen a work's greatest accomplishments copied in dozens of others before you see the original, the original can actually read as cliched or banal.

If you put a gun to my head, I'd actually say The Third Man was my all-time favorite movie, but that's because it deploys those techniques very adeptly to support a story that is affecting in many other ways. If you've seen more 30s European films, Reifenstahl's work is less staggering because less new. Let's not kid ourselves about the impact novelty can have.
posted by praemunire at 9:16 AM on February 24, 2017 [2 favorites]


Talking about M and the Weimar Republic, if you liked Dan Olson's video you'll probably also like Kyle Kallgren's From Caligari to Hitler: Imagining the Tyrant.
posted by sukeban at 9:36 AM on February 24, 2017 [1 favorite]


Speer acknowledges that the Nuremberg Rally lighting effects -- which he considered his personal best artistic effort -- arose from a rather prosaic logistical problem.

These rallies were most important to Hitler politically as a recognition and consolidation of the regional Gauleiters and the other old-school Hitler supporters -- people likely to be middle-aged, coarse, rural, overweight, ruddy, and bleary-eyed.

Yet they expected to be seated prominently in the front sections. What to do? Rake the audience with chiaroscuro lighting! Where the light falls, the seats are stacked with Aryan Ubermensch, between them, in the shadows, are the less-than-impressive physical specimens that constituted Hitler's administrative political base.
posted by StickyCarpet at 10:24 AM on February 24, 2017 [9 favorites]


Some excellent points, especially in the contextualization of the Röhm purge and Reifenstahl's earlier film of the party rally. Thanks for the post. I have to agree with languagehat - I can't entirely disregard Riefenstahl's artistic accomplishments. The opening scenes with the arrival, the switching between dark and light, the repeating cuts at the rallies with the close ups and distance shots, the camera lenses that make the massive crowds seem even larger, the camera running up and down the flag pole, all of these things make the film visually compelling. Yes, money and scope of course, but she was also obsessive in her filming and editing. We'd do well to remember that hate can come in pretty packages.

I recommend The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl . Watching her describe the process of making the film and still defending it as pure documentary decades later is shocking and eye opening.

Also recommended is Capra's The Nazi Strike. Watching just the first few minutes you can see both what the Hollywood director does with Riefenstahl's footage, and the American take on propaganda during the period. You'd hardly describe Riefenstahl's work as subtle until you look at it next to the Capra. To be fair he was working quickly with another audience in mind, but, wow, what a difference.
posted by Cuke at 5:02 PM on February 24, 2017 [2 favorites]


> Let's not kid ourselves about the impact novelty can have.

Well, I guess we just have different approaches to these things. To me, novelty in and of itself means almost nothing, especially since I don't believe in it. I care about the overall esthetic impact of a work.
posted by languagehat at 5:25 PM on February 24, 2017


I think the issue is less that people should disregard Riefenstahl's artistic abilities, it's that this is not simply a work of art, and treating it as such means tacitly accepting its fundamental premise. There isn't an incidental connection to Nazi ideology here, because this is not a film that was simply made about the Nazis, but for them, to further a murderous regime that intended to commit murder and acts of brutality.

There are a lot of problematic films and filmmakers out there. How do we feel about Roman Polanski? I won't describe what he did, but it's certainly a horrific act that complicates how I, personally, feel about watching his films. He's an absolutely brilliant filmmaker, but clearly a problematic one. Where do we separate out what we know about Polanski with the amazing films he has directed? Do I need to feel uncomfortable knowing that I liked a movie he directed while under house arrest for a brutal crime he was never punished for?

We don't have these issues with Riefenstahl, at least not with this film. There is no separating out the Nazi connection, because that's all this film is. Stills from this film were in a book about movies that I had when I was a kid, but they carefully chose the ones that didn't show swastikas. Should we therefore say this is a beautiful work of art, provided we overlook the swastikas? Is it a triumph of filmmaking as long as we don't pay attention to the content of it? Is style and composition something to be celebrated in isolation from subject matter and historical context?

I think the answer is no. It's a cinematic achievement just as the V-2 rockets that shelled London were feats of engineering, and the SS uniforms were revolutions in style. None of these is even a step removed from death and destruction. This film is a document of murder.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 5:54 PM on February 24, 2017 [1 favorite]


Usually pretty cynical about YouTube essayists, but this is surprisingly great. Goes into great detail about supporting the argument that propaganda art is decoupled from more straightforward artistic expression. Thanks for the link!
posted by aleksalhambra at 2:24 PM on February 25, 2017


I first saw Folding Ideas because someone here linked his video on editing in Suicide Squad, of all things.


I think sometimes people get tempted to play up a dilemma. Like, "If you torture this guy, you can save someone's life," is a compelling dilemma. "If you torture this guy, the info you get probably won't be reliable anyway," is not. It's almost a just-world fallacy.

Similarly, I wonder if sometimes people exaggerate the artistic merits of Triumph of the Will to make a more compelling dilemma as to whether you should admire those merits.
posted by RobotHero at 3:13 PM on February 25, 2017 [1 favorite]


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